The explosion of terrorist activities in Kashmir poses a problem for the for the National Front government to which there is, in the fundamental sense, no early answer. The reappointment of Jagmohan as Governor of the state and the resignation of Farooq Abdullah as Chief Minister, though welcome in themselves, cannot alter this assessment.
The Union Government did not have much of a choice. In the given situation in Kashmir, it had to lean on Jagmohan in view of his remarkable record as chief executive in the state after the dismissal of the G.M. Shah ministry earlier and his intimate knowledge of the administrative machinery there. It could not have experimented with one of its favourites, especially in view of its reportedly less than happy experience in Punjab. Indeed, it does not speak too well for it that it should have debated the issue for more than a month. Such delays in decision-making at the top cannot augur well for the country in the most uncertain international situation it faces since independence.
Farooq too did not have any option but to resign, once New Delhi had appointed Jagmohan as Governor. Alternatively, he would have faced dismissal soon. Jagmohan has to have a free hand if he is to bring about any improvement in the state. This could not have been possible if the ‘elected’ government had been allowed to stay in office. It would have had to go. Farooq has only spared Mufti Mohammed Sayeed the unpleasant task of dismissing him.
Be that as it may, however, nothing can obscure the basic truth that terrorism has become a dimension of Kashmiri politics on a long-term basis. It can, at best, be contained; it cannot be eliminated in the foreseeable future. It would be patently unreasonable of us to expect Jagmohan to perform such a miracle.
The rise of terrorism in Kashmir has to be seen in the context of the rise of ‘fundamentalism’ there. The terrorists reject the present ‘secular’ order, seek a Muslim’ identity of which their Hindu and Sufi Kashmiri past is not the foundation, and they are inspired by a perception of an ‘ideal’ Muslim way of life which Ayatollah Khomeini has popularised in recent years. It is not fortuitous that hotels, bars, cinema houses and modern schools attract their hostile attention as do government buildings and personnel and, of course, the Hindus.
Today’s fundamentalism needs to be clearly distinguished from old-style revivalism. It is not just Wahabism under a new name. Wahabism also took an aggressive form, as in the attacks of the followers of Titu Meer on the Hindus in what is now Bangladesh in the 1830s and Syed Ahmed’s Jihad against the ‘infidel’ Sikh and the British rule. But the Wahabis were not in search of a ‘Muslim’ identity; they were fully assured of it; they were not the products of schools and colleges run on the Western pattern, they were educated in traditional madrasahs and they lived in tradition-bound societies. To put it differently, Islamic fundamentalism, unlike Wahabism, is Muslim version of third world modern ‘radicalism’ and is therefore more difficult to fight. Educated and semi-educated youth, and not the Mullahs, are its cutting edge.
Fundamentalism can arise and prosper only in societies which have been exposed to disruption as a result of ‘modernisation’ and what passes for economic development. In the case of Iran, Shiism, with its tradition of martyrdom and self-flagellation, has doubtless been a major factor in addition to ‘Westernisation’. So it is in the case of the Shias in Lebanon. For all we know, that may well be a significant factor in Kashmir as well. But the fundamentalist wave sweeps across the Shia-Sunni divide. Social disruption resulting inevitably from modernisation must, therefore, be reckoned as the more important factor.
Misrule and corruption too account in no small measure for the large-scale alienation of the people and therefore for the risk of terrorism in Kashmir. The state has not known honest and competent rule since 1947. The evil of corruption was contained when Ghulam Mohammad Sadiq and Mir Qasim were chief ministers but only to a small extent. Both lived under the shadow of Sheikh Abdullah in jail or exile in New Delhi and were understandably reluctant to act tough.
The Sheikh himself could have been discredited if New Delhi had not secured his overthrow in 1953, imprisoned him, brought up the abortive charge of treason against him, and thereby helped to protect his image as the champion of the Kashmiri cause. Above all, it was Pakistan’s failure to grab the valley in 1965 that enabled Abdullah to preserve his ambivalence and his standing with his people. But that is a different issue. More pertinently, it would be helpful if in the new context, Farooq can carve out a similar niche for himself in the esteem of the Kashmiri people. But to me, that seems unlikely.
