No takers for the development bait     

The right-wing rulers in New Delhi had ample time and opportunity to put into action all their cries for development in the Kashmir Valley, when they had formed the alliance government with the PDP in the state of J&K. Mind you, even then, a large number of the PDP MLAs were very uneasy with the alliance but the Muftis - Mufti Mohammad Saeed and Mehbooba Mufti - had seemingly got taken in by the development theories that rulers in New Delhi had wooed them with, for the supposed ‘modification’ of the Valley!

PDP’s decision to get into this alliance had dragged along offshoots. One of the prominent faces of the PDP, Tariq Hameed Karra, was upset to the extent that he resigned…Days after his resignation from the PDP and also from Parliament, I had met and interviewed him in September 2016. Along the expected strain, my first query to this former MP was: why did he have to resign when he could have stayed on and spoken out in Parliament? He told me: “For the last several months, I hadn’t been attending any of the party meetings…been feeling suffocated ever since the PDP decided to form the alliance with the BJP. This decision to resign from the PDP was a difficult one for me, as I’m one of the founding members of the party, but I listened to my conscience. How could I justify to my people that we formed an alliance with a communal party? The way the situation has been handled in the Valley left me feeling outraged. So many Kashmiris killed…worst form of human rights violations. Mosques locked and closed by the government on Fridays and even for the Eid namaaz! I didn’t want to be a part of this government. From day one I have been against PDP’s alliance with a party like the BJP.” Karra, at his blatant best, went on to say, “It’s high time that the government stops its practice of looking at Kashmir as a territorial issue. It is about political aspirations. The state has its own flag and Constitution. This reality cannot be blanketed by economic, developmental or administrative issues. And where’s the so-called development taking place? Nowhere! Can you see any traces of development in the Valley?”

And as I had gone around the Valley, there seemed no signs of development. Only sorrow and despair spread far and wide. Instead of development, what was seen on ground were painful incidents…the level of alienation and anger in the Valley was peaking every single day. Not just the average citizen of the Valley who was affected by the rising levels of killings but even those in the bureaucracy. To quote former bureaucrat Shah Faesal, who had topped the 2010 civil service examinations and, this winter (2019), decided to resign from the Indian Administrative Service – “To protest the unabated killings in Kashmir and absence of any credible political initiative from the Union government, I have decided to resign from the IAS. Kashmiri lives matter…” He also hit out at the political pollution spreading out in the country – “The marginalisation and invisibilisation of around 200 million Indian Muslims at the hands of Hindutva forces, reducing them to second-class citizens; insidious attacks on the special identity of the state and growing culture of intolerance and hate in mainland India in the name of hyper-nationalism…I wish to remind the regime of the day that subversion of public institutions like RBI, CBI and NIA has the potential to decimate the constitutional edifice of this country and it needs to be stopped. I wish to reiterate that the voices of reason in this country cannot be muzzled for long and the environment of siege will need to end if we wish to usher in true democracy.”

Tell me, how will the so-called ‘development’ ever reach the Valley when its own rightful residents are sitting in severe pain and turmoil for years? There is no respite for them from the daily round of humiliation and tortures. In fact, their trauma has been increasing since 2016.

Have we bothered to ask the Kashmiris what they want? What are their aspirations, demands and needs? No, we have entered into no dialogue with them. We haven’t even bothered to find out the reasons behind the growing alienation and anger. We have been also kept away from historical facts and turning points.

Facts have been buried. Veteran journalist Ajit Bhattacharjea remarked, “People tend to forget that J&K cannot be treated like any other state. It acceded to India on October 27, 1947, on the condition of internal autonomy. Though Muslims were in a majority, they supported accession and helped Indian troops resist Pakistan. But gradual erosion of the state’s autonomy planted the seeds of alienation. Now, of course, the situation is messed up…”

Mind you, without taking facts and ground realities into consideration, there can be no way forward. An atmosphere has to be created in the context of what the Kashmiris want and not what we can heap on them through military might!

In a book on the life and times of the late editor Ved Bhasin, Vedji & His Times—Kashmir: The Way Forward (Selected Works of Ved Bhasin), edited by Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal, there’s a chapter titled ‘Jammu and Kashmir: Road Map for Dialogue’, where the veteran journalist listed several confidence-building measures (CBMs), which could help prepare a ground for dialogue to take off. However, there’s also a note of caution. “It needs to be emphasised that there can be no “peaceful negotiated settlement” of Kashmir, without the full and active participation of all sections of the people of Jammu and Kashmir living

on both sides of the divided line. No solution should be imposed on the people of J&K and it should emerge through a process of multilevel dialogue,” it reads.

Without talks and dialogues, the situation cannot be controlled in the Kashmir Valley. New Delhi needs to return to Pandit Nehru’s speech of August 7, 1952 where he spoke of Kashmir and Kashmiris. He had said in the Lok Sabha, “We do not wish to win people against their will, with the help of armed forces...We want no forced marriages, no forced unions.”