Evil Architects of J & K Cauldron

If all the good people were clever,\ and all clever people were good,\ the world will be nicer than ever, wrote the poet Elizabeth Wordsworth.

Let us take the liberty of turning around her words: If all the evil people were clever,\ and all clever people were evil,\ the world will be nastier than ever.

The architects of the communal cauldron in Jammu & Kashmir today fit well with this description. All the actors who matter in this frontline state have played their evil game and tried to be very clever about it. In the process, they have pushed the state back into a quagmire which is reminiscent of the darkest period in the state.

Who are the evil architects of J & K politics? Well, take your pick.

Let us start with S K Sinha who demitted office as Governor of Jammu & Kashmir on June 25. He, as chairman of the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB), had played a crucial role in persuading the state government to provide about 40 hectares of degraded forest land to the SASB for erecting temporary shelters for pilgrims during the Amarnath Yatra in the summer every year.

Mind you, when the J & K government took the decision to that effect in May this year, only the environmentalists had expressed concern about its ecological effect. But then the matter had been investigated and cleared from all angles by the expert teams set up by the state government over a period of three years and the notification came only after the go ahead was given by the highest court in the land.

The self-styled Hurriyat leaders, who had been largely marginalized during the last few years when peace returned to Kashmir, began the rearguard action to communalise the issue but in their initial attempts, they failed to mobilize the Muslims in Kashmir.

This came as a ray of hope for all people who wanted peace and prosperity to endure in this communally sensitive state, but Sinha used his principal secretary to let loose a barrage of inflammatory rhetoric that changed the nature of the popular discourse and strengthened the hands of the militant groups.

Sinha was a Constitutional functionary. He ought to have exercised restraint in expressing an opinion that had a bearing on a communally sensitive issue. But he had an evil design. Just as he was to relinquish office, he wanted to project himself as a protagonist of the Hindu cause so that any party that led the coalition government next at the centre (Congress or the BJP) would like to keep him on its good books by offering him sinecures. He had had a good time for last 11 years as governor, thanks to his ability to ingratiate himself with both the leading parties of the country. It was time, he thought, he made himself indispensable to their scheme of things.

The other evil duo in this J & K imbroglio is the father-daughter team, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed and Mehbooba Mufti. It is amazing that Mufti, as the then Home Minister in V P Singh government, who sacrificed the critical interest of this country by releasing hard core terrorists from the prison to save his abducted daughter, can still have political credibility to assume the position of the chief minister. Such a man ought to have been a political pariah in any democratic state. But, given the nature of the communal politics, such betrayers of the national cause turn into political masters.

His personal stigmas apart, look at the devious role of his party in the Amarnath episode.

The assignment of the land to the SASB was a collective decision of the J & K cabinet, of which his PDP was a constituent. More so, the forest minister, Qazi Mohammad Afzal, who was responsible for signing the orders allowing the SASB the use of the forest land, is a PDP leader.

You are party to the decision, you issue notification, but when you see the protests are mounting, you renege on your commitment and turn tail and blackmail the government to rescind the order lest you face the wrath of the Kashmiri Muslims.

Mufti & Co are thus not merely betrayers of national cause; they are opportunists who, trying to be clever, only expose themselves as the parasites of our political system.

Ghulam Nabi Azad, the other prominent evil designer of the Amarnath saga, was acting clever, but he turned out to be too clever by half. He took a proactive role in ensuring that the 40 hectares of forest land was assigned to the SASB on an expeditious basis, before the scheduled elections to the state assembly was notified by the Election Commission. He knew that would draw cheer among the Hindu community whose support was crucial for the Congress to win the elections in the Jammu region. That Azad himself belonged to a constituency in Doda district of Jammu was an added consideration.
But the same Azad developed cold feet when militant outfits in Kashmir raised the ante and paralysed Srinagar in a bid to put pressure on the government to reverse its decision. From the Hindu appeasement, the cycle turned to the other extreme, Muslim appeasement. Azad government revoked the order of land assignment. To assuage the sentiments of livid Hindus, he came out with a list of measures for the benefit of the Amarnath pilgrims. That obviously did not cut ice with the Hindus of Jammu.

