by Barkha Dutt
Although he had always rubbished the idea of a merger with Pakistan, Sheikh Abdullah began to talk about the possibility of an independent Kashmir which could enjoy the same status it did before the accession. Soon after he changed his stance he was jailed and dismissed from office and was not able to lead the state for another twenty years. His unceremonious and forced exit would be the first in a series of similar undemocratic interventions from Delhi, blunders that would vitiate the state’s future. The Sheikh’s clash was not just with Nehru but, closer home, with the Praja Parishad of Jammu, a new political party representing the interests of Jammu Hindus, led by men like Balraj Madhok, who went on to become the president of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (the precursor to the BJP). With its slogan of ‘Jammu Alag Karo’ (Separate Jammu) it sought to end the Muslim dominance of Sheikh Abdullah and wanted a complete integration with India without any exemptions of law.
Jammu and Kashmir is the only state in India permitted to fly its own flag alongside the national flag and also the only state to have its own constitution and separate penal code. This was part of the special arrangement under Article 370 that had formed the basis of its accession to the Union of India. It is these constitutional privileges enabled by the state’s special status that led Shyama Prasad Mukherjee—the Bharatiya Jana Sangh founder, member of Nehru’s first Cabinet and vocal supporter of the Praja Parishad movement—to famously proclaim, ‘Ek desh mein do vidhan, do pradhan aur do nishaan nahin chalenge (In one country, we cannot have two constitutions, two leaders and two flags).’
During the Praja Parishad uprising, protesters would pull down the state flag from government buildings and replace it with the Indian flag. In one of many missives to Nehru, Mukherjee wrote, ‘If India’s constitution was good enough for the rest of India, why should it not be acceptable to Jammu and Kashmir?’
Over the years, many of these distinctive powers were whittled down. The centre was given the power to dismiss an elected state government in case of a breakdown in law and order, the nomenclature of the heads of the state were changed from Sadr-e-Riyasat and Wazir-e-Azam to governor and chief minister respectively, and hundreds of union laws were made applicable to Jammu and Kashmir through a series of constitutional amendments. Nevertheless, exceptional prerogatives remained with the state.
Now, just like his father had five decades ago, Farooq appeared to be on a collision course with the RSS on the issue of greater autonomy for the state. ‘Name one Hurriyat leader who has ever stood for India, can you name even one?’ He smiled when I suggested he was being overdramatic. ‘We are with India, Barkha, they are with Pakistan or for independence,’ he said, expounding on why his call for autonomy was the only effective antidote to their slogans of ‘azadi’.
Farooq Abdullah was hard to read. Excitable, passionate, impetuous and colourful, he was as much at ease cavorting with Bollywood heroines as he was talking about terrorism and foreign policy. He had a knack for the Kodak moment; he thought nothing of suddenly diving into the cold waters of the Dal Lake to enliven a tourism meet. One day, in the interiors of the Valley, I asked an ageing village man what he thought of the chief minister. ‘Voh to disco hain (He is like disco),’ he replied, in the most accurate summary I have ever heard of Farooq’s kaleidoscopic and idiosyncratic personality.
Farooq spoke Kashmiri, Punjabi, Dogri, English and Urdu, and was unchained by worries about how people would perceive him. He was a master at using humour to deflate tricky questions. As a young reporter who was on the Kashmir beat for decades, I got to know him quite well and was often at the receiving end of his frivolity.
As happened to all high-profile reporters on the front line, slanderous whispers would follow me and I was used to hearing that I had married or was in a relationship with this or that powerful Kashmiri leader to explain how I got my stories. I had learnt to laugh this nonsense off. Farooq must have heard the silly, malicious jokes as well. One day, during the 2002 elections which would depose the National Conference after twenty-seven years in power, I accosted Farooq and his son Omar as they emerged from a polling booth after casting their votes and asked them to respond to persistent rumours—I used the Urdu word ‘afwah’ for rumour—about rising friction between father and son. As Omar prepared to launch into a serious rebuttal, Farooq interrupted him with, ‘Afwah to yeh bhi hai ki hum tumhare aashiq hain, afwah se kya hota hai (Rumour also has it that I am your suitor, what does rumour have to do with anything)!’ he said with a big smile, stumping me on live national television. It was classic Farooq. Father and son were, of course, a study in contrast. Farooq’s spontaneity and earthiness made it far easier for him to connect to ordinary people than his son, Omar. Omar, the third generation of the Abdullah family in politics, was a much more emotionally reserved figure than his father, or grandfather. At the same time, Omar, a hotel management graduate who his father would have preferred to stay out of politics, was regarded as the more sober, level-headed and politically correct of the two.