In most past discussions on Kashmir, a great deal was made of the anti-Pakistan component of the Kashmiri perception of their identity and selfhood. This component has clearly been eroded in the past decades as the pan-Islamic sentiment has spread, as frustration with the incompetent and corrupt rule within Kashmir and New Delhi has mounted, and as social disruption has proceeded as a result of ‘modernisation’. Educated’ young men and women look down upon the crafts and trades of their forbears and cannot find the jobs they are ‘trained’ for. Indeed, that explains the rise of terrorist-fundamentalist groups in the valley. This makes it difficult to assess the importance of the anti-Pakistan component of the Kashmiri self-perception.
I cannot say for certain whether or not the terrorists have become genuinely pro-Pakistan to the point of wanting to take the valley into Pakistan, though I for one would still doubt that the majority of the Kashmiri people would even today want to join Pakistan. As I see it, they feel free to give expression to their ‘pro-Pakistan’ sentiment because there is yet no real danger of Pakistan grabbing the valley.
It could, of course, become a different story if the Afghan mujahideen were to seize power in Kabul and the predominantly Muslim republics in Central Asia were to secede from the Soviet Union. These possibilities need not detain us presently. But they cannot be dismissed lightly.
Equally pertinent for the purpose of the present discussion is the unpleasant fact that, whatever our assessment of the anti-Pakistan component of Kashmiri self-definition, it has never taken a pro-India shape. We have had individual Muslim Kashmiri leaders who have seen themselves as Indians, not just pro-Indians. But their number has, of necessity, been always small and that breed has by now become more or less extinct.
Despite the millions of words that have been written and spoken by Jawaharlal Nehru and on Jawaharlal Nehru, it is difficult to say whether or not he seriously believed that it would ever be possible to integrate Kashmir into the Indian Union in a meaningful sense of the term. His actions certainly speak of no such confidence. On the contrary, all his actions, with the sole exception of the promise to hold a plebiscite under UN auspices, suggest that he was engaged in only a holding operation.
Whether or not this was, indeed, the case, it would be less than fair to blame Nehru for the troubles we have faced in Kashmir for over four decades. In a basic sense, he was also a victim of circumstances, though it needs to be added that he was also a prisoner of his rash impulses and prejudices which led him to place undue trust in Mountbatten’s bona fides, experience and wisdom and promise a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir. For, once Jinnah had pushed marauding tribesmen into Kashmir, the course of events had been set.
India could not sit idly by and allow the marauders to seize the state. It had to intervene militarily; the military intervention in a predominantly Muslim and border state had, in order to be legitimised so soon after partition, to be accompanied by Sheikh Abdullah’s support; the issue had also to go to the UN Security Council; and one trouble had to follow another, one of the most important being the clash between Sheikh Abdullah, who saw himself as the sole legitimate embodiment of Kashmiri ‘nationalism’, and Nehru who saw himself as the guardian of the larger Indian national interest.
Nehru had watered down the substance of Indian nationalism. He made it appear as if it was little more than an aggregation of an undefined pride in, and love for, the country with its past ‘suitably’ reinterpreted to dilute, if not write off, its Hindu character, of ‘modern’ education with special emphasis on science and technology leading to what he called the scientific temper, and of economic development, a euphemism for an imitation of the Western model modified in the light of the Soviet concept of central planning. Even so, the clash was unavoidable. To avoid it, Nehru even accepted the humiliation of negotiating with the Sheikh as if the latter was the head of a sovereign state and of concluding with him the ‘Delhi Pact’. But even that did not help; the Sheikh had to be overthrown and arrested.
Since then the Government of India has, as earlier, engaged in ad hocism. Even the Tashkent agreement, following the 1965 war with Pakistan, was an exercise in a patch-up and so was the Simla agreement in 1972, following the war over Bangladesh.
