Hubris and downfall

Jammu and Kashmir: The collapse of the Congress-PDP alliance government is the end result of playing the communal card.

in Srinagar

WHEN the plot of a classical Greek tragedy reached an impossible-to-resolve impasse, its author would turn to a device known as deus ex machina or god on a machine. God would be winched down to the stage to resolve the crisis through a miracle and the show would go on.

Few in Jammu and Kashmir will mourn the passing of the Congress-Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) alliance government. Before Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azads July 7 decision to withdraw a confidence motion prepared the ground for Governors Rule, a dozen people had paid with their lives for the parties competitive communalism. If the PDP set off the communal conflagration by seeking to appropriate an Islamist movement protesting land-use rights granted to the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board, the Congress fuelled the crisis in an effort to subjugate its alliance partner and expand its own position in Jammu.

The elections scheduled for October are being seen as a deus ex machina to heal the wounds of this summers violence in Jammu and Kashmir. Addressing the deep communal divisions, the State will, in fact, take a good deal more but it is far from clear whether its politicians have either the will or the imagination to write the new script that is needed.

Hindu reaction the force behind the final wave of street violence that made it impossible for Azad to survive a confidence vote has been growing steadily since 2003, mirroring the expanding ideological influence of Islamism in Kashmir.

In the build-up to the 2002 elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had found itself discredited by its failure to contain terrorism. Much of the Hindutva movements cadre had then turned to a new grouping, the Jammu State Morcha. Leaders of the JSM wanted a new, Hindu-majority State carved out of Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh made a Union Territory. In the event, both the JSM and the BJP got annihilated in the elections, winning just one seat each.

A new generation of Hindutva leaders now took control of Hindu neoconservative politics in Jammu. Sushil Sudan and Anil Kumar were the most visible figures. Sudan, who is the State Bajrang Dal chief, hails from a trading family in Sunderbani town with strong links to the local political establishment. Each of his four brothers was a member of a different political party. Anil Kumar was a long-standing Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh pracharak from West Bengal, who cut his teeth in organisational work in the Kalakote-Sundarbani belt. The two men proved perfect partners. If Kumar had the ideological vocabulary needed to draw Hindus to Hindutva, Sudan understood the mechanics of the mob so crucial to projecting power.

Soon after the Congress-PDP government came to power, this new Hindutva leadership unleashed its first mass mobilisation. Leaders of the Bajrang Dal, the Shiv Sena and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) claimed that former Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeeds calls for demilitarisation and self-rule were existential threats. Pointing to the expulsion of Pandits from Kashmir at the outset of the jehad, Hindutva leaders said that Mufti Mohammad was preparing the ground for the expulsion of Hindus and Hinduism from Jammu.

From 2003, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal sought to forge these anxieties into a concrete political mobilisation around the issue of cattle slaughter. Hindutva teams would often interdict trucks carrying cattle, and then use their capture to stage protests. It was not as if the anti-cow-slaughter movement had stumbled on a great secret. For decades, cow-owning farmers in the main, Hindus themselves sold old livestock, which no longer earned them an income, to traders from Punjab and Rajasthan. The traders, for their part, sold these herds to cattle traffickers on Indias eastern border, who fed the demand for meat among the poor of Bangladesh. In using the cow as a metaphor for Hindu communal anxieties, Hindutva groups were drawing on well-established regional traditions of neoconservative mobilisation.

Back in January 1999, for example, in the wake of a series of massacres by Islamist terror groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, carcasses of ritually slaughtered cows were found in Jhangalwar, in the district of Doda, as well as in Jhajhar Kotli and Kanachak in Jammu. Hindutva groups were able to organise successful mobilisations against what was cast as an Islamist plot to defile the faith.

Interestingly, there is some evidence that Farooq Abdullahs government may not have been wholly unhappy with this sharpening of group boundaries. At the time, the State government was working on a report calling for the creation of new provinces whose boundaries were to be drawn along Jammu and Kashmirs ethnic-religious faultlines a demand endorsed, with some variants, both by Pakistan and by the Hindutva groups.

Now, as then, violence followed in the wake of the anti-cow-slaughter movement. In December 2007, for example, VHP-Bajrang Dal cadre organised large-scale protests against the reported sacrificial slaughter of cows in Bali Charna village in the Satwari area of Jammu and Chilog village near Bani town in Kathua district. Riots took place in the villages around Pargwal in Jammu in March 2005 after Hindutva activists alleged that a cow had been raped leading to large-scale protests and traffic disruption in the villages around Pargwal.

Hindutva groups used pilgrimages to contrast their own religious commitment with the States supposed failure to protect Hinduism. From 2004, for example, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal took de facto control of the annual pilgrimage in August to the Boodha-Amarnath shrine near Mandi in Poonch district. The VHP-Bajrang Dal influence in the Amarnath Yatra in Kashmir too became marked, with Hindutva groups marketing the pilgrimage as an act of defiance against Islam.

Neither the Congress nor the National Conference (N.C.) showed great interest in resisting the march of Hindutva through Jammu. N.C. politicians in fact welcomed the Hindutva resurgence, which they believed correctly would lead to a consolidation of Jammus Muslims behind the party. Congress leaders, for their part, sought to appropriate the divisive politics that underpinned the protests, projecting themselves as the best political medium for Hindu resistance to the Kashmiri chauvinism of the PDP.

