What cost must Kashmir bear for BJP to make this marriage work with PDP?

Some marriages are doomed at the altar. The "alliance of governance", stitched together between the BJP and PDP after two months of tortuous courting, was based on the myth that opposites attract.

They don't - not in politics. The argument was deceptively seductive: the December 2014 J&K Assembly election delivered a split mandate. The Valley voted for the PDP. Jammu voted for the BJP.

By coming together in government, they would be respecting the will of the people of both Jammu and Kashmir. There would be healing. The chasm between "Muslim" Kashmir and "Hindu" Jammu would be bridged.

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They were wrong. The soft separatist sentiment the PDP represents resented the alliance with the BJP from the beginning. The PDP workers showed their anger by boycotting Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's funeral in January 2016.

His daughter Mehbooba is cut from different cloth. She has never hidden her desire to make Hurriyat separatists stakeholders in any "settlement" over Jammu and Kashmir.

Valley

With the Valley simmering, Mehbooba last week made a tactically shrewd move by, for the first time, blaming Pakistan for the violence.

While backing CBMs with Pakistan and advocating the withdrawal of the AFSPA, Mehbooba said of Islamabad: "Pakistan shouldn't tell our children that if you take up guns and die, we will salute you. I think this is hypocrisy. Every day, we get to know that infiltration is going on unabated along the borders."

The PDP and the National Conference have a history of ambivalence towards separatists. Both speak with forked tongues.

Both want a "political" solution to J&K without specifying what that solution is.

In a series of television interviews and newspaper columns, former home minister P Chidambaram has laid out his own prescription of what a political solution to J&K could mean: "As long as J&K remains an integral part of the Union of India, there is ample political and legal space to try out new ideas that will reassure the people of J&K that the government of India will honour the grand bargain of the accession. There are other steps that can be taken to retrieve the ground that has been lost since the advent of the PDP-BJP government, but this requires courage."

It is again a seductive argument in a Brexit world where Scotland could seek (and win) a second referendum to leave the United Kingdom.

But India lives in a more dangerous world. Kashmir is not Scotland: the Scots don't have a neighbour that sends gangs of terrorists to maim and kill its citizens.

Greater autonomy and the calibrated lifting of the AFSPA will certainly quieten Kashmiri tempers. It can, however, also give separatists and their Pakistani pay masters ever-easier access to the Valley. The poison this spreads can have the opposite effect to Chidambaram's prognosis.

External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj's statement last week that India will not allow "a heaven to become a terrorist haven" is an indication of the Modi government's realisation that its Pakistan policy so far has been inconsistent and counterproductive.

An autonomous, quasi-"independent" Kashmir would rapidly become a Pakistan-run frontline jihadi-infested state like Afghanistan.

Pak plan

Besides, Pakistan has no real desire to settle the Kashmir issue.

It serves to justify Pakistan's mountainous defence budget, much of which is siphoned off to lubricate military officers' lavish lifestyle.

Were the Kashmir dispute to be resolved, the Army would lose its primacy in Pakistan and put an end to the tidy fortunes its top brass makes.

The fault for the failure of India's Kashmir policy lies with the Indian government as well - past and present.

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The rigged J&K Assembly election of 1987 on Farooq Abdullah's and Rajiv Gandhi's watch led to the first flush of militancy in the Valley in 1989.

It was followed by decades of misrule by the Abdullahs and Muftis.

The PDP-BJP alliance government was meant to be a fresh start for J&K.

It was always a false hope. The PDP has ideological symmetry, among national parties, with the Congress. It has none with the BJP. It was delusional for the BJP to think that the PDP could somehow be weaned away from its separatist roots.

And yet the BJP will continue its efforts to keep the J&K alliance government going.

Governance

The BJP's mild deputy chief minister Nirmal Singh appears to have little say in the Valley's governance. Central cabinet ministers remain distracted.

Home minister Rajnath Singh visited the Valley over the weekend - a full fortnight after the terrorist Burhan Wani's death.

The Rs 80,000-crore flood relief package hasn't been delivered. This mixture of wilful neglect by the central government and directionless governance by the PDP-BJP state government further emboldens separatists and Pakistan-funded terrorists.

The PDP and BJP, like an unhappy couple, are stuck together because a midterm poll would be electorally disastrous for both.

For the BJP though, it is better to lose a state upholding a principle than lose a nation abandoning it.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)