Here is a lesson for those so naïve as to not know this. When a nationalist political party states its position on foundational aspects of a country and its culture, believe it no matter how implausible it may seem. That is because they mean it.
Today, I say this in the specific context of the abrogation of Article 370 of India’s Constitution granting a special status to the state of Jammu & Kashmir by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government led by Prime Minister Narenda Modi. The rejection of 370 within the BJP’s core ideology as well as that of its progenitor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its early political offshoot, the Jan Sangh apart from its broader Hindu affiliates has been sweeping for decades.
I discovered how deep this rejection was in late 1989-early 1990 when, as the Kashmir Valley was slipping into the first throes of violent separatist insurgency, I happened to chat up a low-level party functionary while waiting for my appointment with its grandee Atal Bihari Vajpayee at the party office. The functionary, with an eye firmly on Kashmir, declared “Dhara 370 hata dijiye aur sab theek ho jayega. (Remove Article 370 and all will be fine.”)
Nearly three-decades hence the party has as good as done that. It is not my case at all that merely because someone has a long-held conviction and eventually lives up to that, it is automatically commendable or even right. I am saying no one should be surprised that the BJP has done it because it has long said it would. Its timing, motivation and consequences can and must all be a matter of vigorous debate but its action cannot come as an upending surprise. I find it amusing that former chief minister of J & K Mehbooba Mufti says she feels that India has “betrayed” Kashmir. In an interview with the BBC, she was quoted as saying, “"We have been let down by the same nation we ceded to." According to the BBC, she said that “it seemed as though the state had made the "wrong choice" in aligning with India rather than Pakistan during partition in 1947.”
I say amused because the same Mehbooba Mufti’s People's Democratic Party was in alliance with the BJP until as recently as June of last year. One can safely presume that Mufti was quite aware of the party’s assertive derision and rejection of 370 then. One can, of course, argue that there is a difference between maintaining an ideological position on an issue and actually acting on it. Well, like I said, when a nationalist political party states a foundational position, believe it because they do.
She could have taken a principled position before forming a coalition government with the BJP and not formed an alliance because of their directly contradictory position over an issue that she believes is essential to her state’s existence. Ditto the BJP because it also knew that the abolition of 370 was politically and culturally anathema to the PDP and its cadres. However, both chose to be self-servingly pragmatic only to eventually collapse as the BJP withdrew support on June 19, 2018.
On the broader question of whether Article 370 should have been abolished and what its consequences might be I have a somewhat amorphous take. Before I dwell on it, I believe any nation’s constitution should not be treated with such rigid reverence that it becomes The Book that must not be trifled with. No constitution is divinely handed down, if you believe in that kind of non-sense. It is created by a group of fallible people in response to a set of specific historical circumstances. There are always those who have the sagacity to embed values in the document, which are universal, and, in some sense, even eternally moral. However, in and of it, the constitution is not a pure document that cannot be changed.
Similarly, there is always unseemly rush to condemn India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his “sins”, as his virulent opponents in the BJP camp absurdly describe it, for his role in the creation of 370 along with Sheikh Abdullah and Maharaja Hari Singh of Kashmir. It is a fact of history that Nehru, as in charge of Kashmir portfolio in 1947, propelled the article in the face of opposition from his home minister, Sardar Patel and others in the Congress Party. The success or otherwise of 370 is a matter of serious debate and also a function of which side of the ideological divide one dwells. However, to impute sinister motives to Nehru for the sake of it and purely out of ideological spite is problematic.
The bifurcation of Jammu & Kashmir into two union territories with legislatures for Jammu and Kashmir and a union territory without legislature for Ladakh is quite a leap. Whether we land into a future better for the state than it has been in the last 72 years is a matter of conjecture. The notion that it would dramatically speed up Kashmir’s integration into the national mainstream rising above its violent insurgent fault lines often created by Pakistan is seriously questionable. What it does do, however, is strengthen New Delhi’s direct writ over it. But more about that in my part 2 tomorrow.
I reported on the Kashmir insurgency for over seven years from its inception 1989-90. I have some measure of what the situation was on the ground during its first explosion. I vividly remember speaking a hotheaded young man in Anantnag, which he called “Islamabad”, telling me in Hindi sometime in 1991 or 92, "अभी तो ३७० हमारी जेब में हैं (We still have 370 in our pocket),” to assert its specialness. No more so.
