Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: The Times of India
Date: August 10, 2008
There is a facet of the turmoil in Jammu and Kashmir that is both puzzling
and revealing: why did it take the government so long to begin talking to
the protestors in Jammu?
Consider the facts. On July 31, Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh invited the leader of Opposition L K Advani and Arun Jaitley
for a discussion on internal security. After an anodyne exchange on terrorism,
the prime minister requested the BJP to use its good offices to ensure that
the 'blockade' of the highway to the Kashmir Valley is lifted. He had information
that the separatists would use the disruption to press for accessing the Muzaffarabad
road and demanding transit through Pakistan. This would create fresh complications
and add an international dimension to the problem.
The prime minister's fears were warranted
since this is precisely what the Hurriyat Conference leaders have begun demanding.
Yet, for a full week, until the all-party meeting on August 6, the government
sat back and watched the agitation in Jammu escalate steadily. At the all-party
meeting too, the government's limited objective was to secure a unanimous
resolution asking for the Jammu agitation to be called off. It was only after
the BJP flatly refused that the government grudgingly agreed to begin a dialogue
with the Sangharsh Samity spearheading the agitation.
Democracy is by definition quite tiresome.
It involves constant engagement with saints, dreamers, rogues and normal people.
In Jammu and Kashmir, successive governments have kept the door open for dialogue
with even those who have questioned the state's inclusion in the Indian Union
and supped with the ISI. The prime minister even travelled to Srinagar for
a Round Table Conference which included the Hurriyat Conference - it is a
separate matter the separatists didn't attend. So, why did the government
hesitate to talk to those who have been on the streets for over a month, defying
curfew, braving hardships and marching with the Indian tricolour? If the separatists
are ''our people'', are the citizens of Jammu non-citizens?
The government's insensitivity arose from
a mindset that has influenced official thinking, shaped the million-dollar
conflict-resolution industry and permeated into the editorial classes. It
was centred on the assumption that the Kashmir Valley was all that mattered
in Jammu and Kashmir; Jammu and Ladakh were the loose ends that could be conveniently
papered over. No one gave a damn when Ladakh protested against the demographic
transformation and the threat to its identity and Jammu's long-standing complaints
of discriminatory treatment were brushed aside with sneering condescension.
All that mattered was the so-called 'hurt Kashmiri psyche' and Kashmiri 'alienation'.
These labels of victimhood also became the cover for the most heinous political
crime of independent India: the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus from the
Valley. Today, this shameful expulsion has become such a footnote that Hurriyat
leaders can brazenly proclaim their 'secular' credentials on TV talk shows,
while the voices of Pandit protest are rubbished with the disdain reserved
for Praveen Togadia.
The protests in Jammu are only partially about
the 40 acres of land given to the Amarnath Yatra Shrine Board and then taken
away after the PDP and the separatists raised the bogey of a demographic invasion
and an assault on Kashmiri identity. Imagine the outcry if a Haj Terminal
is peremptorily denotified on 'cultural' grounds?
Having had their feelings trampled upon for
so long, the people of Jammu are demanding the right to live with self-respect
and dignity in a state where only separatist blackmail seem to matter. The
protests are an assertion of political empowerment and a plea to the rest
of India to give nationalism a place in Jammu and Kashmir. Simultaneously,
it is a fitting rebuff to the mindset that deems Omar Abdullah's eloquent
insensitivity in the Lok Sabha an iconic assertion of cosmopolitan modernity.