For those who had been following these phenomena, the protests in Jammu including the torching of Gujjar herders huts in the Samba-Vijaypur belt and the attacks on ethnic Kashmiri travellers near Udhampur were no surprise.

Islamism has also played a role in engendering similar strains in Kashmir (Feeding on Fears, Frontline, July 18). Ever since 2003, there have been repeated crises provoked by Islamist claims that a project was under way to alter the regions demographic character: violence provoked by the uncovering of a prostitution scandal in 2006, for example, or the xenophobic polemic against outsiders that, among other things, led to the mass killing of migrant workers near Kulgam.

Depending on who has been doing the telling, the Shrine Board protests have been characterised as an intifada, or revolution a spontaneous outburst of young peoples anger against India or against the State government, a demonstration of nationalism but in fact fall within the religious-chauvinist continuum of these earlier movements.

A careful study of the Shrine Board protests shows that the unusual intensity and scale of the mobilisation was, principally, the outcome of the opportunistic use of the Islamist cause by mainstream political parties an opportunism that reinforced and legitimised paranoiac Islamist claims that the land grant was part of a plot to seize land and destroy Islam.

Using Urdu-language newspaper reports, police records and interviews with local political activists, The Hindu developed a database of 290 rural and urban protests, which took place in Kashmir province between June 24 and June 30. Of these, the largest single gathering was an 8,000-strong Jamaat-e-Islami-led gathering at Qaimoh; the smallest, a procession of 30 Srinagar residents who marched home to Maisuma from Lal Chowk.

Baramulla offers an interesting illustration of the politics of the protests. Islamists set off the conflagration. A 600-strong peasant gathering at Watergam on June 27, for example, was led by Jamaat-e-Islami activist Nisar Ahmad Ganai. Two days later, Jamaat-linked activists Mushtaq Ahmad Wani and Fayaz Ahmad led the protests in Baramullas Khanpora area. Elsewhere in Baramulla, though, pro-India parties drove the protests. A 5,000-strong gathering at Sheeri-Baramulla on June 30, for example, was led by local N.C. activist Abdul Qayoom and PDP dissident Ghulam Mohideen. Hasan Rather, another PDP dissident, also played an important role in organising protests.

Similarly, in Anantnag, both the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) and Syed Ali Shah Geelanis Tehreek-i-Hurriyat played an important role in organising protests. Tehreek leader Hafizullah Mir, for example, organised an 800-strong rally at Anantnags Lal Chowk on June 25, while APHC-linked Fayyaz Ahmad Sodagar and Zahid Hakim led a similar crowd at the same venue the next day. However, the Congress helped the protests move beyond the Islamists urban bases.

Local Congress leaders burned effigies of PDP patron Mufti Mohammed Sayeed at Wandi-Valgam on June 30, while N.C. activists were the principal leaders of protests in Paibugh.

Of the 20 protests in the district of Ganderbal the scene of a dramatic N.C.-PDP confrontation that saw former Union Minister of State for External Affairs Omar Abdullah lose his seat last year half were led by N.C. cadre. In the village of Chatterhama, N.C. activists even pitched in to help build a shrine to two Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists killed in the course of the protests.

Islamists sometimes played a peripheral role in protests held out as examples of their influence. On June 27, secessionists reported that they had led a 2,000-strong protest in which a Pakistani flag was hoisted on the clock tower in Srinagars historic Lal Chowk. Police videotape obtained by The Hindu shows the politicians Javed Mir and Firdaus Ahmad Shah arriving late in the course of the protests. It also establishes that the flags bore the crescent-and-star logo of Islam and not, as reported by several Indian newspapers and even The Economist, Pakistans national insignia.

Significantly, the district of Kulgam saw a grand total of just seven protest gatherings. While the Jamaat-e-Islami organised the 8,000-strong rally at Qaimoh on June 30 and an earlier gathering at a historic shrine in Kulgam town, there was no violence at all. Answers lie in the configuration of the districts politics. The Communist Party of India (Marxist), the main political force, is the sole party in the region that had not made an alliance of convenience with the Islamists. Its principal rival, the PDP, had no interest in fuelling the anti-Shrine Board protests, once it came under assault on the issue. Local N.C. leaders simply did not have the on-ground muscle to influence the course of events.

Will the political opportunism that underpinned the crisis in Jammu and Kashmir pay off in the coming elections?

Depressingly, the answer is, most likely, yes. Most analysts expect the BJP to make significant gains in the Hindu-majority areas of Jammu, while the N.C. is thought to have improved its position in the Muslim-majority areas north of the Chenab and the Kashmir Valley. The PDPs hopes that the Shrine Board agitation would help it expand its constituency among the religious Right have proved misplaced, as have the Congress aspirations to emerge as the sole spokesperson for Jammus Hindus.

Governor N.N. Vohra will, as his scrupulous handling of the confidence vote suggests, ensure that the elections to be held in October will be fair, to a fault. Democracy, though, is just a process a process that, obviously, does not guarantee desirable outcomes. If Jammu and Kashmirs politicians wish to save their State and the people who live in it from the horrific communal abyss that lies ahead, they will have to begin to demonstrate a seriousness of purpose, so far conspicuous by its absence.

Meanwhile, both the Congress and the PDP still allies in New Delhi, if not in Srinagar might wish to ponder another lesson from Greek tragedy: that hubris is intimately linked with downfall.