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Manmohan’s task at the Red Fort

This morning when the Prime Minister addresses the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort he may want to tell the country how and why things have come to such a sorry pass in Jammu and Kashmir. Why have the gains — political, strategic, and psychological — of the last 15 years been allowed to get dissolved so quickly in the last few months? He may have some thoughts on how to explain the bloodshed by Indian soldiers which has been dishonoured by his Home Minister’s sheer ineptitude? And, if he has the courage of his convictions, Dr. Singh may want to use the opportunity to mobilise the nation against the Bharatiya Janata Party’s incendiary politics.

The sad fact is that the Prime Minister has been so obsessively preoccupied with the India-U.S. civilian nuclear agreement that he found himself unable to monitor and correct the developments in Jammu and Kashmir. After all, an innovative resolution of the Kashmir problem was supposed to be one of his “legacy” issues; and, to begin with, Dr. Singh did invest considerable time and energy in sorting things out with President Musharraf. Maybe, the reconciliation matrix changed once the civilians took charge of Pakistan and became internally distracted; but there was no reason for the Prime Minister to leave Jammu and Kashmir entirely to his Home Minister. Today, all the comforting assumptions of the last few years — normality, separatists disheartened, militants on the run, economic progress, etc., — stand shattered.

It is easy, especially with hindsight, to catalogue all the sins that have been committed in this sensitive State. First, there was the decision to insist that Mufti Mohammed Sayeed make way for a Congress chief ministerial nominee. The decision was predicated on a charge that sections of the People’s Democratic Party were in a nexus with “militants.” The security establishment in New Delhi was the author of this fabrication. For better or for worse, this was seized upon by the perennial intriguers in the All-India Congress Committee brass to add “one more Congress Chief Minister” to Ms Sonia Gandhi’s crown.

Instead of seeing through the intriguers’ game and its harmful implications, the Prime Minister went along with the party apparatchiks. It was Dr. Singh’s national duty to insist that his party leadership ensured that Ghulam Nabi Azad remained faithful and honest to the Congress-PDP alliance; instead, the Chief Minister was allowed to remain trapped in his presumptions. As an all-India party, the Congress has the obligation to be mindful of the national implications of its actions or inaction; in this critical State, the Congress had the responsibility of reconciling Kashmiri aspirations with Jammu grievances. As the self-designated custodian of India’s multicultural secular arrangement, the Congress leadership is clearly guilty of failing to observe due diligence.

It was bad enough that the Chief Minister was left alone to write his own script of political narrow-mindedness. It was worse that the Prime Minister and his advisers did not anticipate what the former Governor, Lt. Gen. (retired) S.K.Sinha, was up to. Admittedly, the Union Home Minister has the primary responsibility for Jammu and Kashmir affairs; and, in the normal course, that’s where the matter should have been handled. However, by now Mr. Patil’s inadequacies in dealing with issues of internal security are widely recognised. Any reasonably alert Home Minister should have long ago found a replacement for Gen. Sinha, rather than let him complete his term and pursue a blatantly partisan agenda. But Mr. Patil did not act, while the bogey of “land grab” was allowed to go unchallenged. Equivocation and indecisiveness are no substitute to hard decisions.

In particular, the Prime Minister should have understood clearly that his Home Minister lost all interest for the job, especially after the Left presciently vetoed his elevation to the Rashtrapati Bhavan last August (though, in the process, the Left pre-empted the possibility of the country getting a new hands-on Home Minister). We live in too troubled a region to have a disheartened man preside over North Block and its vast security apparatus. This ever-expanding security estate needs intellectual leadership and administrative guidance; and, Mr. Patil is obviously not the answer. Admittedly, the Prime Minister was never free — nor is he free now — to choose or dismiss his Home Minister. Those tutored in the current realpolitik know very well that Ms Gandhi has inexplicable faith in Mr. Shivraj Patil. Yet it is fair to suggest that future historians are bound to ask if Dr. Singh was too obsessed with the India-U.S. nuclear agreement that he thought he was in no position to insist on a replacement for Mr. Patil. Historians will also wonder if Dr. Singh could risk his prime ministership on the nuclear deal, what prevented him from taking a similar stand in the matter of a new Home Minister. Hundreds of officers and men of the Army had not shed blood in Kashmir just to keep a party president humoured in her comfort zone. Perhaps, the Prime Minister did not want to be seen as a man having an independent view on how internal security ought to be managed. The consequences are too painful and too evident. What is worse, from the realpolitik point of view, the stalemate in Jammu and Kashmir does not help the Congress politically or electorally.

Is it too late for the Prime Minister to assert his independence? A new face and a new voice are bound to bring new energy and a new intellectual vigour to the task of finding a way out of the stalemate in Jammu and Kashmir. Dr. Singh has to make a convincing attempt to impress upon the country that there is no confusion at the highest level of the governing arrangement on what needs to be done in the troubled State; only then will he be able to take on the task of rescuing the idea of secular India from the Sangh Parivar’s onslaught.

It is the Prime Minister’s job — indeed, his sacred duty — to tell the nation of the BJP’s perniciously divisive and cynical political game in Jammu and Kashmir. It is no use lamenting that L.K. Advani and his colleagues have embarked on an opportunistically cynical pursuit of the Hindu votes in the current standoff. The BJP makes no bones about its preferred strategy of wanting to consolidate the “Hindu vote” on the so-called Amarnath yatra issue.

The country needs to be told of Mr. Advani’s own record of stewardship as Home Minister. Before he arrived at North Block, Mr. Advani made a career of making the country believe that he had what it would take to take on the militants, jehadis, the ISI and Pakistan and the troublesome elements in J&K. Once in office, he found he could not turn away from the obligation to explore reconciliation and peace in the State; in fact, his very first move in August 2000 was to send the Union Home Secretary to sit across the table with a group of secessionists (who came to the negotiating table, as Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee later informed Parliament, with their faces masked). Power and responsibility enjoined on Mr. Advani and others in the Vajpayee team to try to put behind them the Sangh Parivar-manufactured demonology and to pursue the requirements of peace. For better or for worse, the brightest moment of the NDA’s six-year rule was the January 2004 breakthrough in Islamabad, which in turn paved the way for the subsequent normality in Jammu and Kashmir.

Now Mr. Advani has turned his back on the obligations of restraint and responsibility and blessed the totally misguided Amarnath Sangarsh Samiti and its equally misguided agitation for “restoration” of the so-called “allotted land.” As the head of the ruling arrangement, it is the Prime Minister’s duty to educate the country on this duplicity. The Prime Minister and his political colleagues in the Congress ought to realise that the new India had long ago moved away from the fears and apprehensions of early 1990s. There is no reason for them to remain a prisoner of the Shivraj Patil type of timidity.

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