Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
Cry beloved country, cry. Do not blame the people. For, they did their duty, unmindful of the roadblocks put in their way by nature and man alike. Continue to mourn the losses nature unleashed when your loved river Jhelum in Kashmir and, to a lesser extent, Tawi in Jammu disgorged their negative energies, their fury, to cripple your people’s quest for good times, washing away homes, inflicting untold miseries on man and beast alike. No distinctions made, as is nature’s wont.
Cry dear countrymen – call them Kashmiris and Jammuites, you stupid, or you will be dubbed an agent, foreign or homegrown, depending in the colour of the shades you wear. Never mind that you turned out in very large numbers, in unprecedented numbers am told, to cast your ballot to choose the next lot of politicians, in the hope they would tend to the freshly inflicted wounds by the floods of a few months ago, or equip you well enough to brave the freezing winter months when electric power is at a premium, and when homes have been reduced to mere shelters by the unforgiving flood waters.
And the politicians meantime playing power games; a macabre dervish dance it actually has been, with all those well publicised political comings and goings, those little behind-the doors confabulations, the media faithfully reporting who met whom or even who didn’t meet whom.
For all that, the only thing they seemed to do was weave rings round themselves, holding their cards close to their chests. And, this when they were supposed to be doing plain horse-trading, passed on to us as high-minded political discourse aimed at finding a common platform to work on. The unstated designs were hard to come by, for they were obviously not wholly revealed. That was the level of mutual trust that informed their talks, preliminary to undertaking the job they were elected to do.
Seventeen days have passed since the people rendered their verdict. Good or bad, it was there, in the open for all to see. For politicians to wallow in, each interpreting the verdict to suit his party ends. Each, thanks to the nature of the verdict, claiming to be the winner.
In Jammu you in your wisdom overwhelmingly voted for the party you believed would heal your bruised body (real or imaginary only you can tell).You returned the party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, giving it the highest ever gains in the region; in the more populous Kashmir valley you mainly voted for the known political parties with Mufti Sayeed’s PDP at the top of the heap, the largest single party overall in the State.
Yet it was a fractured verdict and your hope that the elected parties would work their way out of the mess unrealized. On the 17th day, as I said, the problem of having a Government in place has continued to defy a solution. Such is the level of mistrust among the dramatis personae. And if you ask me all of them must indeed be good men, chosen by the people but darkly suspicious of one another. The huddles, big and small, meanwhile continue at an unhurried pace, be it in New Delhi, in Jammu or in Srinagar, yielding little other than the pompous “shaant rahiye, baatcheet chal rahi hai, aapko sahee samay pe batayenge”.
The so-called independent TV channels meantime continue to have a ball, calling people (mainly from the Valley) names, unpatriotic being the the favoured flavour. To my horror I heard a top editor-anchor of an English language channel describing the PDP as the separatist pro-Pakistan party.Pity, is the word that comes to mind when you think of the brash young man on the tele screen.Not a care in the world as he continues his harangue like some of his peers do on other channels.
Home work obviously is not the strongest suit of most channels and their self-opinionated anchors. So the anchors too are having a whale of a time, demolishing reputations, as they say. And yet these very anchors can be so very obsiquious when it comes to the men and women from the ruling dispensation in Delhi. And the party(BJP), bless it , has some 25 odd spokespersons, men and women for all seasons and all TV channels. Dedicated spokespersons I am tempted to say.Virtual know-all specialists who can declaim endlessly on any thing – from rapes to space science, not to mention their staple, the political tu tu mein mein.
And as I write on the of the 17th day of waiting – Governor N.N. Vohra must indeed be a very patient man waiting for word from the seemingly unlikely partners from the Valley and Jammu regions, a word that would make a world of difference to a hapless people caught between the devil of non-governance and a freezing winter with diminishing wherewithal.
Sitting far away from the scene of action my heart goes out to the people in the remote parts of the State whom I routinely hear, thanks to minor TV channels, particularly the Urdu ones, baring their hearts out, complaining of the misery that their lives have become with hardly anyone to look up to for succour. I hear victims of the rural folk living along the cease-fire line and the international border along Jammu crying out for someone in authority to help them out of the line of cross-fire between the Pakistani Rangers and our own Border Security Force. Their homes razed by shells, walls of other homes pock-marked by bullets and assorted gun-fire, they simply do not know who to turn to. There are no Mantrijis and MLAs around to listen to their woes.And a clueless officialdom looks helpless since the decision-makers, the political bosses, continue to be bogged down, talking out the terms of sharing, to use a timeworn saying, the fishes and loaves of office.
The other day I heard a senior BJP leader in Delhi saying “What’s the hurry, we have upto 19th January to decide ” (on Government formation), a very revealing thought! And this against the backdrop of Mr.Narendra Modi’s commitment to good governance. How will you govern if you don’t accept the responsibility which you yourself say has been assigned to you by the people of Jammu (and Kashmir)?.
The State has virtually been without a government since late August, demonstrated most tellingly by the former State Government’s absolute failure to stand up to the challenge posed by the floods in September.You have had the word of the outgoing Chief Minister that Kashmir was without a Government for over a week when the Jhelum broke its banks , threatened to sweep away the summer capital ,and left the valley bruised and battered.The capital city has yet to come to terms with the aftermath.
Normally one would have expected the political parties to move with greater alacrity in giving the State a newly-elected Government, in the present circumstances a coalition, much sooner than it has been.This is no time to play games as the BJP and the PDP seem to be doing. It shoud be obvious that the so-called grand alliance touted by the Congressman Ghulam Nabi Azad is not a possibility.Even if it were to happen that would effectively leave the Jammu region unrepresented. Likewise, if the BJP were to cobble together an alliance comprising some odd balls from Jammu, with an independent or two from the valley it would amount to trivializing the mandate given to the largest single party in the new Assembly, the PDP to wit, and even the National Conference with 15 seats not to mention eight of the INC. To repeat the BJP has 25 against the PDP’s 28.
So, even as the only viable combination may have been obvious to you and me – never mind the compromises that would it have entailed – the politicians, true to form, must play games before accepting the inevitable. In the event, it is more likely that the BJP may find it tempting to slide in to power in the State through the Raj Bhavan route. That requires word from Governor Vohra to the President about the politicians’ failure to overcome the consequences of a fractured poll verdict. That’s if the ruling party at the Centre has no further surprises to spring as the State plods along, fighting off one of its severest winters, the consequences of unprecedented floods of just a few months ago and now the indignity of outliving the consequences of a fractured mandate delivered by the people..(My apologies to the readers of this column for a factual error last week. The BJP as is well known failed to pick up any seat from the Valley when I erroneously gave it one.)
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