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For secessionists, humiliation follows hubris

“Elections are ultimately projected as a sort of referendum by India, and that is why we have called for a complete boycott of such a process,” said the chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, on November 10. Speaking to journalists just a week before the seven-phase elections to the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly began, the Mirwaiz made “a last call to the so-called mainstream politicians to join the separatist movement and pull out.” If they still chose to contest, “the people shall start a social boycott campaign against them.”

Humiliation, as any student of tragic literature could have predicted, has followed hubris. Just seven days after the Mirwaiz held out the threat, 74 per cent of the voters in Gurez, 57 per cent in Bandipora and 47 per cent in Sonawari defied his call, and lined up outside polling booths.

Kashmir’s Islamist-led secessionists have been further disgraced since, for the turnout in the Kashmir Valley has averaged over 50 per cent in each successive phase. On November 21, Mirwaiz Farooq insisted that “we are sure there will be 100 per cent poll boycott.” Tehreek-e-Hurriyat chief Syed Ali Shah Geelani, for his part, let it be known on November 22 that the people would “boycott polls and not let the fellow Kashmiris down.” But a day later, 59 per cent of the voters in Kangan and 51 per cent in Ganderbal braved the cold to exercise their franchise.

In fairness to the secessionist leadership, most experts misread the configuration of Kashmir’s political life. In an October 31 article, commentator Hassan Zainagiri reported in Greater Kashmir that Kashmir’s “people are quite jubilantly supporting the boycott schedule of the Coordination Committee.” Ahmad Rashid of Hindustan Times asserted that “in Kashmir’s atmosphere of sullen anger, the coming elections are widely regarded as a symbol of Indian rule.” Eminent journalist and author Prem Shankar Jha prophesied that “the government will be lucky if they get more than 10 per cent of people to come out and vote”.

Errors of analysis underpinned this misreading of the course and contours of mass politics in Kashmir. Leaders of all major secessionist formations — as well as several commentators — read the violence that followed the Amarnath Shrine Board protest as a generalised uprising against India’s presence. In fact, the election turnout has made clear that the protests revolved around communal anxieties which had little to do with the secessionist cause.

Kashmir’s civil society has long been anxious about its future in a Hindu-majority state. On a visit to New Delhi soon after Independence, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah candidly underlined the relationship between politics in Kashmir and Indian communalism. “There isn’t a single Muslim in Kapurthala, Alwar or Bharatpur,” Abdullah said, noting “some of these had been Muslim-majority States.” Kashmiri Muslims, he concluded, “are afraid that the same fate lies ahead for them as well.”

Fears like these — fuelled by the discrimination the region’s middle class encounters outside the State — acquired legitimacy after Hindu communalists in Jammu announced an economic blockade. Despite its marginal impact, many saw the blockade as an existential threat; a precursor to a large-scale communal onslaught that would deprive Kashmir’s people of their land. In June, Mr. Geelani charged the Indian state with working to “alter the demographic character of our State.” “I caution my nation,” he concluded, “that if we do not wake up now, India and its stooges will succeed and we will lose our land forever.” Until state action ended the blockade, the Islamist leader’s charges appeared legitimate.

Secessionists also underestimated the influence of mainstream, pro-India parties. Outside of the principal urban bases of the secessionist movement — Srinagar, Baramulla and Sopore — the Shrine Board was not secessionist-spearheaded. A 5,000-strong June 30 gathering at Sheeri, for example, was led by local National Conference activist Abdul Qayoom and People’s Democratic Party dissident Ghulam Mohiuddin. Local Congress leaders burned effigies of PDP patron and former Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed at Wandi-Viligam on June 30, while NC activists were the principal leaders of the protests in Paibugh.

