J&K: BJP should forgo alliance with PDP, play for the long haul
Just as the BJP and the PDP wrestle with a marriage of compulsion, dictated by the split outcome in the state’s Assembly elections, it remains to be seen who will play the husband. It is ironic that this embrace of the mutual hatred the two share is the most durable and that of the most loving, most unstable.
Will the BJP use the opportunity to rewrite the rules of the game by demolishing the Leftist Nehruvian narrative around Article 370, making it central to the state’s merger with India? Article 370 was a Nehruvian whim, like secularism and socialism, which framers of the Indian Constitution did not want, but were forced to include to humour Jawaharlal Nehru. If they parked secularism and socialism in Directive Principles of State Policy, Article 370 was accepted as a temporary expedient, at the end of which J&K would be a normally merged princely state.
If Indira Gandhi amended the Constitution in 1976 to make secularism and socialism its defining elements, a benign neglect allowed Article 370 to take a life of its own transmogrified into the soul of J&K’s accession to India. The fiction peddled as eternal truth is you end Article 370 and J&K’s accession to India ends. The Instrument of Accession which governed the accession is dismissed as a useless piece of paper. Article 370 was as insignificant as a buried dead donkey.
Nehru allowed Sheikh Abdullah to build a huge mausoleum of a miracle performing peer on this dead donkey. The fictional peer dictates what India can and cannot do in J&K. The BJP’s mission should be to expose the fraud by excavating the dead donkey. But the BJP will not do that? Just like any other Indian political party it will go for petty deals leveraging the strength of the numbers at its command in the state Assembly. People of Jammu had dismissed it as an opportunistic party which practiced tokenism with its Hindu voters. They have come back to it in this election giving it 25 seats, solely because they see a credible leader in PM Narendra Modi. Can Modi force J&K BJP to deliver, when the highest priority of its MLAs will be to be part of the government and enjoy power?
The BJP can enhance its appeal to voters of Jammu and Ladakh and rest of India by undoing the wrongs perpetrated by the Valley Muslims-dominated state leadership. The arbitrary fixing of Assembly constituencies, which allows the Valley to enjoy numerical majority in the state Assembly, is foremost. Sheikh Abdullah saw to it that Jammu and Ladakh combined had fewer seats than the Valley by creating much larger constituencies. This was further fortified making the arrangement delimitation proof through a resolution passed in J&K Assembly. Leaving nothing to chance, the latest census in 2011 was rigged by undercounting in Jammu and Ladakh and over counting the Valley. A fresh census under Centre’s supervision should be done and on the basis of new census a new deal for Jammu and Ladakh justified.
Another sore point is the creative demography practiced by the Valley dominated Muslim leadership. It encourages Muslim labourers from other parts of India to settle in Jammu to change the Hindu character of the region. The latest are the Myanmarese Muslim Rohingia refugees in Jammu. While there are regular attacks on Bihari Hindu labourers, these Muslims remain safe. Similarly, Tibetan Muslims (of Tibetan mothers and Kashmiri Muslim fathers) have been settled in Ladakh to reduce the Buddhist percentage. Significantly, they have been given state subject rights denied to Hindu-Sikh refugees from PoK.
The Kashmiri leadership has been implementing all steps to strengthen its clout in Jammu and Ladakh which it denies to central government in name of state autonomy. If it can send Muslim settlers to non-Muslim parts of J&K, why can’t the Centre settle non-Muslims in the Kashmir Valley?
The Left lib Nehruvian establishment has allowed the Kashmiri Muslim leadership to get away with murder in the ethnic cleansing of the Kashmiri Pandits - they got the same treatment given to Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan. The government looked the other way, as if this tragedy had taken place in an independent Muslim country.
This raises the question - if a community with full rights is driven away by brute force of the majority from its ancestral homeland, does the offender community deserve similar treatment by summoning the might of the Indian state?
After all, the residents of J&K were subjects of the maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir. With the merger into Indian Union, they became subjects/citizens of the Constitution of India. A maharaja could always banish a recalcitrant member of Raiyyat or hang a treasonous one. The Constitution of India should summon similar powers to punish.
Unfortunately, the BJP will choose to shrink from all of these challenging problems. Instead it will negotiate the nitty-gritty of power sharing. It will crow in triumph if the PDP concedes a Hindu CM from Jammu, with Manmohan Singh-like status; the real power exercised by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed as chairman of coordination committee. Or it will sell its acceptance of deputy chief ministership as a hard bargain with big financial concessions extracted for Jammu and Ladakh.
The ideal situation for the BJP will be to go for the long haul – take the negotiating position to the breaking point in which it should look like the party that refused to sacrifice the interests of Jammu and Ladakh. This should lead to President's rule in which it can make sweeping changes in the state administration. In effect, Jammu and Ladakh will come into power through the backdoor.
Even if a state government is formed minus the BJP with support of the Congress and the NC, it will not last long resulting in fresh elections in less than a year. In that election the BJP will score really big - 40 plus seats - setting the stage for the unravelling of the forced combination of Jammu and Ladakh from the Kashmir Valley.
Another bonus with this approach will be that the BJP will attract more voters in the coming Assembly elections in Bihar, Bengal, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh.