UNDER the blazing sun on a September afternoon, some young men were playing cricket at the sports stadium in Pulwama, not far from the simmering villages in south Kashmir where militancy is at its peak. An hour later, around 1:15 p.m., Mukhtar* announced recess. As the famished players dispersed for lunch, he was alarmed by the foreboding sound of someone approaching him from behind. He turned around to find a masked man with a pistol. In a moment, the militant had pulled the trigger. The bullet missed Mukhtar by a whisker.
In Shopian, separated from Pulwama by 20 kilometres of narrow stretches of road flanked on both sides by dense apple orchards and an extensive network of hills that camouflage the movement of new recruits, the scene is not violent, but nonetheless it is disturbing for Mohammad Sayeed Shafi, whose neighbours do not greet him any more. At the mosque near his house in Wadi Pora village, where he offers Friday prayers, he is met with hostile stares and mutters. “It has become a common occurrence now,” he said with a sigh.
In the months following the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) decision to pull the plug on the Mehbooba Mufti government, there has been a swift erosion of people’s trust in the democratic set-up in the Kashmir Valley. (The BJP was a difficult ally, reluctant to hold dialogue with stakeholders of the conflict, and often spurred efforts to dilute the State’s constitutional guarantees.) The decision to hold urban civic body and panchayat elections at a time when the Centre has kept everyone guessing on its intent on Article 35A has added to the mistrust.
It is in this charged atmosphere that political workers such as Mukhtar and Shafi, now seen as “collaborators of the state”, have been denied a sense of belonging. Although the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the National Conference (N.C.) claim that their decision to abstain from the elections is to register their protest over Article 35A, Frontline has information that they had tried their best to mobilise their cadres and find candidates but failed.
Alienation
Alienation in Kashmir began when the PDP, which had sold soft separatism in the 2014 Assembly elections, joined hands with the BJP. It grew sharper after the killing of a young militant commander, Burhan Wani, in July 2016 and the ruthless quelling of a civilian uprising in its aftermath, which left nearly 100 people dead and more than a thousand partially or fully blinded by pellet guns.
Hundreds of political workers who have fled from their villages over the past two years are now hiding in Srinagar, some at comfortable guest houses provided by senior leaders with whom they have a rapport and others at shabby lodges downtown, living without any source of income and worrying about the fate of their houses and property.
Abdul Qayoom of the PDP explained why he refused to go back to his village and canvass for the party. “At dusk, on April 4, 2017, my wife, who was on the terrace, saw two gunmen approaching our house,” he said, recounting the circumstances in which he had fled from Urpora A, a village in Shopian district, more than a year ago. “She huddled the three children downstairs, into a rear chamber, and screamed for help. The militants could not break open the main iron door but damaged everything outside, including our car.”
Qayoom, the sarpanch of Urpora A, had received two threatening letters earlier but had ignored them. That night, he sneaked out with his family to his in-laws’ house at Sheikh mohalla and passed the ominous, dark hours, praying. “At the first gleam of light, I left for Srinagar,” he told Frontline . “C.M. sahiba [Mehbooba Mufti] ne khud phone kiya, kaha chale aao [The C.M. herself asked me to flee].”
He said that in the post-Burhan Wani era, their influence is conclusively lost. “Workers are reluctant to visit their native places.... People will beat them.”
Well before the PDP announced that it would not participate in the elections, a couple of legislators from Kashmir indicated to this correspondent that the decision was inevitable. “South Kashmir is beyond our control. People are seething with rage; the workers are hiding. How does one prepare for an election?” a young PDP Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) from south Kashmir asked. Another prominent face of the party, who was earlier in the N.C. and had once fought an election against PDP founder and two-time Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, hinted that they were not able to find candidates.
A young Turk of the PDP who was involved in the screening of candidates spoke to this reporter on September 3 in Rajbagh, Srinagar, which was a week before the PDP decided to boycott the elections. He was more candid about what had happened inside party circles. “Initially, we thought the elections wouldn’t happen. But when the Centre announced the dates, we hurriedly started the screening process. We contacted some likely candidates and asked them to prepare for their wards. But they tersely replied that they wouldn’t contest.”
Officially, however, the PDP came up with a face-saving explanation. “The situation created by linking panchayat elections with the case pending in the Supreme Court on Article 35A has created apprehension in the minds of the people, who see an assault on the special constitutional position of the State…. It was unanimously resolved that the party would stay away from the electoral exercise at this juncture,” PDP president and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti told the media at her Gupkar residence in Srinagar on September 10, after a meeting with her party leaders. The party’s arch-rival, the N.C., had, a few days earlier, decided to stay away from the hustings on the same grounds.
Elections
Elections to municipal corporations, councils and committees will be held in four phases from October 8 to October 16. The panchayat elections are slated to be held in eight phases between November 8 and December 4.
