Kashmir: Is It Also a Question of Internal Colonization?

Kashmir has remained in turmoil and simmering since the current regime under Mr Modi took over the reins in the centre. It remains central to the agenda and strategy of Hindutva in the rest of India. What has been the dominant mood in the valley under the current regime? And what has been the ‘Kashmir policy’ of the BJP? Why did the BJP align with a pro-separatist party such as the PDP and why did the alliance not last its full term? What was the nature of the hidden tension between the PDP and the BJP that eventually led to the dissolution of this unlikely coalition?

In many senses, the mood in all these states tells us about the direction of democracy in India. In a survey, that I carried out in Kashmir Valley, after the coalition government of BJP-PDP took over, we found a few surprising opinions (add the details of the survey here). Jammu & Kashmir held assembly elections in November-December 2014, soon after the BJP formed the government at the centre in May. The elections witnessed an unprecedented turnout. The BJP swept Jammu region with 25 seats but failed to open its account in the Valley. Afterwards, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the BJP, most unlikely of partners, came together to set up a coalition government. In the Valley, the overwhelming agenda was to defeat the BJP, which the electorate succeeded in doing, with most BJP candidates losing their deposits. The post-poll BJP-PDP alliance, however, has been seen in far more pragmatic terms by the people of Kashmir. It is interesting that while a majority in the Valley sees the BJP as a ‘Hindu’ party, they nevertheless think that Kashmir can benefit in terms of development and governance with the BJP in power. In fact, a majority said that having close ties with a party in power in the Centre would benefit the Valley. The stance is partly because the Valley has a Muslim majority, whose confidence in PDP and Mufti Sayeed as a ‘local person’, responsive to ‘local sentiments’, is strong. It is also partly the result of fatigue with militancy and a perceptible decline in pro-Pakistan sentiments.

Voices from the Valley

The majority of those surveyed saw Pakistan as a ‘failed state’ and said that Kashmir could not afford to align its future with it. At the same time, however, most of them staunchly supported Article 370 and were confident that the BJP would not tamper with it. One middle-aged gentleman said, ‘Duniya ki koyi taqat Article 370 ko hata nahi sakthi. Jo ye hateyenge, us waqat inquilab ayega’ (No force in the world can remove Article 370. Whoever removes it will face an uprising.) Many said the force of the response to any attempt to remove Article 370 would be bloodier than 2008 when the Valley saw the violent ‘Ragdo Ragdo’ protest against allotment of land to Amarnath pilgrims.

A surprising majority of respondents said that Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) might actually be necessary but that it should be restricted to border areas rather than used indiscriminately. Many expressed anguish about the relevance of the provision in Srinagar. Many of them said they felt a deep sense of ill treatment when they are repeatedly checked and asked for identity cards ‘in their own home’. The issue appears to be one more of dignity than of full-stinted support for militancy. (The mood-of-the-electorate survey, using a semi-structured questionnaire, was conducted across seven districts of Kashmir. Nearly 150 people, from students and vendors to professionals and businessmen, were interviewed over one week.)

This, however, does not mean there is any decline in the support for azadi (freedom). Almost all the people we spoke to argue in favour of azadi, which they translated as self-determination for Kashmir and Kashmiris. It had layered meanings and multiple articulations, including a desire for an ‘Islamic state’, especially among the youth, who have very little memory of the grand tradition of Kashmiriyat and composite lives with Pandits and other communities. For these young people, the Valley essentially belongs to Muslims, and they had very little knowledge of the Pandits or what they had suffered in the 1990s. A majority thought the Pandits represented India and the humiliation that comes with it. It was the older generation who said that Kashmir was incomplete without the Pandits, and, in fact, that education in the Valley had suffered after the Pandits left.

From the survey, we gauged the essential mood in the Valley as one between pragmatic understanding and a deep sense of hurt and distance from ‘mainland’ India. While they see the need for development and for jobs for their young people and therefore, the advantage of moving closer to India, they also resent the way local people are treated. For instance, many respondents expressed anger and resentment against the hanging of Afzal Guru, arguing that it was patently wrong, that he was not a terrorist, and that his hanging and the refusal to return his body to the family violated the norms. Similarly, many respondents said that the release of Masrat Alam was justified, as he was not involved in terrorist activities but represented the popular mood of the Valley by organizing protest rallies.

The ball, it seems, is now in the court of ‘mainland’ India. The Centre should have carefully treaded between these opposing sentiments in the Valley. It could do so by encouraging dialogue and putting an end to exceptional methods in the State.

(The mood-of-the-electorate survey, using a semi-structured questionnaire, was conducted across seven districts of Kashmir. Nearly 150 people, from students and vendors to professionals and businessmen, were interviewed over one week.)

What Is BJP’s Kashmir Policy?

As stated earlier, Kashmir has remained in the headlines all through the Modi regime. It began with the killing of Burhan Wani, followed by surgical strikes in Uri (and Pathankot in neighbouring Punjab), the house arrest of Pervez Khurram, and increased stone pelting.

It then moved on with the events of the video of a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) jawan being heckled and then the photos of a Kashmiri being tied to the jeep also going viral, finally culminating in the statement by the union home minister Rajnath Singh that the government will announce a policy frame for ‘final settlement’ of the Kashmir problem. If the issue survives and keeps hogging the headlines, will it be the contentious issue on which the BJP will fight the general elections in 2019? Kashmir is one issue that holds a pan-India appeal and a chronic crisis in the Valley and a growing threat of its secession from India will create the anxiety that can consolidate the support for the BJP.

Kashmir is an emotive issue that has the potential to sideline all other issues including that of development, growing unemployment and inflation, dipping Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the agrarian crisis. It is an issue that combines nationalism with communalism. The media and the response from the government has gradually built a common sentiment that while India is tolerant and willing for a dialogue and also develop Kashmir, it is Kashmiris who are unreasonable, unrelenting, and intolerant, because the demand grows from a growing Islamic sentiment; rising stone pelting, growing militancy from across the border, a palpable support to it and early signs of a rising Wahhabism and Sa­lafism replacing the more tolerant Sufi-Kashmiriyat stand testimony for this.

Sufism to Salafism?

In the popular imagination, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced development packages and inaugurated new roads, the topper in the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) was a Kashmiri a few years ago. and 14 of them got selected in 2017. Further, Modi seems to have made concerted efforts to extend a meaningful hand of friendship with Pakistan; made friendly overtures by visiting his counterpart Nawaz Sharif’s family event; shook hands; spoke to him in international gatherings and even presented a shawl to his mother, which was reciprocated with a saree for Modi’s mother by Nawaz Sharif.¹² In return, what we are getting back are militant attacks, sustained conspiracies, unrelenting Kashmiris refusing to dialogues—a tolerant India being repeatedly rejected and insulted by the Kashmiri leadership aided by Pakistan.

The way leading postcolonial scholar Partha Chatterjee had been hounded and reprimanded for his argument—that tying up of a Kashmiri to the jeep is the ‘Gen Dyer’ moment of post-Independent India—is a case in point.¹³ Not many bothered to read the critique of Chatterjee of the Pakistani Army in the same article, and it remained willfully ignored. The conflict and the crisis are simmering even as more than 100 chapters of the Jammu and Kashmir study forums have been launched more than two years ago across India. These forums are being used to project a sustained version of how Kashmir was a Hindu land that witnessed mass conversions and has henceforth displaced the Pandits. This narrative eventually has the potential to recreate a consolidated Hindu sentiment that overlaps with hyper nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiment across India.¹⁴

What then could be the permanent solution that the home minister Rajnath Singh was referring to?¹⁵

Hurriyat Ban?

Could it mean banning of the Hurriyat? Or arrest of its leaders, including hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani? And an attempt to repeal Article 370? Or a repeal of Article 35(A)? If any of these steps were to be taken by the current dispensation, the Valley will erupt in unprecedented violence, dividing the nation vertically into those who wish to stand for an integrated India and those who wish to aid in weakening it. It is precisely around these issues that the BJP broke the alliance with the PDP. They argued that there is a growing radicalization in the valley and that the PDP is doing precious little.

In such a scenario, even the liberal constitutionalists would feel the pressure to stand by a dispensation—that is fighting a tough battle in Kashmir. Going in for a general election in such an atmosphere can only be best left to the imagination of the readers. Can Kashmir be handled differently? In my own survey that I elaborated on in the previous section, many responded by saying that there is nothing much left in Pakistan other than ‘bomb blasts’. There is much less support to the militancy in comparison with the 1990s, and many of them, especially the older generation, see militancy as eroding the social life while offering no palpable solution.

However, many will have a problem with remaining as a part of India, but this is, however, on the issue of autonomy and dignity and not essentially on religious grounds. Religion plays a role to the point of becoming the medium and the matrix of the dissent and disenchantment in the Valley. When young men waive the flags of the terror group Islamic State (IS), it is more to create anxiety and hurt the sentiments in India than a belief in its ideology. This, however, does not mean the young Kashmiris do not have the potential to move towards making Kashmir a religious-fundamentalist/religious-nationalist demand from that of its current demand for self-determination. This, to a large extent, depends on how we engage with Kashmir and treat them as citizens and not subjects of a history denied.