Dwarika Prasad Sharma
Why did Charles de Gaulle, Prime Minister and President, in that order, in post- WW II France, say that politics was too serious a business to be left to politicians? De Gaulle, as a general, had led the French resistance forces against German Nazis. So he took his military discipline and command experience to his political career, where he came to be regarded as a statesman.
This is no apologia for a martial law or a military coup. He was involved in neither. It is just to state that politicians can earn the epithet ‘statesman’ only by avoiding impatience with sane alternative viewpoints, and, more important, having a vision that sees national interest as paramount, instead of craving for an image, national or international. A statesman should be led by hard-headed statecraft and not by mushy idealism or emotionalism.
The troubles in the state since 1947 have been caused by skewed statesmanship, or utter lack of it. The primacy that has been given to Kashmir valley since then, and taking Jammu for granted, has created a political imbalance. Kashmiri leadership has tended to take positions either extremely contrarian to the Centre, in which Jammu is not even a wedge issue, or complacently condescending, in which mainstreamers pose that they are the bridge between the Valley and the Union government, the last people standing to say “Hindustan Zindabad”. At short notice, these leaders also assume contrarian positions of varying scales.
It is widely believed that Jammu has rarely produced a leader. Jammu seems be stuck in a time warp in which the recurring issues mainly are economic discrimination, discrimination in selections for jobs and Kashmir’s political dominance. It can be easily seen that other issues can be taken care of if a measure of political balance is established. In this context, the PDP-BJP coalition government was a bold experiment, in which the Muftis politically conceded more than they gained. Critics say that for the BJP, as was shown in the end, it was more a matter of a plus on the score-card of its political march across the country, than a strategy for a political balance between the regions.
A strong Jammu presence on the government would gradually persuade Kashmiri leadership of all stripes that there are other forces in the state to reckon with. But the outgoing BJP ministers had only an opposition role tradition of the party to inform them, and they came across as weak and poor administrators.
The collapse of the alliance government in the state on Tuesday was sudden, and it further hazed the surrealistic situation prevailing in Kashmir. The shifting quicksands of violence present a treacherous landscape where any forward movement is beset with uncertainties and pitfalls. Where to start, how to move? have become almost perennial questions.
The loose-jaw politicians are at the job of weaving verbal webs of self-justification, nay, political and electoral self-preservation. The regional divide in the state has again been brought into sharp focus. Should Jammu be seen only as an accessory to the “aspirations” of Kashmir, or regarded as an entity with its own legitimate aspirations? This is a question that has again come to the fore. As I have said earlier, Kashmiri leaders and people have got to be sensitised to this important question. After Pandit Prem Nath Dogra, who roared for Jammu’s cause, there has rarely been a leader of Jammu who could rise above his narrow self-interest.
Even to Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, Kashmir was the be all and end all of the state. He equated Jammu with the Maharaja, for whom he had a visceral hatred. He viewed Dogra’s Praja Parishad as a disruptive force, inimical to the interests of his buddy Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah.
It will be quite germane to analyse the geneses of the present problems in Kashmir, and with Pakistan which now is the fountainhead of the troubles. These started when the new country India took the Pakistani invasion of October 1947 to the UN Security Council, and mishandled it there. Nehru is said to have ignored the advice of Mahatma Gandhi not to go to the UN.The Mahatma had famously said: “You will get only monkey justice there!” But Nehru was fancying himself as a world leader, and thought it logical to be seen to be reposing his faith in an inchoate world body that had been set up to mediate peace in a situation of conflict.
At the forum, the case was helplessly allowed to wallow in the provisions of the inappropriate Chapter VI of the UN Charter, which gave Pakistan equivalence with this country, instead of being hauled up as the culprit. Even before the deliberations got under way, India committed itself to holding a plebiscite in Kashmir, “in spite of holding the Instrument of Accession”. The equivalence bug biting Pakistan continues to dog the relations between the two countries, further confounding them with that country now boasting nuclear parity. Kashmiri leaders often say that the Kashmir violence cannot subside without an accord with Pakistan, asserting that it cannot be otherwise prevailed upon as “it is a nuclear power” now.
India’s case at the UN was that Pakistan had not only pushed into the state armed Pathans, but its army regulars, who had committed large-scale killings, rapes and looting. The takeaway for it, instead, was that the Commission designated by the forum was asked to investigate India’s charges as well as that of Pakistan that India had acquired the accession instrument through “fraud and violence” and that it was perpetrating a “genocide” of Muslims of the state.
This should have been signal enough for Nehru to change gears and begin to act realistically. Having knocked at the doors of the Security Council, despite military superiority over Pakistan and despite the Indian commanders seeking some more time to polish off their mission, he continued to go along with the “monkey justice”.
It is to be noted that the wording of the “most important” Resolution 47 was “Pakistani nationals” and not Pakistani army regulars. Also, instead of directing Pakistan to withdraw its forces, including the tribals, it was asked to use its “best endeavours” to secure the withdrawal.
Another provision was that, before a plebiscite was arranged under UN aegis, an interim coalition cabinet should be formed. India, read Nehru, thought that the coalition idea would put Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah in a difficult spot. There is a widely-held view that Nehru, ignoring military counsel, agreed to a ceasefire when the Indian army had pushed back the invaders to a point beyond which the territory was considered to be politically and administratively inconvenient to Abdullah.
Pakistan wanted representation in the proposed coalition for the Muslim Conference, dominant party in the part of Kashmir still in its hands. It would have been a double whammy for Abdullah. In both these calculations, the two applied their native Kashmiri shrewdness. Selective realpolitik, but later a general situation of confusion and stalemate!
Former diplomats at the UN have commented that the approach of the Security Council was off-track. They say that the prolonged deliberations and wranglings had caused it to lose sight of the fact that India had come to it to complain against Pakistan’s aggression. It was erroneously led to believe that it was a political problem, and it evaded looking at the legal position of India as the holder of the Instrument of Accession.
It was belatedly realised that India should have invoked Chapter VII, which allows the forum to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” and to take military and non-military action to “restore international peace and security”. It gives teeth to the Security Council. Chapter VI is devoted to “peaceful settlement of disputes”. It permits only recommendations and not directives. The end-result (should we say, non-end) was that the resolution “bound the parties only morally and not juridicially”.
India’s “commitment” at the UN and Nehru’s Srinagar Lal Chowk speeches promising a plebiscite have provided a fat stick to the separatists to beat the drum of self-determination and aazadi, and the mainstreamers that of greater autonomy and self-rule. A composite plebiscite in the entire state, on either side of the ceasefire line, would have been an impossible proposition for Abdullah. To his suggestion to Nehru that, as the “undisputed” leader of the state, he had accepted the accession, and would get it ratified by the Constituent Assembly (which it did later), the Indian Prime Minister would say: “No. My international position would suffer.”
Some later events, however, created misgivings in the mind of Nehru about the Kashmiri leader, who began showing his colours as a soft, and still later, a hard, separatist. Shaken by the 1951-52 agitation of Jammu’s Praja Parishad, which later took on the name of the Jana Sangh, Abdullah flew off the handle in a speech he made at Ranbirsighpura, near Jammu, where he said that he had developed second thoughts about the utility of Kashmir continuing its association with India, “in view of the existence of powerful sections in the country bent on establishing a Hindu Raj”.
He went on to “warn” against “attempts to foist the Indian Constitution in its entirety on Kashmir”. The demand of the Praja Parishad and the majority of Jammu people was for full integraton with the Indian Union and full application of the National Constitution in the state. Abdullah’s intolerance of any alternative viewpoint, and his assertions, direct and indirect, of Kashmir’s exclusivity, had been on display not just in this speech but in others elsewhere as well. Kashmiri politicians, mainline, separatist and in-between, assiduously try to project this exclusivity. In fact, the people of Jammu, and to a lesser extent of Ladakh, are cheesed off by the general national and international ignorance about the geographical, cultural, linguistic and ethnic composition of the state. For most, the state is just Kashmir.
As if to pre-empt “attempts” at bringing about greater integration with the Union, a new state flag was got approved by the Constituent Assembly, without any reference to the Centre. The hereditary monarchy had already been got abolished, and provision for an elected head of state got approved. Nehru went along with these measures, as the Maharaja and the Praja Parishad were anathema to both leaders. Nehru thus put his supporting hands to the sprinkler with which Abdullah watered the sapling of Kashmir’s separatism.
While Nehru kept on nursing his “international position”, Abdullah began drifting, by choice, into a sentiment of “alienation” from the Union of India. As he was “the tallest leader” of Kashmir, his “alienation” was, by extension, that of the Kashmiris. Between 1950 and 1953, the idea of an independent Kashmir kept on growing on him. There is plenty of evidence to show that the Americans played a role in this. Abdullah’s one-on-ones in Kashmir with some key American figures were in aid of developing the idea. His meeting with Adlai Stevenson in May 1953 proved the last straw on the camel’s back, and Abdullah was dismissed and arrested in August 1953 for treason and “conspiring to secede” from the Indian Union.
Another version is that, sensing impending action against him, Abdullah sounded out Pakistan for help. How Pakistan could have been of help is not clear, but those briefed on the events of the time have reported that an emissary to meet the Sheikh had been named by that country. These moves, it is said, proved his undoing.
Was Abdullah a secular person? Not entirely. He made the Hazratbal shrine his tub-thumping ground. He made fiery speeches there after Friday prayers, often using language with separatist and communal nuances. The Hazratbal syndrome birthed by him has now been taken over by the more vicious Nowhatta (Jama Masjid) syndrome.
He dubbed the Praja Parishad agitation for full integration of the state with the Union as communal, a move to bring the state into the fold of a “Hindu Raj”. The two ruling dynasties of the state, the Abdullahs and the Muftis, often, especially during election time, question the legality of whatever Constitutional integration has been brought about. They and other Kashmiri mainliners, directly or indirectly, suck up to the perpetrators of violence in Kashmir.
Farooq Abdullah recently called stone-throwers “freedom fighters”. Mehbooba Mufti some time back used to call terrorists “holy warriors” and point out that the penholder-inkpot symbol of the PDP was that of Syed Salahuddin when he fought the 1987 assembly election as Syed Mohammed Yusuf Shah. Omar Abdullah often breaks into a gratuitous warning that the accession would end (how?) if Article 370 was taken away. Mehbooba’s latest is that “you cannot use force” in Kashmir where “a muscular policy won’t work” to control violence. Also that “Kashmir is not an enemy country”. This is in the context of the Centre not extending the internal ceasefire, and resumption of anti-terror operations.
What have these leaders done to help control the violence? They have left the dirty work to the Centre and issue homilies to it, while they themselves engage in playing dirty politics?
(The writer is a Senior Journalist)
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