Qayoom of the PDP said that he had been approached by the party leadership to stand in the election but he had declined. “I met Mehbooba Mufti in the last week of August. She wanted me to prepare [for the elections], but I asked her, ‘Who will protect my wife and children who are still in the village?’” He suggested that the former Chief Minister begin the campaign trail from the less volatile Kupwara, Baramulla and Ganderbal districts in north Kashmir. “In the south,” he cautioned, “villagers will kill us before the militants do.” It seems like an overstatement from a crestfallen man on the run, but it is not. On October 16, 2017, a block-level PDP worker named Ramzan Sheikh was murdered by two militants at his house in Humhama village in Shopian. One of the two gunmen, identified as Showkat Ahmad Kumar, was hunted down by Sheikh’s family members and killed in a scuffle that ensued.
What followed validates Qayoom’s presentiment. A large number of villagers attended Kumar’s funeral, and shortly afterwards, some of them marched towards Sheikh’s house, demolished it and set it ablaze.
Speaking over phone from his office in Srinagar on the genesis of the current flare-up, Tanvir Sadiq, political adviser to the N.C.’s working president, Omar Abdullah, said: “The unholy marriage is to blame.” He was referring to the erstwhile coalition between the PDP and the BJP. “The PDP went to the [Assembly] elections in 2014 vowing to keep the BJP out of power; it occupied the space between the separatists and the N.C., and that’s why people voted for it. Later, not only did it join hands with the BJP, it pursued a policy of exclusion instead of engagement; people who had voted in the election were tied to jeeps and paraded in Kashmir. In Jammu, arms rallies were held, generating a fear psychosis.” Public disillusionment
Kulgam MLA Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) said that alienation and disillusionment were the biggest reason for people staying away from the elections. “The willingness of people to participate in elections is most important for any democratic exercise. But the reality is, people in Kashmir are reluctant to participate in such an exercise at present. The unwillingness of the Government of India to file a counter affidavit in the apex court in defence of Article 35A has created serious doubts about its intentions,” he said.
In 1996, when elections were held in Kashmir after a seven-year interval marked by armed insurgency, polling was dismal; many of those who voted alleged that there had been coercion by the security forces. Political analysts writing on Kashmir said it had taken New Delhi years of confidence-building measures (CBMs) to engage voters and persuade them to vote.
Najmu Saqib, an additional spokesperson for the PDP, credits the late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed for “legitimising the electoral exercise” in the Valley. “He brought the fringe to the mainstream and that worked. The BJP delegitimised it again,” he said.
There is a perception that in the 2002 Assembly elections, which witnessed 42 per cent polling, the PDP fielded many former renegades of the erstwhile Ikhwan group, allegedly created by New Delhi in the 1990s to crush militancy. However, the turnout soared past 65 per cent in the 2014 Assembly elections, the highest in 25 years.
Some State legislators explained the role of political workers in mobilising the electorate. “When New Delhi announces CBMs, a positive message is generated, but it is the worker who takes the signature schemes to the grass roots and builds the mood for election,” said Aijaz Ahmad Mir, MLA from Wachi, Shopian.
A few villagers in Anantnag and Shopian districts shed more light on how a political worker pursued that objective. “It’s a barter,” said Imtiyaz Ahmad*, a cousin of the fugitive militant Owais Malik, at the picturesque Arwani village in Kulgam tehsil in Anantnag, half an hour’s drive from Bijbehara, the PDP stronghold to which the Muftis belong. “A dependence on the political system has been created over the years,” said Ahmad, who is in his twenties. “Here, in these villages, if one approaches the authorities to secure an electricity line in one’s neighbourhood or install a motor in one’s orchard, one is told chitthi likhwa ke lao [get a letter of recommendation]. We get it from the local MLA or the Collector. At the time of election, the political workers who had facilitated it ask us to vote; we can’t refuse them.” The octogenarian Salam Malik, a journalist with Kashmir Uzma , an Urdu daily, said that the Mehbooba Mufti government helped recruit 200 to 300 youths from villages around Bijbehara and Anantnag to Jammu and Kashmir Bank. “Naturally, the favour will be returned,” he added.
Political workers
Today, political workers are looking for escape routes, jeopardising the very electoral structure they had helped erect over the decades. “We don’t want to be identified as pro-India,” Mukhtar said over phone from an undisclosed location in Srinagar. On September 2, at the sports stadium in Pulwama, he narrowly escaped death. “I ran as fast as I could towards the bushes. I thought the trees would help me elude my assassin,” he said.
But others were not as fortunate. Abdul Gani Dar and Shabir Ahmad Wani of the PDP, Gowhar Ahmad Bhat and Shabir Bhat of the BJP, and the senior politician G.N. Patel are a few names in the growing list of casualties.
