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By the time you have come as far as
this page of your newspaper this morning, the assembly election results of
Jammu & Kashmir should have begun trickling onto your television screen.
Therefore I shall not speculate on results, and move to its significance.
J&K is India's
lone Muslim-majority state, and, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi generally
being regarded abroad as poster boy of the "Hindu right", if there
is a single state assembly election that the West is closely watching, it is
in this contentious state. If its pines, lakes and snow-capped mountains are
bewildering, horrific indeed is its record of violence, with over 50,000
people including civilians killed since the onset of insurgency in 1987.
Its enigma is due as much to its history as its
geography. Ruled by a Hindu monarch but inhabited by a predominantly Muslim
population, it was the exact opposite of the Nizam's state of Hyderabad on the south-east of India, whose
ruler was Muslim but the subjects were by and large Hindus. India could
manage to swallow Hyderabad because of its geography, being a thousand miles
away from Pakistan, where the Nizam's heart lay. But, being wedged between India and Pakistan, J&K was the
inevitable battlefield of the kaurava and pandava in the subcontinet's
post-Independence Mahabharata. Pakistan
started it within months of Independence
when it deployed its militia to grab a good one-third of the state's
territory.
However, J&K is not like any other state of the Union. Following its troubled accession, it came under
Article 370 of the Constitution which gives the state autonomy in everything
except foreign relations, defense and central banking. The 'undivided'
J&K has 111 assembly seats of which 87 are in the part that falls in India, the remaining 24 seats representing the
Pakistan-occupied Kashmir are kept unoccupied in the assembly at Srinagar. There are
some other differences. Like the assembly election in J&K which is held
at six years' interval, not five years as in other states. The voter-seat
ratio is also an issue.
Modi would like to have Mufti
on
board if he wants Kashmir
to be a global destination
However, election in
the state is a complex exercise due to the presence of not only separatist
organizations like the All Parties Huriyat Conference but armed militants of
Hizbul Mujahideen or Lashkar-e-Taiba who terrorize voters from visiting the
poll booth as they think that pushing the button on the EVM is an indirect
sanction to India's rule. The fear element was never high in Jammu or Ladakh but it was a deterrent to
voting in the valley. In the 2008 assembly poll, the turnout figure reached
60 per cent due to high mobilization in Jammu.
But in this election the valley too has participated, taking the state
average turnout to 65 per cent plus.
The high turnout is the result of
two factors. First, Modi's exceptional ability to mobilize his supporters, as
it is evident in the Lok Sabha poll earlier this year, when his BJP bagged
all the three Muslim-minority constituencies of Jammu, Udhampur (also in the
Jammu region) and Ladakh. But BJP's Lok Sabha poll agenda to abolish Art 370,
combined with the miserable governance record of incumbent National
Conference Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, whipped up a conservative Kashmiri
backlash. Consequently, though all the three remaining seats in the Kashmir
valley—Anantnag, Baramulla and Srinagar—with overwhelming Muslim population,
went to Mufti Mohammed Syed's People's Democratic Party, it didn't poll many
votes.
Significantly, thanks to a combination of inhibitory factors,
turnout has always been low in the valley, which has over 97 per cent Muslim
population. A 2014 Election Commission study shows that as many as 15.86 per
cent electors in the state refrain from voting because, in their words, they
have "no faith in political system or electoral democracy".
Besides, 9.03 per cent said they kept away from voting in compliance with the
advice of their religious or community leaders. Nor did the administration
try hard to see that the people cast their votes, as 16.52 per cent said they
had no voter ID. Such voting apathy is at its highest in the Muslim-dominated
valley. It is the opposite in Hindu- or Buddhist-inhabited Jammu and Ladakh. In the last general
election, the wining PDP candidate from Srinagar
constituency polled only 167,000 votes while the BJP winner from Jammu bagged 619,000.
The overall increase in turnout has largely been the valley's contribution as
mobilization was always high in Jammu.
The question is, what has now impelled the valley's voters to regain what
they said they lacked, which is, "faith in electoral democracy"?
Is it because the BJP under Modi mustered the courage of dropping
Art 370 from its assembly poll manifesto which even Atal Behari Vajpayee
didn't dare. Instead, the BJP kept some non-controversial promises in its
agenda. Modi even made Army to publicly admit and apologise for its wrong
doing in the killing of two innocents. Of course, Modi's numerous visits to
the state and handling of flood affected
Valley won some hearts too.
Even if the valley voter chooses
PDP, the winner is India,
as a well-participated election will make it difficult for the sponsors of
Kashmir separatists in Pakistan
to complain that J&K elections are a sham, and thus block the prospects
of Indo-Pakistan bilateral solution to the long-standing problem.
But the result that transpires
today can indeed turn a new chapter for J&K if it paves the ground for a
working or participative understanding between PDP and BJP. It will be
quite unlike the alliance between the Congress and NC of the Abdullah clan,
which is somehow regarded as a partnership of under-performers. Besides, the
popularity of the two parties is at its lowest and their new generation
leaders are mere rookies. But PDP founder Mufti Mohammed Sayeed has a stature
cutting across Kashmir’s civil society as
well as the extremists. And if Modi talks, the Hindu ultra-nationalists, who
were the main roadblock to a solution to the Kashmir
problem, are expected to listen. Mufti is publicly warming up to Modi and
thanking him for holding free & fair polls in the state. “Modi has a
bigger vision and he has a mission to make India a great nation,” Mufti said
on December 19. The message is loud & clear. Far beyond electing a
state’s government, the J&K election may lay the foundation of peace in
the subcontinent.
(The author is National Editor,
Lokmat group)
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