Six years ago, Abdul Ahad Pandit threw a burkha over his clothes and darteddown the narrow lane leading to the polling Station. His wife, Saeeda Pandit,followed. "We sat up awake for the next three nights", Pandit recalls,"waiting for death to knock on our door, a Kalashnikov in hand."
Back in the autumn of 2002, just five Yaripora residents cast their votes in theJammu and Kashmir (J&K) Assembly elections, which brought theCongress-People's Democratic Party (PDP) alliance to power -- every one of themhidden inside the all-enveloping cloak for fear of being identified. Nestledbelow the southern reaches of the Pir Panjal mountains, Yaripora was, for allpractical purposes, ruled by jihadis. Both the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) andLashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) had put up posters warning that those who voted would beshot -- and had demonstrated their ability to deliver on the threat, killingdozens of political activists across the region.
But this month, hundreds followed where the Pandits had led: almost three infour registered voters in Yaripora -- 1,481 of 2,073 (71.44%) -- cast theirvote, in a graphic demonstration of just how the decimation of jihadi groups inJ&K has transfigured the state’s political life.
Across J&K, voters have startled experts both through the intensity of theirparticipation -- over 55 per cent in Kashmir, and upwards of 60 percent in Jammu-- and a verdict that debunks the notion that this summer’s violence over theAmarnath Land issue had sundered the state into hostile ethnic-religious blocks,one of them irreconcilably hostile to India.
Just weeks ago, a successful election seemed improbable. On November 21, MirwaizUmer Farooq, Chairman of the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC)had insisted that "we are sure there will be 100 per cent pollboycott". Most experts agreed. In an October 31 article, commentator HassanZainagiri reported in Greater Kashmir that Kashmir’s "people are quitejubilantly supporting the boycott schedule of the Coordination Committee."(The separatist J&K Coordination Committee had issued the call for a pollboycott). Eminent journalist and author Prem Shankar Jha prophesied, "theGovernment will be lucky if they get more than 10 percent of people to come outand vote."
Understanding the J&K election results requires jettisoning the notion thatthe state consists of three monolithic ethnic-religious blocks -- or that itspolitical life is primarily driven either by India-Pakistan conflict orethnic-religious competition. Both the National Conference (NC) and the PDP havedemonstrated that they have primacy in sub-regional zones in Kashmir; theCongress and BJP that they, in turn, speak for parts of Jammu.
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Northern Kashmir’s mandate has been divided between the two majorKashmir-based parties. While the NC has taken seven seats, the PDP has securedsix, leaving one to the Congress and another to independent candidate AbdulRashid Sheikh, who broke ranks with the secessionist People’s Conference andstood for election from Langate.
In central Kashmir -- the agglomeration of fifteen seats between Kangan andGanderbal on the one side, to Khansahib and Chrar-e-Sharif on the other, withurban Srinagar at its core -- the NC has reigned supreme. Here, the PDP couldtake just three seats, those of Chadoora, Khasahib and Beerwah. NC leaderssucceeded in beating off competition in the region’s rural constituencies --competition which cost NC leader Omar Abdullah the Ganderbal seat in 2002 -- andalso capitalised on low turnout in the eight urban segments, which gave theparty's committed cadre electoral primacy.
In stark contrast, the PDP has dominated southern Kashmir, losing just four ofthe region’s sixteen seats -- two to the Congress and one each to the NC andCommunist Party of India – Marxist (CPI-M). Here, the PDP succeeded inwidening its constituency among political Islamists, often supporters of theJamaat-e-Islami (JeI) -- a constituency the party had begun to court in therun-up to the 2002 elections, when it succeeded in securing the backing of keyregional commanders of the HM.
While the NC’s efforts to leverage Islamist issues and themes to theiradvantage does not appear to have helped the party in southern Kashmir, thePDP’s more resolute ideological opponents appear to have held their ground.The Congress has retained both the Dooru and Kokernag seats, despite a PDP-ledIslamist campaign that linked the Congress candidates to an emotive 2006prostitution scandal in Srinagar. In Kulgam, CPI-M veteran Mohammad YusufTarigami -- again a hate-figure for Islamists -- was re-elected for a third timerunning. Interestingly, the sole NC win in southern Kashmir was registered bySakina Itoo who, as a single woman professional, has been a favourite target ofIslamist ire. In 2002, her campaign was targeted nine times by jihadi groups.
South of the Pir Panjal mountains, the Jammu region has also demonstrated thatno one party can claim to speak for the entire region. Of the eleven seats inthe Doda-Udhampur belt, the NC and Panthers Party have taken two seats each,while the Bharatiya Janata Party has won one. However, the Congress has profitedfrom former Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad’s developmental record in thearea, picking up seven seats. Azad himself has won with a staggering margin ofover 29,000 votes from the mountain constituency of Bhaderwah.
