A year of political silence in Jammu & Kashmir
Jammu and Kashmir was dismembered and disempowered a year ago and with that mainstream political parties, struggling in a state where different regions and sub-regions were dangerously drifting apart on communal lines, were pushed in limbo.
Though most of the leaders and activists of these parties, taken into preventive custody around August 5 last year, and subsequently detained formally under the stringent Public Safety Act (PSA), have been freed, many of them are under oath not to speak up. With only one or two exceptions, they have been virtually forced into hibernation by the powers that be. On the whole, political activities by mainstream parties, excluding the BJP, have come to a complete halt.
Only a couple of key faces of J&K politics are active on Twitter but even they behave like ‘obedient children, as was put by a critic, and beat about the bush when it comes to enunciate clearly on vital issues,’ as was also put by a critic.
The leaders of these parties blame the government at the Centre and its local facilitators for their waning influence and growing organisational disarray. They say that the government has, through its harsh steps, squeezed political space for them. They insist that the absence of politics and imposition of a vacuum in J&K is a calculated stratagem by the BJP.
“By pulverising democratic space and criminalising dissent, they are brazenly taking pride in destroying every institution of democracy to further their fascist agenda,” said a senior leader of the PDP. That coming from a former coalition partner of the saffron party in the J&K government may be pooh-poohed by many as tongue-in-cheek, but there is no denying the fact that arbitrary incarceration of leaders of every hue postabrogation of Article 370 and splitting the state up into two union territories definitely contributed to a collective voicelessness of J&K’s political parties.
Moreover, a deliberate attempt is being worked to carve a political space for selected people and parties willing to toe the line of the present dispensation at the Centre.
Some local political watchers say that this ‘policy of containment’ to keep political parties and leaders other than those of the BJP and its myrmidons away from the people does not augur well for the country’s interests in J&K, notwithstanding the Narendra Modi government’s claims to the contrary.
Senior PDP leader and former minister, Naeem
Akhtar, lamented, “Delhi has decimated decades of our investment in peace and democracy. At the cost of mere political gains for one party, all norms of democratic society have been infringed upon”.
Critics say that on August 5 last year, the government ventured on the path of disowning and un-winning Kashmir. “By seeing Kashmir through a religious and civilisation prism, they want to win Hindus voters in the rest of the country by disowning and fighting people of J&K,” one of them alleged.
Srinagar resident, Abdul Majeed Shah, bemoaned, “The dye has been cast, the script is clear. Delhi wants to infuse a sense of fear and defeat in every Kashmiri.”