Tweedledum and Tweedledee, doesn’t matter which one it is. It really doesn’t. Whether it was the late Mohammad Sayeed or his daughter Mehbooba Mufti that saw the sword brought down on themselves and the people in whose name they spoke, knowing well that the partner they chose to live with didn’t give dime for the promises he might have made. His only commitment was and continues to remain absolutely loyal to its political objective of Hindutva and Hindu Rashtra. If the PDP was willing to be what little schoolboys would call a “bakra”, which it turned out to be, never mind the high spirited references made to it as the “accord of alliance” by the late Mufti, and his chief negotiator who later served as Finance Ministers of the two Muftis, father and daughter, with the RSS points man Ram Madhav who obviously promised them all but the moon while selling the coalition idea to the Muftis. And in retrospect it doesn’t matter on whom the axe fell. Both were partners in the unworthy deal wholly at odds with the basic constitutional and political system, at odds also with the secular democratic fabric of the nation and the State. The accord in the event turned out to be a fraud played with great deliberation by the BJP national leadership on a gullible, power hungry political unit. What unfolded over the next three years saw the PDP becoming more and more a cat’s paw for the saffronites, used to give a veneer of acceptability to national party’s vicious agenda of sharpening the divisions within the state, always emphasizing the separate identities of Jammu, Ladakh and the valley, never losing an opportunity to heavily underline the points of difference between the three regions: religious, cultural, linguistics, and what have you. And indeed the BJP cat peeped out of Mr Ram Madhav’s ample bag the day he finally chose to wax most eloquently from Jammu, the winter capital, explaining how and why it had become imperative for his party to withdraw support from the coalition. Given the BJP’s mindless obsession, one of its many, with places and names there appeared to be a bit of a deliberation in announcing the withdrawal from Jammu after calling its Ministers in the State cabinet for a deep session of brainwashing. Not that they any time seemed to be lacking in blowing into the horn of hatred against the valley. But then, Mr Ram Madhav cannot be denied, one is told. And that is exactly when the cat in the bag peeped out the first time that evening in Jammu. Jammu and Kashmir comprised three distinct entities with different cultural moorings and sadly, believed Mr Madhav, Jammu and Ladakh had been discriminated against, with the Muslim-dominated valley always getting the best of deals. No one in his audience of patrakar bandhus asked him how and why, and Madhav in any case wasn’t going to tell. No mention naturally of the strife of the past three decades, of long incarcerations of people who had worked for Sate’s disputed accession to India including of those who have dared to question it the long years spent in jail by Sheikh Abdullah, the turmoil that has been part of Kashmiris’ life these past many decades, the joy or lack of it of living with the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and current phase of a virtual martial law – God forbid it is not as bad as that as yet. Someone has put it that little purpose would be served by attempting to analyse what went wrong the three years of the great PDP-BJP mismatch in Kashmir. Truth is that little went right for it from the word go. Yes, right from the moment the late Mufti Sayeed tried to put on the peace-makers’ mantle at the swearing in ceremony, in Jammu. The Mufti rarely reverted to his theme the short while he lived to be the Chief Minister. Even the coalition’s demise did indeed reflect the unprincipled nature of the unlikeliest of political marriages ever. Rajnath Singh who had tried to play the fairy godmother of Mufti Jr. too looked the other way when the RSS plenipotentiary in Kashmir, Ram Madhav, betraying misplaced arrogance blamed the crumbling security environment in the State (read Valley) as his party’s alibi to pull out – to more actively pursue its goal of teaching the Valley’s overwhelming Muslim majority a lesson or two. A desperate Mehbooba, sidelined from the inner workings of the saffron mafia, may have belatedly realised that a “muscular policy” was no answer to the questions asked in the State; she was indeed asked to be around when the mantra of hate against the valley was being preached in Ladakh and vociferously endorsed by the BJP both there, and in its base constituency of Jammu, but frankly only as a senior attendee, the honours usually done by BJP stalwarts including Narendra Modi and Rajnath Singh, Mehbooba reduced to the level of a cheer-leader. The saffronites in New Delhi, Nagpur, and in Jammu haven’t yet ceased celebrating the collapse of the marriage of convenience which they forged in Kashmir three years back but it is sad to note that it represents total bankruptcy of India’s political establishment. A monumental failure that has increased the space for separatist/militants, do we really need enemies if we have so many short-sighted men sitting right round the seats of power in Delhi and in Kashmir – or is it Jammu, down the path of bloody conflict.
A monumental failure
