The Unbearable Lightness of the Proxy

AS THE BHARATIYA JANATA PARTY (BJP) took away Article 370 from Jammu & Kashmir, the separatist leader from North Kashmir, Engineer Rashid, received summons from the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to appear in Delhi. The agency wanted to question him for his alleged involvement in a terror-funding case. As he felt the ground shifting beneath his feet, Rashid rang up a top Army commander based in Kashmir and begged him to intervene on his behalf. He wanted the commander to help him “get away” and, in return, he is believed to have said that he would manage seven to eight seats for BJP when elections took place. But, four days after the removal of Article 370, Rashid was arrested and jailed.

Earlier this year, Rashid contested as an independent in the Lok Sabha polls. He had garnered sympathy among a lot of Kashmiris for his imprisonment. For years, Kashmir’s two main political parties, the National Conference (NC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), played a game of competitive secession­ism. This was encouraged by New Delhi. But soon it proved to be disastrous, especially from 2015 onwards, when PDP got into an alliance with BJP. Buoyed by PDP’s soft approach, militancy began to raise its head again, resulting in one of the most tumultuous periods in Kashmir’s history of insurgency. It was a time when terrorist Burhan Wani and his gang became the poster boys of Islamist insurgency. By the time BJP pulled out, it was too late. In 2019, the Pulwama attack took place, and within months, Article 370 was felled.

Post-Article 370 Kashmir had no sympathy for PDP. So it gathered around what it thought was the only resistance left in Kashmir: Engineer Rashid. He fought from jail and de­feated two prominent leaders, Omar Abdullah and Sajjad Lone, from Baramulla constituency.

In BJP’s gameplan for elec­tions, Rashid was finally proving to be an important cog. The Lok Sabha experiment went well, so it looks like they put him in the fight again, and this time with others. The arithmetic was simple. The Jammu region had been experiencing a renewal of terrorism. It brought back memories of the 1990s when Hindus would be targeted in some of the most terrible massacres in the state. In June this year, terrorists targeted a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims in the region’s Reasi district, killing nine of them. BJP was aware of the anger among sections of the Jammu populace. Many in Jammu had this overwhelming feeling that post-abrogation Jammu & Kashmir was proving to be more beneficial for Kashmir than Jammu. Many Dogra Hindus in Jammu felt that in BJP’s local office, Kashmiri Muslims and people from other Muslim communities like the Gujjars from the Poonch- Rajouri belt, were able to get their ‘work’ done, while theirs suffered. In the absence of a formidable face among regional BJP leaders, this feeling was accentuated.

The BJP leadership was aware of the situation. But as terrorist attacks began to occur, the party realised that votes in Hindu-majority areas like Jammu, Udhampur and Reasi would finally gravitate towards it. And so it happened. In Udhampur, for example, as compared to the last Assembly elections in 2014 (at the peak of Modi’s popular­ity), BJP doubled its tally (from two to four). In Reasi, too, it went from one to two, and in Jammu, it gained one more seat (from nine in 2014). But this time NC did much better in Jammu, getting seven of the 37 seats in the region, while Congress got one. BJP could have made its peace with that in the hope that, in Kashmir, its proxies would reduce NC’s seats. But that did not happen as the Rashid bomb turned out to be a dud.

At the beginning of the campaign, it all seemed to be working out. Rashid was still in jail, but his sons and other family members had started their campaign. In South Kashmir, his sons would be welcomed with the same energy as the Pakistani terrorists roaming with their AK-47s around 2015-16 would. A few days later, just before the first phase on September 18, Rashid was also let out on parole. As soon as he came out, he launched a barrage against both the Abdullahs and the Muftis. Fashioning himself as someone who had really suffered (he wore the same salwar-kameez in his dozens of interviews), he tried his best to convince people that he was not there as BJP’s proxy.

