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| Kashmiri opposition to reorganization demand ill-motivate | | Trifurcation A Viable Solution | | NEHA
JAMMU, June 8: Kashmiri leaders, including Union Minister Farooq Abdullah, former JKPCC president Ghulam Rasool Kar and scores of others of their ilk, oppose day in and day out the demand for the reorganisation of Jammu & Kashmir on regional basis. They say that they would not allow the "vested interests" and "communal" elements in Jammu and Ladakh to subvert the state's polity painstakingly built up by Sheikh Abdullah, who, according to the NC leaders, "considered religious and regional bias a crime and domination of one region over the other an abominable act". The upshot of their whole argument is that the polity in Jammu & Kashmir is based on the principles of justice and equity and that it caters as much to the needs of the people of Jammu province and Ladakh region as to the Kashmiris and that the demand of the people of Jammu and Ladakh for the reorganisation of the state's polity is unjustifiable and, if accepted, would "hurt the Kashmiri psyche".
The arguments advanced by the Kashmiri politicians in favour of the 65-year-old outdated system are both abstract and politically motivated. The acute inter-regional tensions in Jammu & Kashmir show that the unitary constitutional set-up under which the state was governed after 1947 has failed to produce satisfactory results. This is because the state's constitution ignores the inherent contradictions between Kashmir and Jammu and between them and Ladakh in respect of language, culture, ethnicity and geography.
Two other significant factors have also been lost sight of by the framers of the Jammu & Kashmir Constitution. One was the historical antagonism between the people of Kashmir and Jammu. Kashmiri leaders saw the people of Jammu as "aliens" and "exploiters" from whose bondage Kashmir had to be liberated. Their entire struggle, particularly under the banner of the Muslim Conference (MC)/National Conference (NC) was shaped by the anti-Jammu stimulus. The other is the divergence in the political aspirations and attitudes of the people of Jammu and the Kashmiri leaders and between the latter and the Ladakhis. People from Jammu and Ladakh favour the application of the Indian Constitution to the state in full. The Kashmiri leadership has, on the other hand, always been a keen votary of limited accession with wide autonomy.
Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh State has never been an organic political entity since its inception in March 1846 under the Treaty of Amritsar. Till its accession to India in 1947 the Maharaja was the only link among the heterogeneous regions of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. With the end of the princely rule, even this link disappeared. In normal circumstances, the ideal course after the accession would have been the reorganisation of the state into three separate states of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. This did not happen.
Once New Delhi took the decision to maintain the state as a single political entity, it was imperative for it to take note of the dissimilarities in culture, language, history and political perceptions of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh and evolve an administrative structure in which each region could grow freely. This was an issue of crucial importance in view of the well-known anti-Jammu political mindset of the Valley leadership as clearly seen during the MC/NC political struggles like the scrap 1924 Amritsar Treaty crusade and the 1946 Quit Kashmir Movement. Tragically again, this too did not happen. What happened, however, was that the state was given a special status through Article 370 at the behest of the Kashmiri leadership of the time, which in no way represented the common will.
Armed with absolute political powers under Article 370, Kashmiri rulers followed policies which created a situation under which no one from Jammu or Ladakh could reside and serve in Kashmir or become the chief minister of the state. It was not a mere lapse on their part, this was part of a grand design to exact revenge against the people of Jammu who wanted independence from Kashmir and complete merger with India. However, the worst part of the whole situation was the unqualified support of the NC and Congress legislators from Jammu for all the Kashmiri leaders did to marginalize and "subjugate" Jammu and Ladakh.
The consequence of the policies which the Valley leaders pursued were: allotment of 43 seats to Kashmir in the legislative assembly as against 30 seats to Jammu and a paltry two to Ladakh; wholesale transfer of people from Jammu and Ladakh from Kashmir to Jammu and Ladakh; the appointment of thousands of Kashmiris in Jammu and Ladakh against vacancies caused by retirement, death or dismissal of the incumbents and additional requirements; closure of the agricultural and Ayurvedic colleges in Jammu and so on.
It was under these circumstances that the people of Jammu and Ladakh launched one struggle after the other in order to achieve their due in the state's political and economic processes. So strong and popular were their struggles, like the 1952-53 Praja Parishad movement, 1966-67 student agitation and the 1979 Poonch revolt, that the government had no other alternative but to appoint commissions to look into the people's complaints. The Gajendragadkar Commission (1967), Sikri Commission (1979) and the Wazir Commission (1980) all acknowledged that the allegations made by the people of Jammu and Ladakh against the powers-that-be in Srinagar were genuine. These commissions also recommended a number of sweeping changes in the state's politico-administrative and economic structure in order to compensate for the losses sustained by the people of Jammu and Ladakh.
Unfortunately, the Kashmiri rulers took no notice of the recommendations which various commissions had made with a view to harmonizing inter-regional relations. But given the intense unrest in Jammu and discontent in Ladakh, notwithstanding the setting up of an Autonomous Hill Development Council in Leh, the demand for the reorganisation of the state should be examined afresh. The state has to be reorganized in the larger national interest as well as the interest of the people of Jammu and Ladakh whom the Kashmiri readership has rendered ineffective and unreal for all practical purposes. And the sooner it is done the better. Reorganisation of the state has become now all the more imperative considering what the New Delhi-appointed three interlocutors have said in their report about the causes of discontent and unrest in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. The interlocutors have admitted that the problems and grievances of Jammu and Ladakh are different from the grievances and problems of the Kashmiri leadership.
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