If the government could be blackmailed by the Muslim violence to change its decision, why couldn’t it be forced to make another somersault by the Hindu intransigence? Azad sparked the Jammu plug, but he is no more there to douse the fire. By showing his acute ineptness in handling the conflict situation, this Congressman has cast a long and dark shadow over his native state.

Then what about the evil design of the BJP? The party is right in saying that the stress had for long been on the Kashmiri Muslim psyche; it was time the people in power understood the psyche of the Hindus in Jammu. But then the protagonists of the BJP view need to answer a simple question: they have been opposing any kind of government subsidy to the Muslim pilgrims for years. So by that logic, there should be no government support to the Hindu pilgrims as well. Why the double standard then?

Another question for the Hindu fundamentalists: you are extremely concerned about India’s security, both internal and external. How do you then insist that the government disengage 40,000 police and paramilitary personnel from counter-terrorism duties to facilitate the Amarnath Yatra?

There will be clever answers to these questions, in the same way Muslim fundamentalists will try to answer cleverly any uncomfortable question posed to them. One only wishes these clever people were men and women of good intentions. But sadly they are the self-seekers who would not mind the state turn into a communal cauldron again if that helps them to advance their evil agenda.

Omars & Amars are opportunistic fellow travellers

Two confessions stood out in the run-up to the trust vote in the Lok Sabha on July 22. One was by Amar Singh, the Samajwadi Party general secretary who played a key role in bailing out the Manmohan Singh government after the Left snapped ties with the UPA over the nuclear deal. The other was by Omar Abdullah, the National Conference president, who made a by-now famous confession on the floor of Parliament just before the trust motion was put to vote.

Amar Singh — in his interviews with the print and television media just after his party chose to cross the floor and join the ruling establishment — expressed his heart-felt regret that he had used disrespectful, and, often, derogatory words against the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and her son and Member of Parliament Rahul Gandhi. They did not deserve it and I am ashamed of it, he said.

Omar Abdullah, who also indulged in his bit of floor-crossing – his party was the constituent of the NDA during 1999-2004 period and the main opposition group in the Jammu & Kashmir assembly to the Congress-PDP government during the last four years – expressed his heart-felt remorse before millions of Indians glued to the TV sets to watch the trust debate.  Although I thought about resignation many times after the Gujarat events, I could not bring myself to do it. That is my biggest regret, he confessed.

Both Amar Singh & Omar Abdullah said that they came to the rescue of the government which they loved to hate as the nuclear deal was for the good of the nation.

But then the Samajwadi Party was in the forefront to oppose the deal as a sellout to the United States’ strategic interests so long as Mayawati’s BSP supported the UPA government. And the National Conference, not for once, came out in favour of the nuclear deal so long as the Congress-PDP alliance ruled over Jammu & Kashmir.

The truth is that the political reality forced a rethink in both the cases. In Uttar Pradesh, where the SP has the most significant base, Mayawati was riding high on the social engineering plank. She managed to wrest power in the state in a four-cornered contest, and she is almost certain to repeat her electoral success in the forthcoming Lok Sabha election, going on her own. Samajwadi Party realizes that, in the present political context, it is no match to the BSP. So it desperately needed an alliance to ensure that it remained politically relevant; otherwise there would be mass exodus from the party. The only party it could align with was the Congress, the BJP being politically untouchable due to the SP’s strong Muslim vote base.

But the party had had an adversarial – rather hostile – relationship with the Congress for almost a decade, ever since Mulayam Singh threw cold water on Sonia Gandhi’s bid to become the prime minister. Sonia retaliated in 2004 by refusing to grant his alter ego, Amar Singh, a place at the political high table prior to the formation of the UPA. War of words had flown thick and fast between the warring groups during this interlude, with Amar Singh being the most loud-mouthed of them all. SP had to find a way to get over the past bitterness and come closer to the Congress.

