New Delhi’s bungle in Kashmir

Sankarshan Thakur

Kashmir must truly not be ours, else we wouldn’t feel the need to incessantly chant claims to it from our tank tops: Kashmir hamara hai, Mera Bharat Mahaan. You’ll find that slogan on everywhere in Kashmir but on Kashmiri lips. They paint it on bunkers and barriers, on brigade walls and on armoured carriers, everywhere that they can give the slogan the cover of the gun, everywhere they can protect it from Kashmiri hands itching to deface them.

The need to pulverise Kashmir with patriotic graffiti is bad enough advertisement for New Delhi in the Valley, the necessity of protecting them from being pulversised by Kashmiris makes it worse. Screaming Kashmir hamara hai is the best way of betraying the opposite.

There has seldom been ground to doubt that New Delhi finds it difficult to trust Kashmiris but someone in New Delhi should realise the feelings are entirely mutual. New Delhi holds the ground in Kashmir, or part of it; it does not hold heads and hearts. More than the tumult of daily cordons and curfews and the daily death and destruction, Kashmir is a tumult in the head. It is a suffering psychology, bruised repeatedly by New Delhi and now totally averse to it. Pakistan is an ugly and menacing meddler in Kashmir but we furnished the grounds to begin with. Pakistan is able to export terror because we created a consumer for it.

You only have to look at New Delhi’s record on promises made and broken and buried to understand why Kashmiris have a problem trusting. You only have to remember games it has played, insisting on being player, umpire and audience, you only have to recall its caprice. Sheikh Abdullah is a feted nationalist one day, jailed traitor another. His son is at once worth shaking hands with and worth a dagger in the back, enthroned today, dumped tomorrow. You promise the sky and aren’t even ready to concede crumbs. You are ready to talk to adversaries waging a secessionist war and you reject an ally’s demand for autonomy. You are ready to address Kashmiri aspirations and yet your flanks are still challenging the Kashmiris’ essential article of faith.

Debates on Article 370 — it’s on the BJP’s backburner, but very much there — stink of insensitivity to Kashmiris and to history, they reinforce the us-and-them mindset. Everyone must recognise Kashmir acceded to India under very special circumstances; attempts to distort history will only warp the future more. There was a time all Kashmir wanted was autonomy; they chucked stones when the demand was denied or offered only in perverted fashion. Now, they want independence and they lob grenades and launch rocket attacks.

New Delhi, meanwhile, is still dithering about autonomy, whose buyers may already have run out of relevance in Kashmir. Handing Farooq Abdullah autonomy when he demanded it last year could have given New Delhi a toehold on the slippery ground of Kashmir. If the Hurriyat isn’t talking, try boldly to outflank it. The Prime Minister can visit Pahalgam to commiserate the killing of pilgrims, why cannot he go to Srinagar to talk to the Kashmiri people, the ones he calls his own? They too have suffered, they too have grievances, they too need commiseration, perhaps more than others. Tell them straight New Delhi is prepared to listen, tell them autonomy is on the table, tell them he means it when he says Kashmir hamara hai.

For all his well-known flaws and all the evident erosion of his authority, Abdullah is the only one who speaks India’s language in the Valley. He has been pleading that New Delhi strengthen his hands, give him something he can try selling to the people. Autonomy will give Abdullah a handle and New Delhi a position of strength with both the Hurriyat and Pakistan, parties that are key to any solution in Kashmir and must be addressed at some stage. But New Delhi only shakes its confused head and takes confounding decisions.

Abdullah wants autonomy, New Delhi appoints an interlocutor for secessionists who aren’t on the table. And what is he selling, if not even autonomy? Do even his masters know? The moment demands an initiative of courage and conviction, not political confusion and bureaucratic bungling. By the time New Delhi is done with measuring the weight of commas and semicolons in agreements old and new in its search for a considered proposal, it may be too late. If it isn’t already.