On The spot
Tavleen Singh
It could be because I had just returned from Srinagar when Narendra Modi made his comments about Article 370 that I found them so noteworthy. Unfortunately, what he said was immediately misunderstood by almost everyone. Farooq Abdullah saw it as an attack on Kashmir’s special status and pronounced in menacing tones that Article 370 could never be abrogated no matter what. His son, the Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir, said that Modi was wrong when he said that Kashmiri women were discriminated against because of this article. The Bharatiya Janata Party saw his comment as a watering down of its long-standing position that Article 370 must be abrogated altogether so its senior leaders went on national television to announce in embarrassed tones that Modi had not weakened the BJP stand. And, sundry political pundits pontificated, as they usually do whenever Modi speaks, about what a danger he is to India’s ‘secular fabric’.
All he said was that it was time to examine seriously whether Article 370 has benefited the people of Kashmir or not. The reason why I found this interesting is because having gone to Srinagar after an absence of ten years I myself came away feeling that the people of Kashmir deserve better than they have so far had. They have been betrayed over and over again by Kashmiri political leaders, by political leaders in Delhi and even by the militant groups who promised them ‘azadi’ when they began the insurgency in 1989. Having written a book called ‘Kashmir: a Tragedy of Errors’ on the struggle for basic political freedoms that the people of Kashmir have fought for I need to admit here that I was sympathetic to their cause when I wrote the book. I believed then, and continue to, that it was bad policies made in Delhi that turned a straightforward, basic political demand into a secessionist movement. But, when this movement acquired an ugly jihadist character I lost sympathy with it and this is one of the reasons why I did not go back for ten years.
If I went this time it was because my friend, Lady Nadira Naipual, asked if I would go with her because she longed to see the land where her grandmother came from. So it was that we arrived in Srinagar on a cold, autumn morning filled with soft grey mists and the colours of autumn. In the Shalimar Gardens the Chinar trees that had not yet lost their leaves were luminous with sunlight glinting off gold, yellow and orange hues. We wandered up to Pari Mahal and took pictures of fat, overblown roses and we shopped for shawls and chain stitch rugs and on our second day in Kashmir drove out to see the magnificent ruins of Avantipora. On the way we stopped to buy freshly harvested saffron in a shop that also sold almonds and walnuts and honey from Afghanistan. And, wherever we went people told us that the Kashmiri people now wanted peace and normalcy and that it had almost returned. ‘Nobody wants the militancy to continue,’ they said ‘everyone wants peace.’ But, we also met people who told us that Kashmir had never been part of India but only a colony that had been cruelly exploited. And, we both sensed under the surface calm a disturbing, ill-omened tension as if violence lay just below.
It will continue to lie under the surface until there is a more lasting solution to Kashmir’s political problems. This is the context in which we need to see Modi’s comments on Article 370. Personally, I have no idea whether he thought deeply before saying what he did but if he did not then it could be time for him to start doing so. This is because if he does become prime minister he needs to be sure that he does not make the mistake that Atal Behari Vajpayee did which was to continue with the same Kashmir policy that Congress Governments have followed since Jawaharlal Nehru made the mistake of sending Sheikh Abdullah to jail in the fifties. History will see it as a very serious mistake because had it not been for Sheikh Abdullah’s adamant stand that Kashmir would rather be part of secular India than Islamic Pakistan the Kashmir story may well have been a very different one.
When I was researching my Kashmir book I could come up with no valid reason why the Sheikh should have been jailed at all. And, it was while I was researching this same book that I interviewed militant leaders who said they thought Vajpayee could find a lasting solution if he became prime minister. He was not prime minister at the time but had said on national television that if mosques were used to launch political movements then you could be sure that Hindu temples would be as well. The militant leaders I talked to said they found Vajpayee’s frankness refreshing especially when they compared it with the ‘duplicity’ of the Congress Party. It is India’s bad luck that after becoming Prime Minister Vajpayee found no time to make a new Kashmir policy.
So if Modi does end up as the BJP’s second prime minister then he should already start thinking about what needs to be done beyond rethinking Article 370. A good start would be for him to examine the historical mistakes that were made and that included rigged elections and the denial of basic political rights in exchange for cheap rice and the ostensible ‘pampering’ of Kashmir. This so-called pampering caused hostility towards ‘ungrateful’ Kashmiris in the rest of India and did very little to improve living standards in Kashmir.
He needs to look very carefully at why a new phase of the Kashmir problem was created after the toppling of Farooq Abdullah’s Government in 1984. If he does he may discover that the historical Kashmir problem had died by the eighties and that it was reborn only because people were denied their fundamental democratic rights. And, he needs to examine why jihadists have so changed the culture of the Kashmir valley that cinemas remain closed even today and little girls are forced to wear the ‘hijab’ in a state where women with uncovered faces once prayed beside men in mosques. So much blood and water has flowed down the Jhelum since then that there will be no real peace in Kashmir until there is a fresh approach taken towards solving India’s oldest and most intransigent political problem.
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