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| The reality Congress refuses to accept | | | Ashok Malik | 10/25/2014 8:25:43 PM |
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The Congress has been astonishingly short-sighted and feckless
in not presenting a united face with an elected Prime Minister at this crucial juncture in the Kashmir valley. It had behaved similarly in 2003. Some things never change. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Diwali visit to Jammu & Kashmir saw him meeting leaders of major political parties in the State. The one exception was the Congress, which refused to meet him despite being invited to do so. As it happened, this tetchiness was a throwback to 2003.
In that year, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had visited Srinagar and addressed a public meeting. It was an optimistic moment, about six months after the winter 2002 Assembly election in Jammu & Kashmir, considered the freest in the State's history and universally acknowledged as a turning point. While Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, the Chief Minister and leader of the People's Democratic Party, was at the event, Ministers and MLAs of the Congress, which was part of the ruling coalition, boycotted Mr Vajpayee's speech.
Then, as now, the Congress was being astonishingly short-sighted and feckless in not presenting a united face with the elected Prime Minister at a crucial juncture in the Kashmir valley. Indeed, it was indicating in 2003 that it did not necessarily see the 2002 election as any sort of a milestone. It did not recognise what the Vajpayee Government was attempting to do - expand the ambit of participatory democracy and electoral politics in the valley by persuading even the separatist-friendly PDP to contest elections and take charge of governance.
Despite sharing power with Mr Sayeed, the Congress was clearly harking back to an earlier age, when Governments in Delhi bought and bribed elites in Srinagar and made a mockery of public representation. In times to come, the Congress moved closer and closer to identifying itself as part of the problem in Kashmir rather than part of the solution.
When it demitted office in May 2004, the Vajpayee Government left its successor a robust legacy in Jammu & Kashmir. By early 2004, Mr LK Advani, then Deputy Prime Minister, had been talking to the leadership of the All-Party Hurriyat Conference and beginning a serious effort towards fixing the trust deficit between street sentiment in the valley and the Government in Delhi. The UPA Government simply dropped the ball.
MK Narayanan, Internal Security Advisor and then National Security Advisor in the UPA Government, had no time for such niceties. Like others in the Congress school, he was inured to the old days and ways, of intelligence agencies meddling in Kashmiri politics and of the only solution being a stalemate. The legacy of the 2002 election could not be built upon. In three years, the Congress had got Mr Sayeed to quit as Chief Minister and handed the job to Mr Ghulam Nabi Azad. Its argument was that this rotational arrangement had been agreed to between the PDP and the Congress in 2002.
Yet, when the National Conference won more seats than the PDP in 2008, the Congress gave it support and bolstered its Government without extracting matching conditions. The generosity and sense of enlightened politics that had escaped it when it came to treating Mr Sayeed, a better Chief Minister and a more credible politician in the valley, suddenly resurfaced when the Congress dealt with Mr Omar Abdullah.
Despite his being a severely under-performing Chief Minister, and notwithstanding the misgivings of senior Congress politicians, the Nehru-Gandhi family resolutely backed Mr Abdullah. There was no question of asking him to step down in favour of a Congress nominee. This munificence has long been attributed to Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi's friendship with the junior Abdullah. It goes to show the Congress's Kashmir policy continues to be dictated by an inter-play of family loyalties and cronyism, of playing off local elites in the Valley and simply 'holding on' in Kashmir rather than arriving at a solution or addressing issues of dignity where it is possible to address these.
This background is important while understanding Mr Modi's outreach to Jammu & Kashmir and why he has more than once harked back to what the Vajpayee Government did in the State. It offers a clue as to what may lie ahead. After all, the politics of the valley, and of the State, is moving into a post-Abdullah family, post-Congress/Nehru-Gandhi family phase.
One could argue that this was true in 2002 as well, when the Vajpayee Government was better-liked in the valley than any Indian Government had been in a long, long time, and when the PDP had won the confidence of voters in the valley. Even so, back then the Congress still won enough seats to be part of the power arrangement in Srinagar. As for Mr Abdullah, while his party had lost in 2002, he was still part of the NDA Government in Delhi and seen as a man with a future. Today, the valley is waiting for him to finish a very average (if not poor) term as Chief Minister.
The upcoming election, then, with the likelihood of strong performances by the BJP as well as the PDP, is pregnant with possibilities. While the BJP may not quite realise its slogan of 'Mission 44' - winning an absolute majority in the State Legislature of 87 seats - it can be expected to trounce the Congress in Jammu and Ladakh and put up its best performance (in terms of votes at least) in the valley. On the other hand, the PDP is looking to regain lost ground among the Kashmiri voters. The international situation is more challenging than at any time since 2002. Shelling across the Line of Control has intensified. The keenness with which Pakistani diplomats and interlocutors have engaged with the Hurriyat is telling, coming as it does weeks before the State election. There is a renewed attempt to take the Kashmir issue to global capitals. At the United Nations recently, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif even mentioned the plebiscite, which Pakistani leaders had all but given up on. These factors are only going to worsen in the coming year, as the Americans begin their withdrawal from Afghanistan and as the Pakistani Army seeks to manufacture a diversion for ending its unsuccessful (some would say impossible)battle against various factions of the Pakistan Taliban. In these circumstances, it makes eminent sense for the Modi Government to not just push for an early, free and fair election in Jammu & Kashmir but to offer a relationship to the valley that is credible and honest. All stakeholders need to be given their due, including the long suffering and exiled Kashmiri Pandits.This is crucial as a matter of politics, of perception and, most so, of principle. Meanwhile, the Congress can continue boycotting reality.
( Courtesy: dailypioneer.com) |
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