Indira Gandhi was able to convert the Sheikh into an ally, even if a reluctant one, in 1976 mainly because he was already a tired man and was anxious to get back into office. Even so, she remained suspicious of him and he of her and the two engaged in an endless battle of wits – to the advantage of both. Farooq does not possess the skills or the stature of his father. Indeed, the playboy in him is ever ready to surface and take command.
But it must also be admitted that the circumstances have also been tilted against him. He has had to contend with men such as Arun Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi in New Delhi who have had a wholly inadequate appreciation of the complexity of the task of managing Kashmir. Most important, the so-called development measures, especially the spread of ‘education’, have devastated the Kashmiri society as they have devastated the rest of the Indian society. The Hindus are more resilient and have therefore coped better with the consequences of ‘modernisation’. In any case, they are for all practical purposes Indians and cannot possibly give vent to their frustrations and despair in anti-India explosions which a section of even the Sikhs have come to find useful.
I recall all this to make the point that little more than buying time has been possible in Kashmir for four long decades and that little more than that appears feasible in coming years. I seriously doubt that a decision to scrap Article 370 of the Constitution, as demanded by the Bharatiya Janata Party, can help us achieve even a mitigation of the Kashmir problem. The demand itself is in reality only an expression of frustration.
The issue is not whether it was right and proper for Nehru to concede a special status to Kashmir; as argued earlier, he too was not a free agent. The issue is whether that special status disables the Union Government from taking measures it deems necessary to cope with the menace in the valley.
The answers should be obvious. New Delhi enjoys enough powers under the present constitutional arrangements to take whatever steps it considers necessary; the problem is that whatever steps it takes may prove inadequate. Similarly, it is self-evident that the general reaction in Kashmir to the abrogation of Article 370 will be adverse and strengthen the case of the terrorists that India cannot be trusted. The essentially insular character of the Kashmiri Muslims locked up for millennia in the valley should not be disregarded.
Simultaneously, however, it should be equally obvious that Article 370 has not helped settle anything. Indeed, it must be said in all honesty that if New Delhi had not taken steps to erode gradually the powers the Sheikh had given himself under the Jammu & Kashmir Constitution, the people in the state would have been victims of something far worse than what they have been exposed to. The extension of the jurisdiction of the Election Commission, for instance, may not have ensured truly fair and free elections in Kashmir. But it has at least helped avoid ‘unanimous’ election to all seats, as in 1952. Even at that early stage the Sheikh was not at all willing to trust the Kashmiri people.
It has become necessary to make this point because some Sikh leaders are pressing for a similar arrangement for Punjab, though rather discreetly in order to avoid offence to the Khalistanis, and because some of those now in power in New Delhi may not be too averse to such an arrangement. In my assessment, the Indian people have by now become too conscious politically to accept such a proposal; the BJP will also almost certainly not acquiesce in it, though one can never be too sure about it; and without its acquiescence, the National Front government cannot go ahead with it. But the point I wish to make is that the special status has in reality been a burden on the people of Kashmir and that it would be a burden on the people of Punjab, including the Sikhs. The local ‘leaders’ are invariably worse than all-India ones.
The conventional wisdom in the West has been that insurrection and guerilla warfare prosper under dictatorships when the people are fully alienated from the regime and that these are not possible even in poorly run democracies. Ours is a democracy even if a flawed one. The avenues of redress are not altogether closed even in the worst managed states. But the terrorists in Punjab and Kashmir have made nonsense of that conventional wisdom. Terrorism immobilises the people, on the one hand, and it forces the state machinery to resort increasingly to extra-legal measures, on the other. The presence across the border of an unfriendly Pakistan, unable to define its identity except in terms of hostility to us, further complicates the problem.
All in all, it is irresponsible to look for a quick fix in either Kashmir or Punjab and that is what the talk of a ‘political solution’ or mobilization of popular support amounts to. We have to be prepared psychologically for a long, long haul.
Sunday Mail, 21 January 1990