The Congress too had its political compulsion to come close to the SP. For years it tried to strike a deal with the BSP for electoral alliance. But the BSP always spurned it. Despite Mayawati’s cold-shoulder, the Congress pursued her obsessively and even extended support to her government when she needed it the least. Sonia Gandhi drove to Mayawati’s house to personally congratulate her and declare the Congress support to her government. Mayawati took advantage of the Congress’s obsession for her and extracted her pound of flesh. Having had her way, she declared war on the Congress and withdrew support from the Congress government.

Left in the lurch, the Congress was also in desperate need to strike up an alternative alliance in UP, as it was in danger of being written off the electoral map of the biggest state in the country.

And for the Congress too there was no other party but the SP, as it could not have aligned with the BJP. So the strategists of both the Congress and the SP were looking for an opportune moment when they could justify their coming together after a bitter turf war.

The nuclear deal came as the godsend. Had the Congress-SP political truce not taken place, the nuclear deal would have been consigned to the backburner. The Congress would not have agreed to take on the Left on this issue and put the government on the firing line, had there not been a backdoor deal in place. On the other hand, even if there would have been no political impasse with the Left, the Congress-SP truce would have anyway taken place, albeit with a different justification.

So, it was a marriage of convenience. But, for the marriage to be solemnized Amar Singh had to swallow his bitter words and tell the world that it was a forgotten chapter.

Omar’s confession emanates from a similar political compulsion. Omar belongs to a political dynasty that has always found it useful to align with the ruling establishment at the Centre. Sheikh Abdullah, of course, had political credibility which is woefully lacking in his son and grandson. His son, Farooq Abdullah, inherited Sheikh’s mantle as head of the National Conference and was installed as chief minister. But when he was out of power, instead of roughing it out in the state, he chose to go gallivanting in the nightclubs of London.

When he was invited back to lead the party (after all, his is also the party where leadership has to remain in the family) and become the chief minister, he was too happy do so. But his addiction to power was so overwhelming that he even hitched his stars to the bandwagon of the BJP-led NDA and ensured that his son, Omar, became a minister at the centre. When the Vajpayee government refused to take cognizance of the autonomy bill which had been passed by the J & K state assembly, the father-son duo chose to ignore the collective interest of the Kashmiris for personal gratification.

But the party had to pay the price electorally for the leaders’ lust of power. The National Conference failed to form the next government as it had lost the support of and credibility among the masses.

Omar Abdullah, who has inherited the party leadership in a dynastic succession, was looking for an opportune moment to make amends, as the state assembly election was round the corner. The trust motion debate came as the big stage that he was looking for.

And he made the big confession: he wanted to resign from the central government when Gujarat killings took place, but, for various reasons, he could not. That was the biggest mistake of his life, he said.

Let us not forget that he had turned down the demand, within his party and outside, for his resignation from the union council of ministers in the aftermath of the Gujarat massacre with such vehemence that he would rather not recall now.

But by repudiating the same stance that he had stoutly defended a few years ago, he has now got the public as well as the media hail him as a ‘secular’ and ‘nationalist’ icon.

Public memory is proverbially short, but Omar proved to the world that the media have even a shorter memory by making them eat out of his hands after his ‘impassioned’, ‘stellar’ and ‘captivating’ speech.

Amar Singh’s somersault has not fetched him such national acclaim; may be because he lacks the religion and the pedigree of Omar Abdullah.

But, one thing is certain: both of them are the shining stars of Indian politics because they follow the hard-boiled advice which Emerson had given in a different context: take a stand keeping in view what is in your interest today in words as hard as cannon balls and tomorrow take another stand in keeping with tomorrow’s interest in hard words again, though it may contradict everything you said today.

This double-standard, it seems, is the necessary condition for political success.