In the nineteen-seat cluster from Bani to Naushera, with urban Jammu at itscentre, the BJP has picked up ten seats. However, its opponents have also donewell, with the Congress taking four seats, the NC and independent candidates twoeach, and the Panthers Party one.
Finally, in the six seats of the Rajouri-Poonch belt -- often the site of tenseHindu-Muslim relations -- the PDP, Congress and NC have each won two seats.
What lessons ought politicians to be learning from these results? Perhaps themost important is that competitive ethnic and religious chauvinism of the kindthat threatened to rip J&K apart this summer, doesn't pay.
For the PDP, the returns from the incendiary communal campaign it ran thissummer, as well as its efforts to reach out to secessionists, have beendisappointing. Despite securing the backing of the JeI’s rank-and file, thePDP’s hopes of emerging as the principal political voice of the Kashmir regionhave been squarely thwarted. The party has succeeded, it is true, in winning 21seats, up from 16 in 2002. However, this increase is less remarkable than itmight at first seem. In the 2004 Lok Sabha (Lower House of India’s Parliament)elections, after all, the PDP registered wins in 25 Assembly segments. In orderto make a bid of power, the PDP will need allies and partners -- allies andpartners who will not be forthcoming unless the party moderates its polemic andbuilds bridges across religious and ethnic lines.
Despite the apparently dramatic improvement in the BJP's fortunes -- which havetaken it from just one seat in 2002 to 11 now -- Hindu chauvinism hasn’tyielded exceptional pay-offs either. Claims that the BJP has ridden a communaltide in Jammu are empirically unsustainable. First, the ultra-right Jammu stateMorcha had broken from the BJP on the eve of the 2002 elections. Had thisdivision of votes not taken place, simple arithmetic shows that the BJP wouldthen have won eight seats. As such, the 2008 results mark an improvement in theBJP's fortunes, but a relatively modest one.
More important, most of the 2008 victories have come in areas where the AmarnathShrine movement remained at low ebb. The BJP’s efforts to capitalise on themovement have, for the most part, ended in failure. Kirti Verma -- the wife of aprotestor who dramatically committed suicide -- has been defeated in Vijaypur;the state’s BJP’s chief, Nirmal Singh, also suffered defeat in Samba, whichsaw some of the most intense violence in Jammu this summer. Most of the BJP’svictories came in areas which saw relatively little violence during the AmarnathLand agitation, but where voters were dissatisfied with the developmental recordof incumbents rather than their commitment to religious causes -- a lesson theparty would do well to comprehend if it wishes to expand its state-wide reach inthe future.
The election results have also undermined conventional wisdom on this summer’sviolence in the state, and demonstrated, rather, that the protests revolvedaround communal anxieties which had little to do with the secessionist cause.Kashmir’s civil society has long been anxious of its future in aHindu-majority state. On a visit to New Delhi soon after Independence, SheikhMohammad Abdullah candidly underlined the relationship between politics inKashmir and Indian communalism. "There isn't a single Muslim in Kapurthala,Alwar or Bharatpur", Abdullah said, noting that "some of these hadbeen Muslim-majority states". Kashmiri Muslims, he concluded, "areafraid that the same fate lies ahead for them as well."
Fears like these -- fuelled by the discrimination the region’s middle-classencounters outside of the state -- acquired some legitimacy after Hinducommunalists in Jammu announced an economic blockade. Despite its marginalimpact, many saw the blockade as an existential threat; a precursor to alarge-scale communal onslaught that would deprive Kashmir’s people of theirland. In June, Geelani had charged the Indian state with working to "alterthe demographic character of our state," adding further, "I caution mynation… that if we do not wake up now, India and its stooges will succeed andwe will lose our land forever." Until state action ended the blockade, theIslamist leader’s charges appeared legitimate to some segments of thepopulation.
Interestingly, though, the anti-Amarnath Shrine Board protests were notsecessionst-led, outside of the principal urban bases of the secessionistmovement -- Srinagar, Baramulla and Sopore. A 5,000-strong June 30 gathering atSheeri, for example, was led by local NC activist Abdul Qayoom and PDP dissidentGhulam Mohiuddin. Local Congress leaders burned effigies of PDP patron andformer Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Saeed at Wandi-Viligam on June 30, while NCactivists were the principal leaders of the protests in Paibugh.
