No one could possibly have believed a year ago that anyone would be prepared to risk his life in the Kashmir valley to promote the cause of the Congress party. But such a miracle has taken place. Four Kashmiris by official count have died as a result of police firing on a demonstration organised by the Congress. And many more have courted imprisonment or faced lathi-charges in a campaign which is clearly intended to discredit and, if possible, bring down Dr. Abdullah and his government.
This must not be interpreted as an endorsement of the tactics the Congress leaders have adopted in Jammu and Kashmir to advance the interests of their party. As the readers of this newspaper know, we disapprove of them. We have repeatedly made known our view that they are playing with fire in a place where a lot of inflammable material is lying around and that they can as a result burn not only their own fingers but much else. This remains firmly our position.
But differences of opinion cannot blind us to the fact that the state Congress leaders like Mufti Sayed and his colleagues are men of courage and conviction. They are genuine nationalists not only in the sense that they would want the state to be fully integrated with the rest of the Union but also in a deeper sense which is that they feel free to act as if the state has already been fully integrated into the Union.
There is obviously a world of difference between the two types of nationalists. The men who revolted against Sheikh Abdullah and his strange ways in 1953 – Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, Mr. GM Sadiq and Mir Qasim – were nationalists in the first sense of the term. They upheld the cause of the Indian Union in the state in extremely difficult circumstances. But they were on the defensive – in psychological terms – vis-a-vis the Sheikh. If he had not been dismissed and imprisoned, it is doubtful whether they would have engaged in a relentless fight against him as the Mufti and other Congress leaders are doing today against Dr. Abdullah.
Abdullah Popular
Dr. Abdullah, of course, does not have the political stature of his late father. But he enjoys considerable popularity; he is not a man without certain political skills and, above all, he is in control of the state machinery. All in all, it is not easy to challenge him in the valley. As leader of the Congress party, Mir Qasim, for example, would almost certainly not have fought Dr. Abdullah the way the Mufti is doing even if he had been convinced that Dr. Abdullah was not trustworthy.
The Mir would have regarded such a course of action as being unduly risky – not so much from his personal point of view as from the point of view of the Indian Union. He would have argued that the particularist sentiment in the valley was too strong to be challenged and that it would be in the larger Indian interest for the Congress to seek accommodation with Dr. Abdullah even on his own terms.
It would not even occur to the present J and K Congress leaders to put forward such a plea. They just do not think in those terms. They regard the state as good a part of the Union as any other and themselves as good Indians as any other. Obviously it would be wrong to dismiss these upholders of the Congress flag as opportunists and seekers after office.
Two other points should be made at this stage. First, the Mufti and his colleagues could not have taken on Dr. Abdullah if they did not have the backing of Mrs. Gandhi, or if Mrs. Gandhi was not Prime Minister, or if the climate of opinion in the state had not changed sufficiently to enable them to function as a party without the protection of the administrative machinery. It might be added parenthetically that this is the first time since the merger of the state with the Indian Union that the Congress has functioned truly as a political party; earlier it was little more than an arm of the administration.
Secondly, only a combination of the dedication of the local Congress leaders, Mrs. Gandhi’s innate daring and the change in the climate of opinion in the state could have produced the kind of situation that now prevails there. Without the first and the second, the third would in all probability not have been noticed. And without the third, it would have been worse than foolhardy for Mrs. Gandhi to act the way she has.
This assessment is based not on speculation but on hard facts. Most commentators, for instance, were opposed to Mrs. Gandhi’s decision to confront the National Conference in the valley at the time of the last election to the state legislature because they were convinced that the Congress did not have any popular base there and that it was dangerous to offend Dr Abdullah.
Change In Outlook
I do not know the complexities of the Kashmiri psychology and therefore of politics to wish to make confident assertions. But it seems to me that the last poll was a turning point in the life of the state. The unexpectedly high vote for the Congress was a clear expression of the fact that Kashmir’s psychological integration with the Union had reached a point where it could not be reversed. I have also little doubt that the credit for bringing this pleasant fact into the open must go to Mrs. Gandhi and her lieutenants in the state. They demonstrated an understanding of the change in the people’s outlook in the state which most others lacked.
In the light of our stand on developments in Jammu and Kashmir, it may appear odd if I were to add that I am inclined to believe that Dr. Abdullah’s present posture of unflinching loyalty to the Indian Union is also a tribute to Mrs Gandhi’s daring and the state Congress leaders’ tenacity. But I am so inclined.
To avoid misunderstanding, let me add that I do not endorse Mrs. Gandhi’s charges against Dr Abdullah. She herself has not produced any evidence to substantiate her allegations against him. I base my case on Dr. Abdullah’s own statement of his position which is that the National Conference alone speaks for the people in the valley, and its implication which is that Kashmiri particularism remains too strong to permit the only truly national party, the Congress, to gain much support in the valley and other Muslim-majority areas in the state.
Particularism, as we all know, is a euphemism for sub-nationalism. In Kashmir’s case, the concept of such a sub-nationalism would be based not only on language as in Tamil Nadu but also on religion because Muslims happen to constitute an overwhelming majority of the population there. To be candid, one who claims to represent such a sub-nationalism must by definition remain ambivalent on the issue of national integration because his own survival depends on his ability to adopt whichever of the two platforms – nationalist or sub-nationalist – suits him at the moment.
Sheikh Abdullah’s political career over three and a half decades after independence illustrates the point, as is only too obvious, he remained ambivalent towards the Indian Union till the last day. The Sheikh was certainly not a religious fanatic. But be favoured merger with the Indian Union in 1947 not so much because he was sincerely secular in his outlook as because he was shrewd enough to recognise (instinctively if not conceptually) that there would be no place for him and the Kashmiri personality in Pakistan. And he was never averse to the idea of using the threat of Pakistan and of pro-Pakistan elements in the valley to thwart New Delhi.
Autonomy Call
It might be unfair to rush to the conclusion that left to his own devices, Dr. Abdullah too would have resorted to similar tactics and treated the state as his preserve as the late Sheikh had tended to do. But if he was not inclined to do so, those around him could have convinced him that that was the best, indeed the only, option open to him if he was keen on office.
By adopting the kind of tactics it has, the Congress has, of course, unwittingly, produced several positive results. It has not just compelled Dr. Abdullah to seek wider alliances outside the valley and the state; it has also raised his own stature and made it difficult for communalists such as Maulvi Farooq to bring pressure to bear on him; and it has helped establish the point that no significant element in Jammu and Kashmir regards it worth its while to look to Pakistan for support or use the danger from that quarter as an argument to frighten New Delhi.
To sum it all up, it can be said that an interesting political process has been on in Jammu and Kashmir whereby the forces of nationalism and integration have compelled representatives of Kashmiri particularism to speak in the name of autonomy for the states as guaranteed by the Constitution. In the interest of his own survival, Dr. Abdullah has now taken a road which is very different from the one which his father traversed and which he might have been tempted to take.
While we welcome this change, we must recognise that the political process we speak of is a delicate one. It can break down if Mrs. Gandhi and her praetorians fail to respect the limit beyond which they cannot push things without bringing into contempt the Constitution in the name of which she rules. The last thing Kashmir needs and New Delhi can afford to produce there is a martyr, even so unlikely a martyr as Dr. Abdullah. I for one also do not see what Mrs. Gandhi hopes to gain by casting him in the role of her principal challenger which is precisely what she is doing by acquiescing in demonstrations against him in places as far away from each other as Calcutta and Delhi.
The Times of India, 18 January 1984