Consider the following political comparison.
The population of Turkey is just under 80 (eighty) millionand it has 550 elected members of parliament. India has a population of morethan 1.2 billion (that is ‘billion’ with a ‘b’) and has 543 elected members ofparliament. That is, New Delhi has seven less members of the legislature thanTurkey’s, despite the latter being one-tenth the demographic size of India.
My point is this: the prolongation of the seventy-year oldcrisis that is the State of Jammu and Kashmir has resulted not only because ofpolitical injustice but also due to administrative impracticality, despite theclaims of India’s successive Election Commissions, which, this time around, hasbeen spectacularly silent in response to claims of maladministration fromvarious parts of the country.
This thought enters one’s mind as one tries to make sense ofhow completely “normal” it is to ignore General Elections in Kashmir. Theelected have not delivered, and this memory comes into sharp relief as Indiaenters the final phases of an electoral process involving a staggering 900million voters. One need not speculate much for reasons why, in Kashmir,interest during general elections is somewhere between muted speculation andconfident disinterest.
This unconcern is because elections for the parliament inNew Delhi have had little political credibility in Kashmir for more than half adecade. However, over the years, we have also imbibed, perhaps subliminally,that India’s general elections lack administrative reliability because of thesheer size of the country.
These facts raise the question: is India just too big tosucceed? Especially given the operational bias towards the unitary (read’centralizing’) foundations of its constitution rather than that document’sfederalizing characteristics.
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The above observations are worth pointing out because theKashmiri today is accused – when it comes to elections – of being disruptive,uncooperative and cynical. That narrative needs to be rebuffed, because it is afalse representation. Kashmiris, like any society, are not monolithic orcollectively ignorant. If those who consider the parliamentary elections to beunimportant are very large in number, those who consider the assembly electionsmarginally relevant are greater and those who consider local elections as morerelevant are perhaps greater than the latter number. Whether such participationgives any agency to the people apart, people have voted for administrativereasons, even if it be with buckets of doubt and, increasingly, with diminishinghope of even administrative delivery, in the local balloting opportunities.
That said, speculation about all tiers of polling do existin Kashmir. This parliamentary poll and the expected assembly elections are noexception to this rule.
As anticipated, voter response to the Lok Sabha has beenvery sparse in the Valley, so there is little to analyze. There is a highprobability that the usual suspects will return to occupy the seats Delhireserves for central and south Kashmir. The radical alienation of the PDP,however, may yet spring a surprise in South Kashmir. Meanwhile, the “realcontest” taking place is in north Kashmir. But the pertinent analysis vis thevalley is deciphering how slender voter participation has been.
In Ladakh’s parliamentary seat, there is no incumbentbecause Thubstan Chhewang, a very popular leader, resigned some time ago fromboth the BJP and his parliamentary seat because of the BJP’s double-talk.Surprisingly, the BJP apparently still stands a chance despite this rebuke, becausethe Congress vote has splintered in both Leh and Kargil districts of Ladakh. InLeh, because the Buddhist vote is divided between the Congress and the BJP, andin Kargil because the Muslim vote is divided between Islamia School’sindependent candidate and the Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust’s Congresscandidate. Given this scenario it appears, ironically, that the minority Muslimvote in Leh District and the minority Buddhist vote in Kargil District, mayultimately determine the winner in Ladakh.
In Jammu, although no cakewalk for the BJP was expected, theinexplicable abdication by the Congress central command of any real campaigningfor the Lok Sabha elections in Jammu (or Ladakh, for that matter) has broughtthe Hindutva party back into the picture. So, again ironically, although theBJP had managed to alienate itself in Jammu, acts of omission by the Congress,are helping to give the BJP some hope.
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The assembly elections are still distant, but that does notrule out some speculative reasoning about it.
To begin with, the BJP regime clearly postponed holding thestate assembly elections because it was uncertain about its own fate in the LokSabha elections. It gambled, on the one hand, that if it returned to power inparliament with reasonable clout it could delay elections indefinitely as ittoyed with its laws and tinkered with its demography. On the other hand, evenif its parliamentary fortunes were significantly reduced, it could, with agovernor of its choice, hope for some play in the fate of the state’s immediatefuture. And in either case, the role ofcash in politics, which the BJP is expert in, can be used to greatest effect inany delay in the Assembly elections.
Regardless of the scenarios that play out, the citizen inJ&K state is sanguine about the prospects depending on whether the BJPreturns to power or not. If it does return to power, the supposition is thatits catch and kill policy will continue apace. The reaction of the Kashmiri tothat scenario is frightening; youth action, almost certainly, will translateinto larger protests, greater state repression and a South Asia on edge. If theLok Sabha election replaces the BJP or even the current Prime Minister in arestructured formation of the NDA, it may translate into some relief from thebrutality but little movement forward on addressing the dispute that is theState of J&K in its entirety. In the latter setting, the criticalconstituencies to effect change will be the local and the international ones.
Locally, all parties within the State of J&K must beprepared to articulate the need to somehow break the status quo in thepolitical abdication surrounding the state in its entirety. The internationalcommunity, in its turn, would do well to remember that almost exactly threemonths before May 23rd, 2019, South Asia got ever so close to going to war –over Kashmir.
If the setting is one in which the BJP returns to powerunhindered, all bets are off in J&K, as to the future behavior of thatparty given its beliefs in hard nationalism, military muscularity andcivilizational zealotry. The worry then will not be just about the state ofJ&K, but the future of India, South Asia and the world, keeping in mindthat South Asia, collectively, is home to close to two billion human beings.
Or more a quarter of humanity.
In the event, the question raised at the start of thiscolumn is worth considering in New Delhi and by the international community. IsIndia just too big and complex to succeed? After the last five years, theimplication of this seemingly anti-national query is that New Delhi needs toconsider structural changes to its polity, its institutions and its territory.
For Kashmir, it would be some light at the end of the darktunnel that we have been witness to.