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| Worrisome situation, clueless Govt | | | At newspapers, the reporters, editors and editorial writers and even commentators everyday try to look for new ideas. Writing on the same issue again and again does not do well with the readers. However, here in Jammu, over past nearly two months, we have been writing same thing again and again –“the situation is worrisome and the government is clueless”. Neither the Governor’s administration nor the Central Government is inspiring any fresh idea. The situation is same it was at the time of its eruption. The government was a mute spectator on the day one and it continues to be so even today. The administration headed by Governor N.N. Vohra looks to New Delhi to lead, but the Central leaders appear to have few new ideas. The BJP’s hard stance, with an eye on state and Lok Sabha elections in a few months, can be said to be a good deal responsible for the stalemate. The Congress-led coalition government of J&K, which was ejected from office under sorry circumstances of its own making four months before scheduled elections in October, had failed to anticipate the political moves of the secessionists. And now the BJP is trying to drive home a sectarian advantage. With the politics of divisiveness on unseemly display, it is becoming hard to break the political logjam.
The mood in Kashmir can only be described as worrisome and volatile. More than 20 protesters have died in police firing. Tens of thousands have staged noisy demonstrations on as many as three occasions in the short space of nine days, once to the office of the UN Military Observer Group on India and Pakistan demanding self-determination. In the early 1990s the UNMOG was a regular destination for angry protesters and a symbolic return to it speaks of a terrible slide in the situation in the Valley. There are also three positive facets to the outlook: that indigenous terrorism is in check, that Pakistan — which has provided steady sustenance to the secessionists and the local Kashmir terror groups — is itself in an unstable political state and being battered by Islamist violence, and that the factions of the Hurriyat still seem to be divided, although the Amarnath issue had appeared to unite them for a while. The cracks in the Hurriyat came out in the open last Monday when Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Kashmir’s stalwart pro-Pakistan separatist figure, publicly exhorted crowds in Srinagar to hail him, rather than anyone else, as their leader. Any meaningful engagement with the Valley will need to be alive to these factors. But that is not likely to be enough if Jammu continues to be on the boil, triggered by bruised sentiments. |
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