Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
Article 370 of the Constitution of India is in the news again, an indication that saffron forces are readying themselves for the final assault on the fortress Delhi. Article 370 is a handy ploy. I have come to believe, though, that the BJP is using the Article as a lucky charm, whose magical powers are summoned by it each time it senses a win. The Article conferring special rights on the State of Jammu and Kashmir and enacted at a time when Kashmir was hotly debated in international fora, first attracted BJP’s ire when Jana Sangh founder, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, soon after quitting Nehru’s Cabinet, discovered that the Article bartered the rights of Hindus of Jammu and Kashmir.
It took him no time to emerge as the patron saint of Prem Nath Dogra’s Ek Pradhan, Ek Nishan, Ek Vidhan agitation, which briefly seemed to have blown the bottom off the Mahatma’s and Nehru’s mantra of secularism. It was so soon after Gandhi had seen a ray of hope lighting up an otherwise dark sub-continental horizon at the time of the partitioning of India.
About this time, with the Jammu separatist movement on a high, even Sheikh Abdullah, the father of the Kashmiri awakening, had openly wondered what would become of Kashmir’s accession to India once the Nehru-Gandhi era was past.
He was to give vocal expression to his fears in the following months, thanks to a few Home Ministry, Finance Ministry and States (now lapsed) Ministry circulars that spoke in a language very different from the secular idealism of Nehru and Gandhi.
The Kashmir Constituent Assembly, the only former Princely State which was allowed to frame its own Constitution, an adjunct of the Indian Constitution, also adopted article 370 as its own, if that be the phrase. But the fact is that the Article has always been a bone of contention between New Delhi and Srinagar on the one hand and the BJP on the other, except, of course, when the saffron party or its parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, choose to give it a Nelson’s eye. This was most obvious when the BJP, led by Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, headed the government in New Delhi for six long years. Not once during that span of time did the saffron party think of the Article as an anachronism. Vajpayee’s was indeed a pro-active role in assuring Jammu and Kashmir that its interests were safe in his governments’ hands.
He even picked up the National Conference’s Omar Abdullah, the present Chief Minister of the State, to join his Cabinet as Minister of State in the Ministry of External Affairs. The poet in Vajpayee even set the sky as the limit in determining the future of Kashmir as part of the Indian Union.
The BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, did his very best not to be seen reviving the controversy when he called for a “reopening” of the debate on the impugned Article at his public rally in Jammu last week. The choice of the venue was appropriate since it was here that the demand for undoing Article 370 as well as the separate State flag, constitution and nomenclatures Wazir-e-Azam and Sardar-E-Riyasat was first voiced. Mr. Modi knew exactly what he was doing; he was responding to his basic RSS instinct. There was no room in Bharat for two constitutions, two flags, two Presidents, etc. Forgotten was the fact that the State had much earlier acted unilaterally to adopt the nomenclature of Chief Minister instead of Prime Minister and Governor instead of Sadr-e- Riyasat. He obviously, had his eyes fixed on the general elections when the State elects its MPs, early next year.
Jammu, long considered a BJP stronghold, has in recent years been looking elsewhere for Lok Sabha representatives; the party had the mortification of seeing some of its stalwarts falling by the roadside in the last general elections. With his Prime Ministerial ambitions at stake Modi was only reviving the old doubts, prejudices that have marred the relations between Jammu and Kashmir provinces.
He left no doubt where his sympathies lay when he brought in the marked regional disparities in the State. In fact he appeared to pour scorn on the State by describing it as a ‘beggar’ State, receiving alms, as it were, from New Delhi.
I, for one, am wholly unaware of the State’s ‘beggar’ status. Indeed, Kashmir, I have always believed has been blessed with nature’s bounty. In my long years around I have never heard of a starvation death in Kashmir. Shortages, yes, on a few occasions, but never the kind to force farmers to commit suicide or cause death due to starvation. Yes, it is true that the beggar state description fits the State if you see it through the eyes of the former Governor and BJP Minister in New Delhi, Mr. Jagmohan.
Says Jagmohan : “Both for plan and non-plan finances the State is heavily dependent upon Delhi. Its five-year-plans are wholly funded by Delhi. A substantial part of non-plan expenditure is also met by the Union……..The State’s salary bill in 1989, for instance, was about 234 crores, the salary bill for the year Rs. 277 crores, that is more than its receipts. Had the State been truly autonomous and left to its own resources, it could not have found a ‘single paisa’ for any development work, Jagmohan has said without mentioning that the State hasn’t got a single industrial project worth the name, even in the small and medium sectors very little activity, involving job generation, has been undertaken. Not one worthwhile project to exploit the State’s rich natural resources has emerged from the planners’ desks in Delhi or in Srinagar.
Jagmohan believes he hits the nail on the head while plugging his party’s anti-Article 370 lines. The protagonists of the Article often argue, he says, that its retention is necessary for giving autonomy to the State. But what has desirable autonomy got to do with the Article 370? When other States in the Union ask for autonomy, they do not mean separation of identities. They really want decentralization and devolution of power, so that administrative and development work is speedily carried out, he goes on.
In Jammu and Kashmir the demand, according to him, emanates from a “clever strategy to stay away from the mainstream, to set up a separate fiefdom, to fly a separate flag, to have a Prime Minister rather than a Chief Minister and a Sadr-i-Riyasat instead of a governor and to secure greater power and patronage……… for the new elites.
Not a word from the BJP about the autonomy resolution passed by the State Assembly some years ago; it can’t be the BJP’s case that the Assembly is unrepresentative. The truth is that political myopia does not allow Mr. Modi’s party to see beyond its obsession with the two-nation theory; Article 370, they argue, shapes the State’s communal psyche. Blinding obsessions, which do not allow the party to look for a silver lining, even a very thin one. It’s all black in the Modi-BJP book. I have consciously avoided any reference here to the miserable plight of Kashmiri Pandits, forced out of the valley in 1990. The idea was to keep the focus on the BJPs pet obsession.
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