It’s delusional to solely blame a Muslim cleric for radicalising a cabal of Kashmiri doctors, including the one who undertook the suicide bombing at Delhi’s Red Fort a fortnight ago. As sleuths seek to unravel the network of which they were a part, it will do Delhi good to recognise that the roots of radicalisation in Kashmir lie in history, marked by repeated betrayals of its people.
This saga of betrayals has three distinct phases. The first of these began soon after Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India, with the promise of granting self-determination to its people denied. The memory of that promise couldn’t be erased as Delhi stole elections for the leader looked upon as its man there. Such a leader was perceived to be National Conference’s Sheikh Abdullah, who won for his party all 75 seats there in 1951. Only two of the seats were contested, with the nomination papers of all others in the remaining 73 rejected.
Abdullah’s occasional public avowals regarding self-determination prompted a nervous Delhi to arrest him and anoint Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed as his successor. Under his leadership, in the 1957 Assembly election, the National Conference bagged 68 seats, of which 34 were clinched uncontested. Yet again, in 1962, the party was given a walkover in 34 out of the 70 seats it bagged. For the 1967 election, GM Sadiq merged his faction of the National Conference with the Congress — and won 61 seats, but without having to battle opponents in 22 of them.
The stealing of elections reached its apogee in 1987, when the National Conference and the Congress aligned to win 66 seats, albeit by brazenly rigging the election and brutalising the activists of the principal Opposition party, Muslim United Front. Their experience goaded them into crossing over to Pakistan, from where they returned to spark an armed secessionist movement, which, even as it waxed and waned over the years, sucked Kashmir into a vortex of violence from which it failed to find release and respite.
Through the next three decades of bloodshed, Delhi strove to battle militancy as well as resolve the Kashmir issue through dialogue and negotiations. A breakthrough was nearly achieved in 2013-14, when a draft agreement between India and Pakistan on Kashmir was finalised during the tenure of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. An outcome of back-channel diplomacy conducted between the late Indian diplomat Satinder Lambah and three of his Pakistani counterparts, the draft agreement addressed the concerns of Kashmiris, with the exception of self-determination.
The draft agreement was put into deep freeze as the Congress government shied away from signing it in the months before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, fearing such a step could harm its electoral prospects. At least until 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to Lambah, seemed interested in turning the draft agreement into an India-Pakistan pact on Kashmir.
Two years later, in August 2019, the saga of betrayals witnessed an altogether another twist, with the abrogation of Article 370. Not only was the special status of Kashmir upended, the state was demoted to being a union territory — and balkanised. Also annulled was Article 35A, which had barred outsiders from buying land in J&K. Anxieties over altering Kashmir’s demography grew. The Valley was packed with boots.
A new template for Kashmir evolved: the once-vibrant newspapers were reduced to being government mouthpieces, dissenters were booked under draconian laws, and even Friday prayers at Srinagar’s Jama Masjid were often suspended. The State resorted to collective punishment, blowing up the family houses of those engaged in militancy. There also began a rewriting of Kashmir’s memory, including the surreptitious erasure of newspaper archives and the banning of 25 books on the antecedents of the Kashmir problem. Kashmiris were lulled into sullen silence, which was construed as their acceptance of the new reality.
The defining feature of the new reality is that Delhi will not lighten the history’s burden on Kashmiris by addressing in even a small measure their political grievances suppurating over the decades. They must silently wallow in their misery — or protest at their own peril. Pakistan scripted the Pahalgam massacre in April partly to challenge the new reality. This seemed to have been the motive of Dr Umar Nabi, too, behind blowing himself at the Red Fort.
In an incoherent video recording, Dr Nabi confusingly sought to equate martyrs with suicide bombers. They are alike but also remarkably different, as cultural theorist Terry Eagleton pointed out in A Different Way of Death, a piece published in The Guardian in 2005. Martyrs, Eagleton says, sacrifice themselves not because they see “death as desirable in itself, but in the name of a more abundant life all round.” Although suicide bombers also die in the name of a better life for others, they, unlike martyrs, take the lives of others with their own, as Dr Nabi did, chillingly and despicably, in Delhi. Their death and that of every soldier in the Valley underscore that a muscular security policy must be accompanied with attempts to ease history’s burden on Kashmiris — and those outside of Kashmir as well — as Lambah tried.
The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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