Kashmir secessionists, it is rarely understood, represent specific socialclasses -- not a generalised, free-floating ‘sentiment’. Most majorsecessionist leaders were members of the Muslim United Front (MUF), a politicalcoalition that represented an alliance between the urban petty bourgeoisie andrural orchard-owning elite. Both classes had seen their pre-independenceinfluence decline through years of NC rule -- a rule founded on an alliancebetween the small peasant, on the one hand, and a new elite of contractors andcapitalists, on the other. Islam, for the classes which backed the MUF, was aninstrument to legitimize the protest of a threatened social order against amodernity poised to obliterate it.
In Srinagar and other urban centres, this coalition succeeded in securing thesupport of disenfranchised youth -- the children of the city’s traditionalbourgeoisie, who are witnessing the inevitable death of the artisanal andtrading occupations of their parents, but have neither the skills nor resourcesto compete in the new world emerging around them. Kashmir’s Islamist-ledsecessionist movement became a medium for their rage at being denied entrythrough the gates of the earthly paradise before them -- a phenomenon whichformed the most visible part of the street protests during the Shrine Boardmovement. The notion that the street protests reflected pan-Kashmiri sentimentwas a fiction.
Where might events go from here? Part of the reason for the surprise generatedby the Kashmir election is the influence of a discourse that, a priori, castsKashmiri secessionism as the authentic sentiment of its people. Thus, high voterturnout in the 1996 and 2002 elections was widely (though inaccurately)attributed to coercive pressure from Indian troops, rather than the politicalinfluence of the candidates. Without dispute, Indian Army troops did ask ruralresidents to vote in both 1996 and 2002 -- actions which must be read in thecontext of jihadi groups threatening them with death if they chose to do so, andkilling dozens of political activists to demonstrate their seriousness ofpurpose. However, careful study of voting patterns demonstrates that there wasno demonstrable relationship between this persuasive activity and voter turnout.Zero voting took place in some areas where troops were reported to have pushedvoters; some areas which saw no coercion at all, conversely, reported highturnout.
Now, though, even the Islamists cast as ‘authentic’, have begun to join theelection process -- a phenomenon that bodes well for the long-termre-institutionalisation of competitive democracy. Journalists observing votingpatterns in southern Kashmir have noted that large-scale participation by JeIcadres drove high turnout in the secessionist strongholds of Shopian and Tral.In Kulgam key JeI figures like Mohammad Amin Naqashbani, Sonaullah Kojar, AbdulRashid Chehlan and Masood Sheikh were out on the streets, (unsuccessfully)persuading voters to defeat Communist Party of India (Marxist) legislatorMohammad Yusuf Tarigami.
For anyone not ideologically committed to the idea of Kashmiri independence, thewriting has long been on the wall. Back in February 2008, J&K JeI amirGhulam Hassan Sheikh -- the chief of the political formation which gave birth tothe HM -- had announced he would not participate in a secessionist campaignseeking a boycott of Assembly elections scheduled later in the year. "I amat variance," he argued, "with leaders and organisations whoover-emphasise the election boycott campaign, which may sometimes provecounterproductive… Elections do not have any impact on the status of theKashmir issue. If people cast their votes in the elections, it does not meanthat they have given up their freedom struggle or accepted India’s dominationof Jammu and Kashmir." Others in the Jamaat pointed to a 2004 resolution ofits Majlis-e-Shoora (central consultative council), committing the Islamistgroup to "democratic and constitutional struggle".
Ghulam Hassan Sheikh was eventually compelled to back down and support thesecessionist boycott campaign in the run-up to the elections -- but the partyitself, it is clear, intends to leverage the democratic process to the advantageof its constituents. JeI supporters are likely to have backed the PDP, givingthe party more representation in the Assembly than expected -- or that its ownleaders had hoped for. In time, it seems probable, the PDP will secure thesupport of the classes who backed MUF in 1987. If so, the classes who drove thecourse of the long jihad in J&K will have returned to the democratic fold.
Politicians in J&K have intuitively sensed this possibility, increasinglycasting their parties as credible forces who can, through dialogue with NewDelhi, resolve the conflict in the state. Both the PDP’s calls for self-rule,nebulous as the concept still remains, and the NC’s demands for maximalautonomy, are steps in this direction. As the Congress secures a presence inKashmir, it will point to the existence of a third constituency, which sees thedebate itself as misplaced.
In January, J&K will have a new elected Assembly. New Delhi would do well toengage with the multiple voices it will contain, rather than reach out once moreto a secessionist leadership that has been humiliated by the peoples it claimsto represent.
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Praveen Swami is Associate Editor, The Hindu. Courtesy, the SouthAsia Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal
