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| Whose risk is this? | | | Announcing of assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir, of course, has come as a welcome development but the Election Commission of India’s risk statement is serving as a pre-judgment. People mostly in Kashmir Valley and scene watchers in India and beyond are looking at the Kashmir elections as a risky exercise. This observation is more of psychological in nature than what is actually prevailing on the ground. But Election Commission has left in a wary thought when it said that a risk has been taking while deciding these elections. One is surprised at this state of the Election Commission which in fact, if required, should have come from the political authority. This indicates a failure of the government in New Delhi to state its viewpoint forthrightly in the matter, and also needless self-positioning by the EC that risked drawing it into controversy. When queries were raised if polls would be held before Governor’s Rule expired in January, the commission should have directed questioners to the Union government. The basics are clear. The job of the EC is to hold free and fair elections and to make appropriate preparations in that direction once the government has decided whether to hold elections when they are due. The decision whether or not to conduct polls when they become due lies squarely in the political realm. The EC must be wary of entering this zone. This is why it is no small surprise to read the Chief Election Commissioner’s reported comment that the commission had "taken a risk" by deciding to conduct the Assembly elections in Kashmir since it was not wholly clear what the level of participation was going to be.
While it makes no sense to attempt to play soothsayer, it can be asserted that the level of popular participation in the 2002 Assembly election in the Kashmir valley had stunned pundits and politicians alike. It shocked into silence the bomb-throwers and their minders across the border, who completely misread the sentiment of the ordinary Kashmiri. Barring some of the larger urban centres which recorded low voting, the average for the Valley was higher than that of many states in the country, although the terrorists had killed about 700 people in the runup to the vote in a bid to scare them off. The surprised observers then cooked up the extraordinary theory of the "rural-urban divide", suggesting that unlike the humble rural folk, the conscious city-dweller had opposed elections organised under Indian auspices. The self-serving theory appeared to be coming apart earlier this year, before the June agitation on the Amarnath issue that rocked Kashmir and Jammu by turn, thanks to the ineptitude of the ruling Congress. It was evident that even residents of Srinagar — regarded as the bastion of secessionism — were expecting a fairly large voter turnout in the Assembly election, originally slated for October. The real reason for this was that the threat of terrorism had receded almost completely on account of the loss of public support and effective government action. The previous election had seen the so-called "rural-urban divide" because, for a variety of reasons, extremists could terrorise urban areas more effectively. How the election scene will unfold is likely to depend to a considerable degree on how effectively the extremists can enforce a boycott. But postponing the election would have served no valid political purpose and may have only given a morale-boost to the extremist ideologues in Kashmir. |
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