Kashmir, if the BJP loses the Lok Sabha

Three months ago, a title such as the one above would havebeen called wishful thinking. But today there is reason for relative optimismin India and for anticipatory relief in Kashmir.

Indications are that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) willlose enough seats to have to rely on their allies in the National DemocraticAlliance (NDA) to cobble a coalition, and Narendra Modi may not return as thePrime Minister. For Kashmir, the latter part could mean some hope for an end tothe morally sanctioned brutality of the last five years.

   

However, a change in the person of the Prime Minister does not mean that we in Kashmir are out of the woods, especially if the BJP proves to be the largest single party in the coalition with yet another RSS pracharak as prime minister. It may not even mean an end to the emboldened viciousness that the Doval Doctrine has made a new normal. The prospective coalition’s allies will need to negotiate even the reversal of such reprehensible tactics, given the centrality that the BJP-RSS ideology gives to Kashmir. Nor is a return of the BJP as a coalition partner leading the NDA likely to mean a change in Delhi’s mindset on the question of the dispute over state of J&K.

To make a difference in Kashmir, the people of India willneed to vote in a government that excludes the BJP. This distant prospect maythrow up an opportunity to begin baby-step negotiations on the dispute over theState of J&K. It is a “distant” because, politically, the BJP-RSS regime,has embossed its ideology on the Indian populace with such force in the lasthalf decade that no party can ignore the requirement of paying obeisance tohard Hindu nationalism, Hindutva, if it is to retain power at the center. So,any government will be quick to adopt the path of least resistance; and that isto do nothing on Kashmir. This is to be expected for two reasons.

One, no government at the center will be able to address thedispute over Kashmir with a strategy that could be labeled as being tolerant ofthe “wishes of the people” of a demonized Kashmir. The starkest indicator ofthis is the difficulty any government at the center attempts to roll back theacquired taste for mobocratic sloganeering that substitutes for fact-basedrational political discourse, each time it leans towards any out of boxproposal.

Two, India continues to be saddled with dismal poverty, noinfrastructure in sight for the every-person, no jobs for its youth bulge, aneconomy still smarting from demonetization and GST and an internationalenvironment in which suspicion about India’s ability to deliver, except asconsumer market and a labor force, in the “new world order” grows.

Three, the prospective new government will need to retrieveIndia’s image in the international arena following five years of its peoples(1.3 billion of them) being habituated to divisive politics, a bigotedideology, authoritarian rule and a large sweep of media that has obsequiouslycatered to these trends for commercial gain.

These realities will ensure that a potential non-BJPgovernment will be very busy mending broken fences. Kashmir will be low onDelhi’s list of priorities.

In such a scenario, it is we in Kashmir and the rest of theState of J&K who, first and foremost, will need nuanced strategy andproactive engagement that contributes towards the resolution of the dispute.Some brief suggestions.

The strategy must be to articulate our situation in such away that it conveys the truth that not only is the dispute over our state theunderling cause of the India – Pakistan rivalry bordering on enmity, but thatit also transcends that rivalry when considered from the perspective of theJ&K state’s twelve million peoples and the region at large. Thus, we mustbe able to message the world that the dispute concerns the future of all thepeoples of the state in its entirety, which is uneasily supplemented by anuclear-proud India and Pakistan.

The second part of the strategy must be to place the disputeover the state of J&K, in its entirety, firmly on the global agenda. Thestate, in its entirety, is located along a seam that separates a volatileCentral Asia and an ineffectual South Asia. Limiting it to a regional (which isto say bilateral) agenda will not work because (a) South Asia is all butdysfunctional as a regional force in international relations and (b) we cannotexpect to become a priority for either India or Pakistan. We have cited India’sproblems, but Pakistan too is not without its domestic and internationalproblems.

However, we cannot hope to play a role in highlighting thedispute of over our state unless we agree on a strategy of our own which istransparent, articulate and geopolitically savvy. The state is a cluster ofnations between two new conventional states and a situation that has forced usto conform to the status quo of being a territorial bone of contention at theexpense of our languages, cultures and futures. This, of course, is not new forany modern state, including India and Pakistan. Our situation is out of theordinary because a resolution to the problem has been denied and postponedpresumptively and overtly against our wills.

The action that we need to concentrate on must be to seek apath that will allow all of us within the erstwhile state to talk to each otherto arrive to at a way forward that will end the dichotomization of Kashmiris bymaking us choose between being patronized or demonized, coopted or excluded,converted or killed. It is an ignominy that even the non-Kashmiri speakingnations of the erstwhile state will recognize if we were to understand theintellectual implications of being presented with such binary choices. It is aloathsome indignity. It is true that Ladakh, Baltistan and Gilgit have not feltthe agony of internal military operations against them, but if we allow what hasbeen called the “organized hypocrisy” of the world’s modern state system todetermine our future unshackled by any responsibility to their geographicalperipheries, their turns will also come.   

Second, we need to fashion tactics that do not respond tothe zero-sum template placed before us (and used to vicious effect by theModi-Doval doctrine) with a zero-sum response of our own, a practice that hashad such devastating effect on us in the last three decades. Admittedly this isdifficult, given the lies, deceit and condescension that has been our lot. Butto fashion a confidently independent articulation of our own, we need toacknowledge that we have lived in times of perilous vulnerability for so longthat today we find ourselves in a position in which laws domestic (for example,abrogation of constitutional provisions) and international (for example, theright to determine our own futures) can be abrogated at will, soldiers areemboldened to disregard their humanity and an entire citizenry that is demonizedto be hunted inside and outside their homes. We need to dislodge ourvulnerability.

The unresolved dispute over the state of J&K isdangerous from a security point of view because of weapons of mass destructionpossessed by status quo promoting “stakeholders”. It is dangerous from apolitical point of view because, as simmering disputes in the Middle East,former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union have shown, such disputes tend tometastasize and engulf an area much larger than ground zero. Its resolutionmeans that the peoples living on either side of established boundaries (orcrafty euphemisms such as ‘Line of Control’ and ‘Line of Actual Control’) canlive in a peace that includes them. They cannot be asked to be gratefulbeneficiaries of a peace achieved by a fragile military deterrence,conventional or nuclear.

But to even contemplate all the above as courses of action,the BJP must lose the elections. If the BJP wins the elections to form thegovernment as the single largest party, with or without Modi as Prime Minister,the proposals in this column would be defunct. And with Modi it would bedifficult to predict the level of anguish and trial that will follow for us.

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