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| Coalition woes in Jammu and Kashmir | | |
Praveen Swami
The Congress and the PDP are trapped in a miserable but mutually profitable marriage.
— Photo: Nissar Ahmad.
IN HAPPIER TIMES: Ghulam Nabi Azad, Muzaffer Beigh, and Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.
JUST DAYS ago, it looked like it would take divine intervention to save the Congress-People's Democratic Party Government in Jammu and Kashmir. As if on cue, the driving rain that has devastated much of the State this past week has helped deflect attention away from the deep strains in the alliance.
On August 31, the PDP had demanded that Deputy Chief Minister Muzaffer Beigh — the party's most visible representative in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's round-table dialogue on Jammu and Kashmir — be removed from office. For three days, Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad refused to act on the PDP's demand, precipitating the most serious political crisis since the alliance government took power in 2002.
Mr. Beigh eventually resigned, preventing the feud over his office from precipitating the disintegration of the alliance. Few politicians have time for anything other than dealing with the enormous hardships their flood-hit constituents are now facing, but last week's political crisis has left many wondering just how the Congress-PDP feud will stay submerged.
Questions of power
No coherent explanation of just what prompted the PDP to act against Beigh has so far emerged. PDP president Mehbooba Mufti is thought to have been irate at Beigh's breaking ranks with an ongoing offensive by her party against Mr. Azad. The former Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, for his part, was critical of Mr. Beigh for failing to ensure the appointment of PDP-friendly police officials in key districts, notably Anantnag.
Personality conflicts, though, were just a façade for a political project: building bridges with north Kashmir strongman Ghulam Hassan Mir, who is now the top contender for the Deputy Chief Minister's job. Mr. Mir was suspended from membership of the PDP in April, after he turned against the party in the build-up to the byelections that were held that month. As a consequence of Mr. Mir's rebellion, the PDP's official candidate in Sangrama was subjected to a humiliating defeat.
Mr. Mir's rebellion was provoked by the party's decision to nominate Mr. Beigh, a political lightweight who held out no threat to either Ms. Mufti or her father, for the Deputy Chief Minister's job after Mr. Azad took office. In the wake of the April electoral disaster, though, the PDP understood it had no choice but to pay the price demanded by their prodigal son for his return: Mr. Beigh's job.
Mr. Azad responded by stonewalling the PDP's demands that Mr. Beigh be stripped of his Ministerial portfolios. Congress sources say the Chief Minister believed that giving in to the demand would undermine his authority, and point to the fact that that their party made no attempt to tell Mr. Sayeed which portfolios Ministers should be assigned when he held the top job. Mr. Azad may also have wished to signal to the PDP that he was willing to see the coalition fall rather than run an administration on terms dictated by the smaller partner.
In the event, Mr. Azad was summoned to New Delhi by Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and bluntly told to accept the PDP's fiat — this time. As a consequence, Tariq Hamid Qarra, one of the Mufti family's most trusted confidants, has been assigned Mr. Beigh's responsibilities as Minister for Finance, Planning, Law and Parliamentary Affairs. However, at the time of writing, the PDP was yet to nominate a new Deputy Chief Minister.
Some in the PDP have been pushing for Abdul Aziz Zargar, the Agriculture Minister who succeeded Mr. Beigh as legislature party leader, to get the job. While Mr. Zargar would help the PDP rebuild its links with Islamist groups, his controversial record makes it unlikely that Mr. Azad would be willing to give him the top job. Investigations into the 2002 attack on the Akshardham Temple in Gandhinagar had determined that the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists who carried out the attack had stayed in the Minister's home at Manzgam, in southern Kashmir. Jammu and Kashmir Police have since also begun investigating allegations that Mr. Zargar's official residence in Srinagar has been used by terrorists.
Both parties have drawn clear lessons from the political crisis. PDP leaders, with no significant bases outside of southern Kashmir, know they cannot take power without a coalition partner. None is on offer bar the Congress. Moreover, the PDP's efforts to appropriate the Islamist vote through an alliance with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, have not led to an expansion of its electoral constituency. For its part, the Congress too has few options. While the National Conference has offered to join with it should the alliance collapse, Congress leaders understand the bargain would be a poor one. Unlike the PDP, the National Conference has political ambitions in the Congress' Jammu heartlands, and would also deny it space for expansion in the Kashmir valley.
Battles ahead
Yet, serious conflicts could still lie ahead. Underpinning the feud over Mr. Beigh are serious issues of ideology, issues he made clear at a September 3 meeting with journalists, just after he submitted his resignation. The lawyer-turned-politician charged the PDP leadership with "befooling people with projecting their model of self-rule as the same as that of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, which would fetch azaadi [independence]." "This," he said flatly, "is deception."
In fact, Mr. Beigh argued, the PDP self-rule proposals he had helped author only suggested a restructuring of Jammu and Kashmir's constitutional position within India. "We need to tell people clearly that we are bound by the Indian Constitution," Mr. Beigh continued, "and that what we are seeking are new guarantees." "Our concept," Mr. Beigh said, "would leave unchallenged the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of India and the central Election Commission."
These ideas, which Mr. Beigh first presented behind closed doors at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's round-table discussion on Jammu and Kashmir in May, fall well short of the National Conference's demands, articulated in the April 1999 report of the Jammu and Kashmir State Autonomy Committee. The SAC had argued that all amendments to Jammu and Kashmir's own Constitution made after a July 1952 agreement between Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah ought to be repealed.
If implemented, the SAC proposals would strip Jammu and Kashmir's peoples of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Indian Constitution or the protection of the Supreme Court of India and the Election Commission. Jammu and Kashmir's financial relationship with the Union would also be left open. All these issues would then have to be renegotiated between the Jammu and Kashmir legislature and the Union of India afresh. Mr. Beigh's ideas offer the prospect of forward movement, since they leave aside those parts of the National Conference's autonomy demands rejected by a wide spectrum of national political parties.
However, the committee appointed by Prime Minister Singh to discuss constitutional issues has yet to meet. National Conference insistence on non-partisan leadership of the committee led Mr. Azad to appoint the former Chief Justice of India, Mr. A.M. Ahmadi, as its head. Mr. Ahmadi, however, demanded that his appointment have formal legal authority. Uncomfortable at the prospect of the round-table committees acquiring the status of a Government Commission, the Jammu and Kashmir government replaced Mr. Ahmadi with the former diplomat, Mr. Abid Hussain.
As serious deliberations on Jammu and Kashmir's constitutional future intensify, the disputes within the PDP and the enormous ideological gulf that separates it from the Congress will become more evident. In a recent interview to The Hindu , Mr. Azad described the PDP's calls for demilitarisation as "a publicity stunt." Politicians, he continued, "cannot have bullet-proof cars and commandos and then talk about demilitarisation." He also dismissed proposals for self-rule, demanding instead that its advocates forge "their own road map."
Is a meltdown of the alliance, then, inevitable? Both the Congress and the PDP are trapped in a miserable marriage, but one that yields far too much profit to risk divorce — at least, not just yet.
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