Many Indians believe that Shah will complete the Sardar’s unfinished agenda of a seamlessly unified India.

It seems that the biggest challenge before Amit Shah, in his capacity as the new Home Minister of India, is fulfilling the astronomical hopes that he has generated in the hearts of those crores of Indians who have been waiting for a decisive end to the seven-decade-long violence and turbulence in Kashmir. There is no shortage of Indians who believe that Shah is the new Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who will complete the Sardar’s unfinished agenda of a seamlessly unified India.

Over the past few years, Shah has acquired the image of a skilled surgeon, who picks up his scalpel only after he has identified the source of the ailment. So it’s not a surprise that his ministry is said to be thinking of a delimitation of the electoral constituencies of Jammu and Kashmir.

Truly speaking, problems in Jammu & Kashmir started on the day Jawaharlal Nehru arbitrarily appointed Mohammed Sheikh Abdullah as the “Prime Minister” of the state immediately after Maharaja Hari Singh signed the accession of his state into the newly emerging Republic of India. Nehru did so despite absence of any public mandate in favour of the Sheikh.

ONE-MAN DELIMITATION

Even before his government appointed the first Delimitation Commission in 1952 for holding elections in India, Nehru already, in 1951, had delegated the job of delimitation in J&K to the Sheikh. And the Sheikh, without going through the proper exercise of appointing a Delimitation Commission, arbitrarily decided to have a State Legislative Assembly with 100 members. Out of these 100 seats, he assigned 43 to the Kashmir valley, 30 to Jammu and 2 to Ladakh. He decided that the remaining 25 seats would be left vacant until the time Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) returned to India.

Unlike in the rest of India, none of the four basic factors, namely, population, terrain, judicious assigning of reserved seats and reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, was applied. The fact is that the Kashmir valley forms about 8% of the original J&K and less than 16% of the part remaining with India, while Jammu forms about 26% and Ladakh 58%.

So it was a clever ploy by Sheikh Abdullah to keep the majority legislative power of the state Assembly in the hands of Kashmir valley, permanently. Although the rest of India has had four delimitations in 1952, 1962, 1972 and 2002, yet J&K was never asked to hold a proper delimitation in all these seven decades. In 1993, the state constituencies were reorganised during Governor’s Rule by Jagmohan, but it was done without a systematic delimitation exercise. Rather, this “delimitation” only helped in further perpetuating Kashmir valley’s manipulated majority in the Assembly.

The total number of seats was increased to 111, but 24 seats were left permanently vacant in the name of the lost POK areas. Out of the functional 87 seats, 46 were given to Kashmir, 37 to Jammu and 4 were distributed equally among the two bifurcated regions of Leh and Kargil in Ladakh. A provision of seven reserved constituencies too was made for Scheduled Castes, but all of these seats have been taken from Jammu’s share, while not a single reserved seat was kept in the Kashmir valley.

COMMUNAL SOCIAL ENGINEERING

A close scrutiny of this exercise in redrawing new constituencies exposes a communally biased social engineering, which ensured that the odds were heavily loaded against non-Muslim candidates wherever possible. For example, to the Buddhist-dominated Zanskar in Ladakh, three Muslim majority areas of Kargil—Langhartse, Barsu and Bartoo—were added. These three areas do not have any geographic contiguity with the Zanskar valley, but now contribute to 60% of the total population of Zanskar constituency. Interestingly, the Supreme Court refused to take up the case of Zanskar’s people, who challenged this reorganisation, citing its limitations due to Article 370. Similar communal manipulation is quite visible and is resented by non-Muslims in many constituencies of Jammu, such as Poonch Haveli, Kalakot and Rajouri.

‘CONSTITUIONAL RIGGING’

The reorganisation exercise of 1993 has led to an anomaly which many in the Jammu and Ladakh regions term as a permanent “Constitutional rigging”. While the average voter size of a constituency in J&K was 83,053 in the Assembly elections of 2015, 22 constituencies of Kashmir valley have fewer voters than this average. For example, Gurez has only 17,554 voters, Karnah has 32,794, Khanyar 50,849 and Habbakadal has 54,484 voters. Compare this with Jammu region’s Gandhi Nagar’s 166,132, Jammu-West’s 151,311, Rajauri’s 112,732 or Leh’s 67,736 voters. Thanks to the perpetual and forcible eviction of the non-Muslim population from the valley to Jammu and other parts of India over the past seven decades, the population of Jammu region is much higher than that of Kashmir.

It is not surprising that Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference used its brute majority (57 out of 87 total seats) in the elections of September 1996 to amend the J&K Representation of the People Act 1957 and its Section 47(3), to say that “until the relevant figures for the first census taken after the year 2026 have been published, it shall not be necessary to readjust the total number of seats in the Legislative Assembly for the State and the division of the State into territorial constituencies under this sub-section”. When put to practice in letter and spirit, this law means that the 2032 Assembly elections can be held under a new delimitation only if the 2031 census data is “published” and a fresh delimitation is completed before these elections. Which means that any attempt to amend the ongoing “manipulated majority” of Kashmir valley can be undertaken only for the Assembly elections of 2038.

IMPACT OF MANIPULATED MAJORITY

It is thus easy to understand how and what kind of political-social havoc have been played on the state of J&K under this manipulated electoral democracy. The road-roller majority of Kashmir valley has been used to adopt and impose dozens of many such laws and rules that will put even Hitler’s Nazi Germany to shame. Just a few examples:

J&K laws prohibit from voting in Assembly, panchayat or even cooperative elections, or from seeking admission in higher educational institutions or applying for jobs in the state’s departments to all the following groups: migrants from the days of Partition in 1947; refugees from Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) who settled or were forced to settle outside the state; Gorkha soldiers of the Maharaja’s army living in the state for over 100 years; safai karmcharis, who were brought by the late Sheikh Abdullah himself from the neighbouring Punjab in the 1950s; even Central government officers (including IAS, IPS) who serve the state government on deputation; as well as the children of all these groups born over the past 70 years. (Unlike the migrant Kashmiri Pandits, who have been given remote voting rights, the POK refugee community and its descendants, numbering over a million today, have no right to the 24 Assembly seats that are vacant.) A law passed on the strength of Kashmir’s majority in the Assembly bars women residents of the state from marrying men from other parts of India. Yet another law passed by the Assembly openly invited Pakistani citizens who had migrated during Partition to return and take possession of their old properties as legal “State Subjects of J&K”. It is surely this Kashmiri majority in Assembly, which, instead of punishing stone-pelters and attackers on Indian forces, offers them government jobs (including in police services).

Hence, it is no surprise that Amit Shah has identified delimitation as the real fountainhead of all political troubles in the state. But delimitation is not going to be an easy job because he is bound to be opposed and condemned by all those forces that subscribe to a systematically built Kashmiri narrative or have deep vested interests in keeping the pot boiling. But then the job of Sardar Patel too was not easy.

Vijay Kranti is a senior journalist and Chairman, Centre for Himalayan Asia Studies & Engagement, CHASE.