It is a shameless government that uses death to further its party-power ambitions. This BJP government is one such, as it has demonstrated in the aftermath of Pulwama 2019.
There is no one in Kashmir who does not grasp the grief in the 44 households of India over their dead men. There is no one here who does not recognize the candlelight vigils in many parts of India. This, even if Kashmiris are not allowed to hold any such for their thousands of dead and dying.
But the focus of the Delhi government has been less on grief and more on vengeance. This by a Prime Minister who remains silent at vicious reprisals directed at everyday Kashmiris who live, work and travel all over India. But while the head of government is silent, his acolytes are not. He has a cadre of five million RSS members to draw from to troll and wreak havoc. Against such odds, it is easy to be pushed back, to be discouraged, apologetic and even hopeless. We must avoid all these emotions, but we are duty bound to avoid the last – hopelessness. For that, all we need do is to observe and analyze. Intent, of course, is difficult to decipher. But words and actions can be decoded sooner or later.
In India, ‘mainstream’ media and government are the ‘go to’ sources that need decoding. Less than twelve hours after the Pulwama attack it was a popular Indian journalist who first raised the war-cry by dubbing the assault “clearly an act of war [by Pakistan]” in no less than the Washington Post (February 15th 2019). Similarly, the Finance Minister of India promised ‘incontrovertible evidence’ of Pakistan’s involvement and pledged to ‘isolate Pakistan from the international community’. We wait.
The result of the accusation against Pakistan has been to ricochet attention from the dispute over the State of J&K to Delhi’s state-to-state rivalry with Islamabad. Deny the dispute and deflect the rebellion. It has been the ploy for almost fifty years now. As a result of this, other states are reluctant to get involved in the recognized dispute. It is easier for states to recognize the dispute as a state versus state battle. It involves territory, ideology and narratives of the recent past: subjects of propaganda that states can easily manipulate. People, ideas and livelihoods are subjects that do not lend themselves to easy manipulation. But that is what is involved in state versus non-state actors.
It’s the elections, stupid
Your columnist is not much for believing in conspiracy theories. (If states could conspire so finely, they could do much that makes them so unpopular too.) But it is still important to decrypt state behavior when they seem to get the advantage when the unplanned happens.
Pulwama was a violent political act. There have been two paradoxical reactions to it in India. One, that the suicide bombing was indigenous in a ‘new age militancy’. This was acknowledged with vicious attacks against everyday Kashmiris in urban and rural India. Two, that Pakistan was to blame, solely, for the act (fitting in with the assumption that Kashmir has no agency in its acts) spawning hostile rhetoric and talk of war. Both acts favor Delhi. Cowardly attacks on Kashmiris who are away from home plays to the need to demonize them. The threat of war diverts international attention from the real cause of the dispute, the 70-year deferred need to resolve it.
But today, nine days after the Pulwama attack, the smoke is beginning to clear. Moves to gag the press are in force. More troops have been shipped into Kashmir. Transfer of key bureaucrats are taking place. Pro-freedom activists and leaders are being arrested. The Indian election commission is soon visiting the state.
So, it is about the elections!
Ten days ago, your columnist thought that the BJP would wait until the Lok Sabha elections were held and its results declared, before holding elections in Kashmir. The logic then was that should the BJP not fare well in the general elections, the sangh parivar would not like to lose its grip on Kashmir, which is an ideological and geographic symbol for muscular militant Hindutva dominance. In such an eventuality, the BJP’s proxy governor could be deployed to ensure favorable conditions for the BJP and state elections could be held “on schedule” towards the end of 2020.
An imperative to act
But Pulwama 2019 changed all that. And the BJP, certainly, has been quick on its feet.
The new calculation is that the vicious and bigoted anti-Kashmiri Muslim mood in Jammu will help the BJP to retain its 25 seats. That would ensure it a role as the swing party in a coalition government. The latter has become an imperative ensuing a structural manipulation fashioned in Delhi after 1996, with able assistance from the PDP after its creation in 1998. The coalition imperative was fashioned to contain politics in Kashmir.
For us in Kashmir, the questions are: is a coalition with a Delhi-based party an inescapable reality? Can we do anything about it?
To concede that the coalition imperative is an inevitability is to be defeatist. To meekly accept that we are not capable of doing anything is much the same.
Irrespective of whether electoral politics is a solution or not (to my mind, they are not) to the Kashmir conundrum and assuming elections are on the cards, it is incumbent on us of the state of J&K to believe (whether we vote or not) that we can do something to hold even the manufactured imperative of a coalition with a Delhi-based party accountable. The price of what the PDP has wrought is much too heavy. That is the short-term response.
The long-term response is to have agency in the solution to the dispute, so is more complex. For it to succeed we, the resistance, must learn to theorize, to build institutions and to administer offices as if we were free. It means to out-theorize, out-build and out-administer the institutions of occupational politics. It is to create, operate and support islands of study, structure and governance in preparation of the belief that we are on the right side of history.
If the ferocity with which India has treated Kashmiris in the aftermath of Pulwama unites us, it will be a good beginning to both the short-term and long-term responses.
And to begin it well, as someone said, is half the battle won.