After the initial rhetoric of “finally integrating” Jammu & Kashmir into India, the Modi government appears uncertain about how the ground situation will pan out. Whenever restrictions are relaxed, public protests erupt, concertina wires and mobile bunkers are redeployed in the agitation prone areas.

As of now protests seem largely limited to Srinagar but no one can guarantee that they will not spread to other parts of the Kashmir Valley. It seems that those who assumed that the ordinary Kashmiri would get on with life as usual after their flag, Constitution and statehood were peremptorily taken away, miscalculated.

In retrospect, the biggest error of judgement by decision-makers in Delhi may be the removal of the mainstream political parties of the state from the public sphere by imprisoning their leaders. They were a buffer as well as a channel of communication between the State and the people.

The absence of large scale anger over their arrests has been taken as indication of their total alienation from the grassroots in J&K. But it is not exceptional for people to hate politicians. They are constantly vilified by the media, some are known to be corrupt and more often than not, politicians have not delivered on their promises. This contributes to popular scepticism about them.

However, ordinary people also at the same time do not understand the importance of politics. They may not recognise that the alternatives to democratic politics, are much worse. Despite being imperfect and allegedly corrupt, politicians at least offer an alternative to governance by intimidation. By removing them from public life and political discourse, governance can only be through coercion as one can see signs of in J&K.

Having painted mainstream Kashmiri political leaders as corrupt dynasts, the Modi government is finding it difficult to approach a sullen local population and is unsure of what to do with the state’s imprisoned leaders. It is unable to assess the public mood. Formal administrative channels of communication are ineffective or of little help. No Kashmiri is going to seek justice or help from those who he believes to be responsible for the present denouement. Informal channels have also become ineffective as no one wants to be seen as an informant. With the State still unable to trust even the local police, which remains disarmed, who is going to be its link to even police informers? The mainstream politicians were a safety valve that is now gone.

It will be difficult for the Modi government to fill the political vacuum it has created. No alternative leadership was nurtured before mainstream political leaders were removed. It cannot be created out of thin air. The Modi government would do well to learn from the miserable failure of Gen. Ayub Khan’s and Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s regimes to create new political leaders through government patronage in Pakistan. None of the “Basic Democrats” of Ayub or the “Nazims” of Musharraf have survived the vagaries of democracy. Eventually Pakistan’s military dictators had to go back to the established political parties to facilitate and sustain social and political stability.

The government is afraid that if released, the mainstream leaders would begin mobilising people against it. The Governor of J&K Satyapal Malik admitted as much in an interview saying that if they were set free “their utterances will spoil the ground situation”. If Mahbooba Mufti or Omar Abdulla, he speculated, “march with 20 to 50 people and threaten to burn (down) the Raj Bhavan, we will be forced to open fire, won’t we?” Justifying their imprisonment he fatuously claimed that he himself wished to stay in the “beautiful cottage” where Mufti was imprisoned and Omar Abdulla should not complain as he was imprisoned in a “King’s Palace” (Hari Niwas Palace, now a designated sub-jail). It seems that the top-rung leadership of the Peoples’ Democratic Party and the National Conference is unlikely to be released any time soon.

However their second-rung leaders also seem unwilling to cooperate with the government. They are apparently being offered freedom if they sign a legal undertaking to desist from political activity and criticism of the government. So far, there are no takers.





Women walk past a CRPF person standing guard in a street in Srinagar on Thursday | Photo: PTI

If, as it seems, political leaders prefer to stay in jail instead of being dubbed “collaborators”, how will politics in J&K revive? The Governor’s answer is: “Political dialogue is important but we will engage with civil society.” He claimed he would talk directly to “Lawyers, teachers and other sections” of society.

Governor Malik is overoptimistic if he thinks that civil society organisations are eager to hold a political dialogue with him. Why would those who have agitated about protecting human rights, against the excesses of the security forces and argued for greater autonomy, even independence, now agree to talk to a Governor who had promised them and indeed the whole nation that all stakeholders would be consulted before changing the special status of the state? Since he had to subsequently rationalise his untruths citing obligations under the Official Secrets Act, a dialogue with him will have no credibility.

A political leadership could yet evolve from the sporadic protests and agitations but that is unlikely to be sympathetic to the Union government. The only other process that can lead to the emergence of new leaders is electoral. However prospects of elections to the legislature by next spring, as speculated earlier, seem distant now. Any exercise to prop up nobodies as legislators will not succeed. They may have to be put up in makeshift ‘prisons’ to keep them safe in Srinagar.

Meanwhile, there is already some speculation that a law may be brought in to limit the amount of land non-residents can acquire to assuage local fears about outsiders grabbing land. Without this the ruling dispensation stands to lose support even in Jammu and in Ladakh.

With possibilities of political revival in J&K remaining bleak, it seems that the political situation could remain disturbed much longer than anticipated. After the initial bravado, the government seems to be getting nervous about emerging scenarios in Kashmir.