Neither ever spoke publicly of any disagreements but in the 2008 elections I got a sense of some tension between father and son. On the night of 28 December, when the results were to be declared, I was in Srinagar, sitting close to a kangri heaped with burning coals, trying to keep warm as we broadcast live from Nagin Lake. Farooq Abdullah strode in, dressed in a beige phiran and his signature Karakul hat. The National Conference and the Congress party were all set to form the next government in a coalition but Farooq looked grim and slightly irritated. As we analysed the results the conversation shifted to who would lead the government. ‘Am I looking at the next chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir?’ I asked, waiting for the politically correct replies that usually followed such questions. ‘Yes, Inshallah, you are,’ he said without a moment of hesitation. ‘Is that categorical?’ I asked, taken aback by the certainty of his response. ‘Absolutely categorical,’ he said cutting my question short, ‘the party has already decided.’
Within minutes of the interview airing, my phone rang. It was a senior party leader who worked closely with Omar Abdullah. ‘Yeh to tabahi ho gayi (This is a disaster),’ he said, sounding agitated and confused. ‘What have you done?’ The party had contested the election with Farooq as the official chief ministerial candidate. But now that the results were in, those closer to Omar saw this as his chance. The Abdullahs needed Congress support to form the government, and rumour had it that Rahul Gandhi had one condition—that Omar, and not his father, be the CM. Farooq declaring that the job was his to take had created a awkward situation and Omar’s team was anxious. Nobody knows what transpired that night. Did the father and son have a heart to heart? Did the Gandhis give Farooq an ultimatum or did they offer him something better? The next morning Farooq Abdullah told the media that he would much rather sit in Parliament than move to the state assembly. ‘Father and son can never have differences,’ he announced airily.
Of course Farooq’s autonomy report, endorsed by the state assembly, was never considered for discussion by any government at the centre. The disregard with which it was treated by both national parties in Delhi made the redundancy of committees and reports and interlocutors and working group discussions abundantly clear to the Kashmiris. Nobody at the centre followed through on anything they had promised.
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History was condemned to repeat itself in far too many ways in the Kashmir Valley. Just like his father’s elected government had been dismissed when Nehru was prime minister, in 1983 Nehru’s daughter Indira backed a split in the National Conference that brought down Farooq’s government. Farooq had told friends he thought the years Indira brought his government down to be the worst years of his life—even worse than the challenges of militancy. He would tell his friends the story of how he landed in Saudi Arabia for the Umrah soon after his government fell—to find that his luggage was missing. Indira, he suspected, had ordered the intelligence to spy on him and rummage through his bags. The man who engineered the coup would end up being the second pillar
in Kashmir politics, along with his fiery daughter Mehbooba. But at the time Mufti Mohammad Sayeed was only the president of the Jammu and Kashmir Congress. Farooq would never forgive him because the split in the party was not just political, it was also personal—the man Mufti had propped up to lead the breakaway faction was none other than G. M. Shah, Farooq’s brother-in-law.
Eventually, Mufti would become a Cabinet minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s government, part ways with the Congress to join the V. P. Singh uprising, become India’s first Muslim union home minister, return briefly to the Congress during the Narasimha Rao years, and then leave it all behind to form his own party in 1999. Once considered New Delhi’s voice in the Valley, Mufti now leads the PDP, widely regarded as borderline separatist in its politics. In 1989, while he was union home minister, his daughter Rubaiya was kidnapped by militants. Despite that, as well as several attempts on his life by separatists, Mufti was soft on insurgents, insisting that his government’s ‘healing touch’ would extend to all—separatists and families of militants included.
Mufti’s other daughter Mehbooba, a law graduate from Kashmir University, is the only member of the second generation of the Sayeed family to become a force in politics. She described herself as someone who had come to politics by accident and contested her first election in 1996 upon her father’s advice. Soon, it was Mehbooba who travelled door to door, village to village, braving threats, wading into crowds to build a connection with people, especially women. Outside the Valley, she became controversial for her frequent visits to the families of militants who had been killed. ‘They are dead now,’ she would tell me, ‘why should their children be punished?’ In a conservative society, she became the first woman to head a political party and emerged as a popular campaigner for civil rights. She was sometimes regarded with wariness in Delhi because of the shrill political positions they thought she took. But I must say that I found her gumption and guts admirable. A divorced single mother to two daughters, she forged her own path and through sheer energy and focus was able to build a mass base for a relatively new party that, unlike the Abdullahs, had no advantages of dynasty or legacy.
In comparison to her political opponents, she was more like Farooq than Omar; she could be volatile, sentimental and sometimes theatrical. In 2004, she stormed into a polling booth and dramatically lifted the veil of a woman she believed was a bogus voter. As luck would have it, I was in the same booth when this happened and our cameras caught the flare-up. The woman fled without voting and later told journalists that she had veiled herself because she felt safer in a burkha from militant threats (they wanted the polls to be boycotted). As the footage played nationally Mehbooba was irritated with me; she believed I had overdone the story to embarrass her. But we remained in regular contact through the ups and downs of Kashmir politics. As I got to know her, I discovered that beneath the fire and brimstone was a laid-back, regular young woman with a wicked sense of humour.
I still chuckle when I think of our conversation right after the dramatic elections of 2002. She told me how Omar had dropped by to meet her to offer congratulations. He apologized, she said, for coming empty-handed and remarked that he should have at least brought a cake or something. ‘Never mind, Omar,’ she recalled telling him, ‘tum bhi koi cake se kum ho kya (You are no less than a cake)!’
The Muftis emerged as a force to reckon with in the Valley and raised the slogan of ‘self-rule’, taking Farooq’s autonomy demand several steps further. Their politics was antithetical to everything the BJP stood for so no one could have ever predicted that the two sides could come together in possibly the most unlikely coalition Indian politics had ever seen. Yet, after the mandate of 2014, when Jammu voted overwhelmingly for the BJP, and the PDP led the tally in the Kashmir Valley, the only alternative to a dangerous vacuum was for these ideological enemies to forge a partnership.
‘We are like the North Pole and South Pole,’ said Mufti Mohammad Sayeed with a smile, when the negotiations between the two sides to draft a common minimum programme of governance were still on. I met Mufti in a government guest house in Mumbai in early 2015, more than a month after the results were out but a government had not yet been formed. Although Mufti was an old-school politician with a propensity to digress into rambling stories, today he was absolutely focused on one point. There would be no PDP–BJP government if there was any move to scuttle Article 370 which gave Jammu and Kashmir its special status. ‘All we are asking for is that they [BJP] commit that the present status—we aren’t even calling it a special status—not be altered in any way. We cannot compromise on this,’ he told me. And what if they didn’t agree? ‘Then perhaps they can try and form the government with someone else. I am not desperate to be chief minister. As former home minister, everyone knows I am Indian by conviction. We are negotiating with the BJP out of conviction not compulsion... I hope Prime Minister Modi understands that this is a great opportunity and one that is not likely to come again.’
Notably, in the state elections of 2014, the BJP vision document made no mention of doing away with the state’s special status, nor did Prime Minister Modi’s campaign speeches bring it up. Despite the seasonal political rhetoric around Article 370 no national party, including the BJP, is likely to push for its abolition. To start with, scrapping it would need not just a constitutional amendment in Parliament but a subsequent ratification by the state’s assembly. And no Valley-based party can afford to tamper with what has come to be a symbol of the closest the Kashmiris may ever get to sovereignty.
