Dwarika Prasad Sharma
A day after the State Administrative Council decided on the general schedule for elections to Municipalities and Panchayats, Governor Satya Pal Malik made the classical statement that “neither India nor Pakistan gets benefited from them, nor is Kashmir resolved, but people’s issues get solved”.
This was an answer in advance to the anticipated fears of mainstream Kashmiri politicians who, in a perceived crunch situation, try to sidestep by raising their signature litany of concern for the Kashmir issue, need for talks with all stakeholders, especially the separatists, and a dire necessity to resume the dialogue with Pakistan, and the like. This is their see-through way of worming around their own responsibility and accountability in the disaffection among a section of the people of Kashmir, and obfuscating their own failure to bring them around. They prefer to sit on their asses and put all blame on the Centre, adding fuel to the fire in an attempt to make a political kill, or overkill.
Asking people to participate in the elections, Malik made some rare down-to-earth observations, which can come only from an experienced Jat politician with a dash of native humour. He said: “Today, you go to Government officials and they don’t listen to you; and tomorrow, when there is an elected representative at the grass-roots, you can abuse him if he does not listen to you.”
More in line with this stream of exhortation: “Funds (marked for local institutions) will reach your home even if your representative should misappropriate a portion of them.”
Malik, in his first address to officials at the Srinagar Civil Secretariat, told them that half of the work of Prime Minister Narendra Modi would be clinched if they sincerely attempted to solve people’s problems. Even before the new Governor arrived, the local elections process had been set rolling, with the contention that people at the grassroots had to be empowered to take decisions on local issues and local development works, and in the process strengthen the democracy.
How can one talk of democracy, much less of strengthening it, and least about funds for local development when the Kashmir issue remains unresolved and, on top of it, there is a “threat” to Article 35-A? Democracy, and even strengthening it, are okay if they can bring in their train easy, safe and no-risk power to the two dynastic families of the state.
I recently said in these columns that the Kashmir situation has a way of shifting between real-macabre and surreal-macabre. The shenanigans that some major parties are sinking into are offering gratuitous comic relief, but laced with a sense of foreboding that they are consciously working to envelop the people in. Their main bugaboo is not even the boycott call issued by the separatists. That is a well-worn normal and the mainstream parties in the past have simply dismissed it as déjà vu. But this time over, the separatists are comrades-in-arms over the issue of 35-A.
Opinion leaders outside of the Valley say that the highest court of the land is seized of the PIL challenging the provision, some counter-interventions, besides the position of the state, and that it would entertain more substantive interventions should they be moved. It would be no shorter than blasphemy to doubt or question its fairness credentials, they aver.
The fear of the Kashmiri leaders is their own deep sense of inadequacy at this juncture, especially in the case of the PDP, which had been sitting on the fence for some time, but announced a boycott after the NC did. The two parties are inimical to each other, but now, though standing apart, they have discovered a common cause in conjuring up a “threat” to Article 35-A. Expectedly, they have made 35-A their fear number one, though they had set off with serious misgivings about the safety of their life and limb should they be part of any elections in the present “disturbed conditions” in Kashmir. The “threat” looming over 35-A is being projected as holding the seeds of worsening the disaffection among the people, and making the holding of peaceful elections all the more difficult. They, using the cliché of parties in the opposition, have been wanting the Union Government to “clarify its stand on Article 35-A” before even thinking of holding the elections.
Amid all this noise, the Governor reiterated the government’s resolve to hold the elections. Chief Secretary BVR Subramaniam affirmed this a little later. And now Chief Electoral Officer Shalin Kabra has already announced firm dates for municipal elections. There is little doubt that specific schedule for panchayat elections will come in good time.
The stock of Mehbooba Mufti of the PDP is at its lowest at this point, and she is eager to latch on to any divisive, polarising issue to try to regain some of the ground in the Valley that she has lost with her now-defunct alliance with the BJP. Her traction within her own party has also weakened, with her unabashed promotion of a coterie and family clan culture in the party as well as in her ministry. This is a dangerous brew.
Her recent attempt at placating estranged party leaders whom she had humiliated in the haughty assumption that Mehbooba can do no wrong, has met with partial success. Haseeb Drabu, whom she had summarily and insensitively sent to Coventry, has rejected his nomination by her to the party’s political affairs committee, calling it “appeasement and not atonement”.
She and the other nay-sayers have been urging the Governor to call an all-party meeting to decide on the elections issue. She cited her own Government’s holding of such a meeting and its “unanimous” conclusion that the conditions in the Valley were too disturbed to hold any elections. Her Government partner BJP had, however, denied being a party to the decision.
The NC took a lead on its own in calling a fig-leaf “all-party meeting” on the issue, which the PDP did not attend! Omar Abdullah, briefing newsmen after the meeting, said that it had decided to ask the Supreme Court and the Centre to defer the 35-A hearing till fresh assembly elections and formation of a new Government, to which it should be left to defend the case. This, incidentally, is also the already-expressed assurance of Malik.
The Governor has recalled that at two recent events when Farooq Abdullah spoke along with him, he seemed fairly positively inclined to the elections. (At one of these events, Farooq had once again bemoaned “the mistakes the Centre has committed over Kashmir.”)
Any observer of the recent verbal smokescreens of the nay-sayers knows that they have speciously linked 35-A with their negative position on the local elections. Omar, however, in a flourish of sophistry, said that it was the Union Government’s “own mistake to link Article 35-A with the civic body and panchayat polls”.
BJP leader Ram Madhav recently joked that 35-A had strangely not deterred the NC and the PDP from hotly contesting the Kargil Hill Council election. The “all-party meeting” felt constrained to answer that one and Omar conveyed to the newsmen that they would have boycotted it also “had the GOI linked it with Article 35-A”!
The meeting also had a serious issue with the reported observation in the SC of additional solicitor-general Tushar Mehta that there was an aspect of gender discrimination in the Article that needed to be debated. So, off with his head! the meeting demanded.
(The writer is a Senior Journalist)
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