Bullet, ballot and silence of Jammu and Kashmir

Five years since the abrogation of Article 370, a manufactured normalcy prevails in the Valley while militancy menaces Jammu and Ladakh is gripped by existential anxiety

On the fifth anniversary, today, of the reading down of Article 370, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Jammu and Kashmir policy seems like a bedsheet that is a bit small for a mattress. Tuck the sheet on one side of the mattress, and the opposite side gets exposed. Pull the sheet the other way, and it pops out from under the mattress. This is, in a nutshell, Delhi’s problem five years after it deprived J&K of its special status, demoted it from a state to a Union Territory, and hived off from it Ladakh as another Union Territory.

The streets of Kashmir are ostensibly quieter and calmer: teenagers no longer pelt stones at the security forces, and thousands do not turn up at the funerals of militants slain in gunbattles, chanting, “Azadi, Azadi.” But this transformation is not on account of Kashmiri Muslims discovering their love for Delhi. It is because the cost of expressing discontent or dissent has been made extraordinarily, and unconscionably, high for 
its people.

An apt example of the silencing of Kashmir is its media, which has become a veritable government mouthpiece. The media presumably lost its spunk after a slew of journalists was tossed into prison—Aasif Sultan, Fahad Shah, Irfan Mehraj, Sajad Gul, etc. There was, indeed, a lesson for them to draw from the incarceration of civil society activist Khurram Parvez, who had brought to light human rights violations in the Valley, and lawyers given to critiquing the State in a voice deemed anti-India.

It seems the Stockholm Syndrome grips journalists, exemplified by an extraordinary deposition of a newspaper owner to a fact-finding committee of the Press Council of India that visited the Valley, in 2021-2022, to investigate the alleged intimidation of the media critical of the government. The owner said, “There are journalists for and against the government. If the journalist has the right to write against the government, the government has the right to shut you out.”

Shut out, for sure, was the press club in Srinagar. Its premises now house a police station! But even this manufacturing of normalcy cannot be pitched as a beneficial outcome of the reading down of Article 370, for militancy is now menacing the Jammu region—the other side of the mattress, so to speak.
 
Taking advantage of redeployment of troops from here to Ladakh, in response to the Chinese soldiers amassed there, militants from Pakistan, since 2021, have come down from the Pir Panjal range to launch deadly attacks not only in Rajouri and Poonch but also in the Chenab Valley districts of Doda, Ramban and Kishtwar. They have targeted military convoys with frightening precision.  According to one estimate, 48 army soldiers have died in the Jammu region in less than three years.

Using statistics on deaths to measure normalcy can become an exercise in futility. According to the South Asian Terrorism Portal, 307 security personnel and 173 civilians died due to militancy in J&K between 2015 and 2018. I left out the figures for 2019, for it divides the years with and without Article 370. Thereafter, between 2020 and July 2024, militancy in the Union Territory has claimed the lives of 180 soldiers and 128 civilians. 
Could the dip in fatalities be claimed as an outcome of the improved security situation crafted by the reading down of Article 370? Or, to put it in another way, by what number should deaths reduce before it can be said that normalcy is now J&K’s fate?

The story of the fifth anniversary need not be one of death and gore, yet that makes not the story enthusing in any way. Take Ladakh, whose people greeted the status of Union Territory granted to them with jubilation. They have belatedly realised that without an Assembly, it’s the Lt Governor, a Delhi appointee, who will determine the course of their lives.

Without the protection of Article 35A, scrapped along with Article 370, they feel their identity and demography face a threat because now, people from outside Ladakh can purchase land there. Their anxiety has grown because all the chatter about developing Ladakh evokes a dystopian vision of ecological disaster. And so, Ladakh has witnessed multiple street protests and shutdowns, demanding full statehood for it and inclusion in the Constitution’s Sixth Schedule, which would empower them to legislate on land and forest.

But disenchantment can also be articulated through the ballot. It is bewildering that the State allowed Sheikh Abdul Rashid, popularly known as Engineer Rashid, to contest from Baramulla in the recent Lok Sabha elections, against former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and Sajad Lone, a BJP friend. Locked up in jail, it was perhaps presumed Engineer would muster a lakh or so votes, as he did in 2019, shrink Abdullah’s base and pave the way for Lone’s victory.

But Engineer gathered 4.70 lakh votes and emerged victorious. His triumph has been ascribed to Kashmiris identifying in Engineer’s imprisonment their own fettering and, therefore, voting to spite Delhi, its friends and dynasts. It again shows that the BJP’s policy, like the bedsheet that is a bit small for the mattress, reveals what it wants to camouflage: J&K’s abnormalities.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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