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Kashmir proves what? Certainly not
what New Delhi claims!
WSN Bureau
 SRINAGAR: India is making a big deal out of the heavy turn out for
elections in Jammu and Kashmir, the numbers favored a National
Conference-Congress coalition, Omar Abdullah was preparing to be
sworn in as CM after some initial hiccups from his father who
perhaps wanted the job for himself but New Delhi will be foolish if
it reads the election results as a rejection of the separatists in
the valley. Contours of politics do not change with the beeping of
electoral voting machines, and at best Kashmir and New Delhi should
be looking out for jostling of space between two contending and
often contradictory but forceful ideologies.
There is a soft
pro-people humanitarian agenda of the PDP of Muftis and an agenda to
seek a resolution for
Kashmir outside
the ambit of the Indian Constitution that has indeed helped it
improve its tally from 16 in 2002 to 21 in 2008. To say that the
boycott call's failure was an achievement is to insult the verdict
of all those who voted for the PDP. The PDP's Muslim-centric
ideology has helped the party sneak into the hilly districts of
Poonch and Rajouri - the non-Kashmiri Muslim districts in Jammu
province. The party has opened its account by winning Mendhar and
Darhal
and made inroads into eight other Muslim-dominated constituencies.
The party has taken 82,105 votes in
Jammu province.
On the other hand, the BJP has registered an unprecedented victory,
from one constituency in the 2002 House to 11 this time. It took
3,45,908
votes in
Jammu. It fuelled polarisation during the Amarnath agitation and its
ministers in Punjab personally organised economic blockade of the
Valley. It wanted to be seen as king of Hindu heartland of Jammu
city-Kathua- Samba and has succeeded.
Though the NC has retained its
largest single party status, its numbers have matched its 2002 score
of 28. This time, the oldest and the only pan-J-K party has
Srinagar
city to thank where all the eight seats voted for it.
Srinagar, which
witnessed the lowest 20 per cent turnout this time, has chosen the
NC for a different reason: the new rural Kashmirurban Srinagar city
divide. It is clear that the PDP made inroads into NC's political
turf. It even defeated the NC in south Kashmir and substantially
gained in north and central Kashmir. The PDP's overall vote share
has been boosted by more than six per cent from 2002. By any
dispassionate account, PDP is the real winner. But India should be
more worried about the stark difference in the voters' pattern
between the Hindu- dominated districts and the Muslim belt of
Jammu.
The polarisation within Jammu province belies claims of larger
consensus on the discrimination meted out to the entire Jammu
region. Look at the ways in which parties competed to be
Kashmir-centric. First, the PDP unveiled its self-rule document,
suggesting that the party wants a legislative,
political and
economic confederation with the PoK, thus transcending the
traditional mainstream line of "within the ambit of constitution"
solution.
The NC followed the PDP with its "autonomy plus"
resolution roadmap to which it claimed to add the
Pakistan
dimension, thus bringing it at par with the PDP's self-rule. With
17 seats, the Congress has emerged as a king-maker but the real
story lies in the positioning of both NC and PDP. Both have moved
nearer to Kashmiri spirit, away from New Delhi's meaningless
pious
sloganeering of national integrity and blah blah. Any emerging
coalition, be it the NC-Congress or PDP-Congress, will be under
constant strain because the two ruling alliance partners will have
contradictory agendas to regain their traditional vote banks. The
Congress will try its best to checkmate the BJP and focus on the
Hindu-dominated districts of
Jammu, while the
PDP will keep the NC on its toes inside the Valley.
There is a
possibility that the PDP will shift its politics further towards the
separatist discourse, while the BJP will halt every effort to allow
any serious headway towards a Kashmir resolution based on self rule
or autonomy plus proposal and rather insist on its integrationist
ideology, seeking the scrapping of the special status to J-K within
the Indian Union.
31
December
2008
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