Part of the reason for the incomprehension of the election turnout pattern is a discourse that a priori casts Kashmiri secessionism as the authentic sentiment of the people of the State. The high turnout in the 1996 and 2002 elections was widely attributed to coercive pressure from Indian troops, rather than the political influence of the candidates. Without dispute, the Army did ask rural residents to vote in both 1996 and 2002 — action which must be read in the context of jihadi groups threatening them with death if they chose to do so, and killing dozens of political activists to demonstrate their seriousness of purpose. However, a careful study of voting patterns demonstrates that there was no demonstrable relationship between this persuasive activity and turnout. Zero voting took place in some areas where the troops were reported to have pushed voters; some areas which saw no coercion at all, conversely, reported a high turnout.

Kashmir secessionists, it is rarely understood, represent specific social classes — not a generalised, free-floating “sentiment.” Most major secessionist leaders were members of the Muslim United Front, a political coalition that represented an alliance between the urban petty bourgeoisie and the rural orchard-owning elite. Both classes saw their pre-independence influence decline through years of the NC rule — a rule founded on an alliance between the small peasant, on the one hand, and a new elite of contractors and capitalists, on the other. Islam, for the classes which backed the MUF, was an instrument to legitimise the protest of a threatened social order against a modernity which threatened to obliterate it.

In Srinagar and other urban centres, this coalition succeeded in securing the support of disenfranchised youth — the children of the city’s traditional bourgeoisie, who are witnessing the inevitable death of the artisanal and trading occupations of their parents but have neither the skills nor resources to compete in the new world emerging around them. Kashmir’s Islamists-led secessionist movement became a medium for their rage at being denied entry through the gates of the earthly paradise before them — a phenomenon which formed the most visible part of the street protests during the Shrine Board movement. However, the notion that the street protests reflected pan-Kashmiri sentiment was a fiction.

Where might events go from here? Journalists observing voting patterns in southern Kashmir have noted that large-scale participation by the Jamaat-e-Islami cadre drove high turnout in the secessionist strongholds of Shopian and Tral. Last week, key Jamaat-e-Islami figures Mohammad Amin Naqashbani, Sonaullah Kojar, Abdul Rashid Chehlan and Masood Sheikh were out on the streets of Kulgam, persuading voters to defeat Communist Party of India (Marxist) legislator Mohammad Yusuf Tarigami.

For anyone not ideologically committed to the idea of Kashmiri independence, the writing has long been on the wall. Back in February, the amir of the Jammu and Kashmir Jamaat-e-Islami, Ghulam Hassan Sheikh — the chief of the political formation which gave birth to the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen — announced that he would not participate in a secessionist campaign seeking a boycott of the Assembly elections.

“I am at variance,” he said, “with leaders and organisations which over-emphasise the election boycott campaign, which may sometimes prove counterproductive.” Elections,” he said, “do not have any impact on the status of the Kashmir issue. If people cast their votes in the elections, it does not mean they have given up their freedom struggle or accepted India’s domination of Jammu and Kashmir.” Others in the Jamaat pointed to a 2004 resolution of its Majlis-e-Shoora, or central consultative council, committing the Islamist group to a “democratic and constitutional struggle.”

Sheikh was compelled to back down and support the secessionist boycott campaign in the wake of the elections — but the party itself, it is clear, intends leveraging the democratic process to the advantage of its constituents. Jamaat-e-Islami supporters are likely to have backed the PDP, giving the party more representation in the Assembly than expected — or that its own leaders hoped for. In time, it seems probable that the PDP will secure the support of the classes who backed the MUF in 1987. If so, the classes who drove the course of the long jihad in Jammu and Kashmir will have returned to the democratic fold.

Politicians in Jammu and Kashmir have intuitively sensed the possibility of increasingly casting their parties as credible forces which can, through dialogue with New Delhi, resolve the conflict in the State. Both the PDP’s calls for self-rule, nebulous as the concept still remains, and the NC’s demands for maximal autonomy are steps in this direction. If the Congress gains seats in Kashmir, as its leaders expect, it will point to the existence of a third constituency, which sees the debate itself as misplaced. In January, Jammu and Kashmir will have a new elected Assembly. New Delhi would do well to engage with the multiple voices it will contain, rather than reach out once more to a secessionist leadership that has been humiliated by the people it claims to represent.

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