“Security is a concern,” Tanvir Sadiq admitted. “It is an open fact that no political leader or an elected representative can visit his constituency. South Kashmir is out of the question.”
Rafi Ahmad Mir of the PDP said he used to “travel freely” in Pahalgam, which he represented in the peak militancy years of the late 1980s, when the Hizbul Mujahideen dominated Anantnag, where the hill station falls. “But I cannot any longer.”
The son of a well-known MLA in south Kashmir, who did not wish to be named, drew parallels to the situation in the early 1990s. “When we were young, people did not venture out of their house after 7 p.m.,” he said. “There would be silence outside; sometimes the silence was so eerie that children cried. Those days are back.” He said that on several occasions his father had sought permission to hold public meetings in his constituency, but the police had refused.
The panchayat election was scheduled for February 2018, but the government was forced to defer it indefinitely at that time after Riyaz Naikoo of the Hizbul Mujahideen, Kashmir’s most dreaded militant, released an audio clip threatening candidates with acid attacks. The fear persists.
In 185 of the 315 seats in the municipal bodies that will go to the polls in the first two phases on October 8 and October 10, there are either no candidates or no contest.
Touseef Raina, the 27-year-old independent candidate from Ward no. 15 of the Baramulla municipal council, is a notable exception. “If good candidates stay away, the political system will degenerate further,” said Raina, who heads the Srinagar-based non-governmental organisation Global Youth Foundation. “Development, peace and accountability will restore people’s faith in the system,” he told Frontline .
Most leaders believe that “there is nothing to sell to people” and are pressing for dialogue with Pakistan. “The National Conference has all along been an advocate of dialogue between India and Pakistan. It was very unfortunate that India and Pakistan were supposed to talk in New York and, in the end, the plan got cancelled,” Tanvir Sadiq said.
Dialogue with Pakistan
On September 21, a proposed talk between the Foreign Ministers of India and Pakistan, to be held on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, was cancelled. The Government of India stated that the recent brutal killing of three policemen in Jammu and Kashmir by Pakistan-based militant outfits had exposed the “true face” of Imran Khan, the new Prime Minister of Pakistan. Pakistan refuted the statement, saying: “India had wasted an opportunity for peace.”
In Kashmir, the regional parties are apprehensive that a “forced” election would further erode people’s faith in democracy. Najmu Saqib said that the upcoming elections were bound to be an exclusive process. Tanvir Sadiq pointed to some of the civic bodies in south Kashmir where people from Jammu won unopposed. “Democracy is not about election; it is about participation,” he said. “If the BJP thinks that it can get people elected unopposed from places in south Kashmir, then they are undermining the very essence of elections.”
Militant threats have dissuaded most people from filing nominations, allowing the BJP to secure a foothold in the Muslim-majority Valley. The BJP candidates have been declared unopposed winners in eight seats in Devsar and two seats in Kulgam, two of the four municipal committees where elections are scheduled. As per a report published in Greater Kashmir on September 30, the BJP is set to win the majority of municipal committees in south Kashmir.
Speaking to Frontline , the BJP’s district president in Shopian, Javed Ahmad Qadri, said that he was confident of the party’s victory. He has been attacked thrice in the past, most recently in March 2017, but he is camping in Shopian undeterred. “There are 101 booths here; in 60 of them our people are active,” he said. In the 2014 Assembly elections, he had polled 4,000 votes in Shopian on the BJP ticket. According to local journalists, migrant votes are enough for the BJP to scrape through in the urban civic elections.
At Dewan Sahab restaurant, barely 2 km from Shopian’s famous fruit market, a group of young traders, activists and other professionals have gathered to unwind after a hard day’s work. They are discussing politics and are full of scorn for New Delhi. On the table are raging issues that include Article 35A, the upcoming elections and Army excesses, particularly the notoriety it has earned of late by charring the bodies of dead militants.
“Earlier there was a binary. There were people who were Indian by conviction. They would mock others who identified with Pakistan, reminding them of the neighbouring country’s dwindling economy and sectarian violence,” said Habeel Iqbal, a lawyer in the Shopian district court. “In BJP’s India, that binary is lost.”
These men fear that the elections will come at a “huge human cost”. The political workers in Srinagar assert they would be the first to be killed. But Sayeed Shafi, who had won the panchayat election in 2011 from Wadi Pora’s Ward no. 6, is planning to return to his village. “I had taken a personal loan from the bank, that money is about to end. The party gives us a few thousands sometimes, but that is not enough for the upkeep of my mother, wife and sister, who fled along with me,” he said.
Shafi has a plan. “I will publicly apologise at the mosque. I will vow not to join politics again,” he said. After a pause, in a trembling voice, he added: “If I ever return to Shopian, will I make it to the mosque alive?”
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the individuals.
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