So, Mufti had his way on Article 370. And when the new state government was sworn in on 1 March 2015, in the presence of Prime Minister Modi, both the state’s flag and the national flag flew in the foreground in an ironic reminder of what was no longer possible to change.
IV
The truth and lies of Jammu and Kashmir’s reality reminds me of Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Rashomon, in which a crime is recounted by all those connected to the event. Each telling of the tale is contradictory, yet equally plausible, casting doubts on the absolute singularity of Truth. Any chronicle of Jammu and Kashmir is marked by the Rashomon effect—what I mean by this is that to attempt a reasonably accurate portrait of a complex reality one has to always work with various versions of the truth. The propensity to see the challenges faced by the state in stark black and white has led to the insurgency either being romanticized by ultra-left sympathizers, who always cast the Indian armed forces in the role of the enemy, or misunderstood by ultra-nationalists who believe that a combination of firmness and force can eventually do in Kashmir what was done in Punjab in the eighties during the Khalistan militancy years. Neither approach does justice to the multiple strands of truth that tie together its reality.
The real misfortune is that sorrow and pain have become instruments in a competitive narrative of ‘Our suffering vs. Their suffering’. Even grief has become a subject of political polarization. Mourning the loss of innocent lives and seeking justice for them is qualified again and again by the ifs and buts of politics, the divisions of ideology, the weight of history and the deep fissures in social and religious amity. But, when the coffin comes home, the father of the teenage boy killed by a tear-gas shell fired by security forces and the father of the young soldier pumped with bullets by terrorists at the border—share the same feelings of loss and heartbreak.
The postcards I collected from Kashmir were not of a sun-dappled Dal Lake or pristine snow on the ski slopes of Gulmarg or red chillies and walnuts laid out to dry on the gleaming thatched roofs of storybook cottages in rice fields. My collection was a chronicle of corpses and coffins, too many to count, too many to forget. Burials and funeral pyres, slogans and street processions, bombs and blood, grief and gore came to be the collage of memories I carried of a state that I still found hauntingly beautiful, made somehow more achingly real by (as Yeats would say) the ‘sorrow of its pilgrim face’.
The violence I had seen had shockproofed me. In April 2005, as the Srinagar
to Muzaffarabad bus was to be flagged off, I was present when militants took over the city’s tourist centre. I watched the police burn it entirely to the ground to smoke out the attackers. Before that I reported on the assassination of a regional politician who was blown to smithereens by the force of the explosion that killed him. The bomb had thrown parts of his body into the branches of a giant tree, a sight that would haunt my dreams.
There was the crushing sorrow of seeing an eleven-year-old daughter hold back her tears, her slender back arched and her head held high as she bid a final farewell to her heroic father, Colonel M. N. Rai, with his regiment’s war cry. Colonel Rai was shot by terrorists who misled him into believing they wanted to surrender. Just a day earlier he had made his mark as the youngest officer to be recognized with the Yudh Seva Medal, a prestigious gallantry award. The next morning, he was dead. His Whatsapp status read like a premonition: ‘Play your role in life with such passion that even after the curtains come down, the applause doesn’t stop.’ It was impossible not to be moved deeply by the extraordinary family of three brothers—the colonel was the youngest—sons of a government school principal in Kalimpong, who all became decorated soldiers. On the day of his funeral, I met his elder brother, a commandant with the Central Reserve Police Force, also honoured with a bravery medal for containing a terror attack by the LeT on Jammu’s Raghunath Temple. He said he would want his brother to be remembered for two things, for his valour of course, but also for his humanity and the attempts he made at building emotional bridges with the people in the Valley. I was struck by the fact that he wanted to emphasize his brother’s compassion as much as his courage. It is this benevolence and generosity of feeling that is sometimes in short supply in our national conversation about the state, perhaps understandably choked by the enormity of the grim daily battle against bombs and bullets. Incendiary remarks from Pakistan-backed separatists like Syed Shah Geelani, who brazenly described the men who killed Colonel Rai as ‘martyrs’, only deepen the collective hostility of the rest of the nation towards Kashmir.
