Too little, too late?

The UPA government has at last started taking some steps towards resolving the crisis through dialogue.

in New Delhi

CLEARLY, the Centre had not foreseen that the Amarnath land issue would snowball into a major crisis. Once it had a full-blown crisis on its hands, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government found itself ill-equipped to deal with it firmly, either because of lack of political will or because of a sheer inability to assess the situation. All that New Delhi was seen to be doing was holding all-party meetings. The first such high-level meeting, addressed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, was held on August 6. Briefing journalists after the meeting, Home Minister Shivraj Patil and External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said it had been decided to work out a solution through dialogue after talking to all sections of people. They also said that there was no difference of opinion on providing better facilities to Amarnath pilgrims. The party now says that it will explain to the people, in both Jammu and Kashmir, what the truth is.

However, no senior leader visited the State to engage the people in dialogue. The Home Minister, the National Security Adviser and the Intelligence Bureau chief were the only Central officials who went to the State. Sending the National Security Adviser and the I.B. chief is not going to serve any purpose because this gives out the signal that the Centre is looking at the problem from a security point of view, not as a political crisis, said an independent Kashmir observer. Nor has the Centre come out with any proposal to address the grievances of the people in Jammu.

From the beginning the Centre has appeared keen on passing the blame than on taking concrete measures. Former Governor S.K. Sinha was identified as the main culprit who fuelled the crisis by falsely projecting the temporary lease of land as a land transfer. This was the primary reason for the people in the Kashmir Valley to protest because land is a sensitive issue there. Governor Sinha has a history of creating communal trouble wherever he worked, first in Assam and now in Jammu and Kashmir, Congress spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan said.

The BJP, of course, excelled the Congress at the blame game, counting the Congress regimes mistakes in Jammu and Kashmir since the days of Jawaharlal Nehru and accusing the Congress of indulging in the vote bank politics of minority appeasement. All this effectively took the dispute far beyond the issue of land.

The Congress now appears to be trying to make a virtue out of the governments initial inertia. Senior Congress leaders are claiming that the idea was to let passions cool down before initiating any action.

But questions may arise as to whether the governments silence and inaction in the initial days of the agitation was deliberate, in view of the forthcoming Assembly and general elections. If it was, the strategy has clearly proved counter-productive. A Congress leader, who did not wish to be named, said: While the party has antagonised Muslims in the valley, people in Jammu are angry about the reversal of the land allotment to the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board. The party loses both ways.

If the Congress was playing vote bank politics, the BJP was not far behind. The party stoked the fires in the hope of electoral dividends in the State (it has just one seat in the Assembly) and elsewhere in the country.

The BJP also tried to play a more decisive role in the dispute, but the Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti refused to hand over the reins to the party. In a curt message issued on August 20, the samiti convener, Lila Karan Sharma, ticked off senior leaders L.K. Advani and Rajnath Singh, who had claimed that they had been invited to a samiti rally in Jammu on August 25. Thanking them for their support, Sharma said anyone was welcome to join the agitation but there was no rally on August 25.

The BJP, however, is in no mood to let go of the issue. While this is not an election issue for us, we will certainly talk about it in our campaign because it displays the cultural terrorism which the Congress espouses, said BJP president Rajnath Singh (see interview). Advani wrote to the Prime Minister on August 15, underlining his partys demands. Quoting from the Amarnath Shrine Board Act and Articles 26 and 27 of the Constitution, he wrote, A joint reading of the legislation and the court orders leads to a clear conclusion. The duty of providing amenities to the pilgrims is of the Shrine Board. The government has to give land to the Shrine Board for use. The Shrine Board may request others to put up temporary structures during the tenure of the yatra. The revoked Cabinet order precisely sought to implement the legislation and the judicial directions. The decision of the Governor to return the land allotted to the Shrine Board back to the government is contrary to the provisions of The Jammu & Kashmir Shrine Board Act. The decision to cancel the land allotment to the Board is a violation of the High Court orders and amounts to contempt of the orders dated 15.4.2005 and 17.5.2005.

With this letter, the tone of the BJPs campaign has been set. Nothing less than implementation of the court order could lead to a solution of the present problem, said party general secretary Arun Jaitley.

In the four rounds of all-party meetings, the governments allies and the Left parties urged the Prime Minister to work out a solution through dialogue, keeping in mind the feelings of the people in both Jammu and Kashmir. (The BJP and the Shiv Sena, predictably, harped on the restoration of land allotment order.) In a statement issued on August 20, the CPI(M) Polit Bureau said the process of dialogue should be started and urged both sides to suspend all agitation while the dialogue was on. Senior CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury said that the issue was not of land transfer at all. It is merely a question of taking the land for a particular period to provide facilities to pilgrims and I dont see why anyone should have an objection to it, he said.

He emphasised that a solution to the problem lay in amending the Shrine Board Act to include only eminent local people and in implementing the High Court order.