Kashmiris, meanwhile, were getting enough signals about what they clearly saw as BJP’s plan to divide their votes. The Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir (JIJK) had also put its force behind a few candidates in both North and South Kashmir. The Jamaat was banned in 2019 and has since been struggling with the problem of continuing its work—in the aftermath of the Pulwama attack, its schools were shut down and more than 70 bank accounts were sealed. There were rumours in Kashmir that some sort of agreement had been reached between Jamaat and the government. For BJP, it meant more divisions in votes, especially in Jamaat strongholds. It hoped to cut into NC votes, but also into PDP’s as the Jamaat cadre has traditionally voted for the party since its inception.

With the ban, Jamaat was unable to provide the pivot of its foundation, deeni taleem, or religious training. So, it backed some of its former cadre who contested as independent candidates. Prominent among them was Sayar Reshi, 42, a political science postgraduate who lectured at various colleges. He chose to contest from Kulgam. In the north, from Langate, the party’s former general secretary, Ghulam Qadir Lone, decided to put up his son, Kalimullah, 35, as a candidate.

As this was happening, others joined the fray, too. A radical separatist, Sarjan Barkati, jailed for his pro-militant stance, decided to submit his papers. But instead of fighting from his hometown, Shopian, he chose to contest from Ganderbal, Abdullah’s constituency. Fearing a Lok Sabha repeat, Abdullah then filed his nomina­tion from another seat, Budgam, as well. In an interview to this correspondent during his campaign, Abdullah said that NC had cleverly waited for Barkati to file his nomination and only then he had filed his own from Budgam. But in his campaign, Abdullah and his party members pointed this out extensively. Abdullah said that he would still give the benefit of doubt to Engineer Rashid as he had fought and won elections earlier. But Barkati’s nomination from NC’s stronghold, Ganderbal, he said, was a clear indication as to what Delhi was up to.

BETWEEN ALL THIS, the Jamaat candidates also began to say things that, many felt, were against their grain. Reshi spoke about the return of Kashmiri Pandits, while Kalimullah Lone defended the right of Kashmiri Muslim girls to marry outside their religion. As a party that had boycotted elections earlier, it was uncanny to hear Reshi telling people that if anybody stopped them from casting their vote they should drag that person to the police station.

It took a few days, but the message got delivered that voting for the proxies meant voting for BJP. Slowly but steadily, this belief got strengthened. PDP could not take advantage of it. Kashmiris could not forget its alliance with BJP; for them the abrogation of Article 370 was the direct fallout of the alliance. BJP saved its face by pulling out; Mehbooba Mufti went back to her pro-separatist stance, but it was too late. After the abrogation, as the government adopted stringent measures to cull any possibility of a ‘rebellion’, there was no way to vent. In the Lok Sabha polls, they got their window and made Rashid an MP. But this time they could sense that even he was a ‘collaborator’. Many Kashmiris still danced with BJP scarves round their necks and wore Modi masks, and many others still welcomed the so-called proxies on their cam­paigns. But the majority went with NC-plus-Congress. The recent betrayals were remembered; the old betrayals—NC’s alliance with BJP and before that the alleged rigging in 1987 for NC by the Congress government in Delhi—were forgotten. In the bile of new betrayals, one of the biggest grouses of Kashmiris—that in 2010, with Abdullah as chief minister, 110 boys had lost their lives in the unrest—was also eclipsed.

But that is the nature of politics, especially in Kashmir. As he becomes chief minister again, Omar Abdullah will have to deal with several challenges immediately. One is to show to his constituency that he will keep raising the issue of Article 370. The other is to strike a balance between the aspirations of people in Kashmir and in Jammu. He also has to strike a very difficult balance in his approach to terrorism. But on that account, he has fewer challenges than Rahul Gandhi. After all, unlike NC, Gandhi has to deal with the rest of India as well.

Assembly elections 2024Engineer Rashidindependent candidatesJammu and KashmirNational ConferenceOmar AbdullahShagun Parihar