The Great Game: The train to Naya Kashmir

ONE year after the 1897 Battle of Saragarhi in what is now Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, and around the time China was being convulsed in an anti-foreigner uprising that came to be known as the Boxer Rebellion, the Dogra Maharaja Pratap Singh in 1898 actively commissioned British engineers to build a railway line that connected his lands in the Jammu region with the Kashmir valley.

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As the first Vande Bharat train rolls out of Katra today — all tickets are sold out — for Srinagar, traversing some of the most spectacular scenery in the world as well as connecting hearts and minds between Hindu-majority Jammu and Muslim-majority Kashmir, the Maharaja’s dream has finally come true. Prime Minister Modi can take full credit for pushing the Railways and all the Centre’s infrastructure missions, via Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and Road Transport & Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari, to deliver not just this Insta-ready arch bridge over the Chenab, but also 38 tunnels and 927 bridges over 272 km of tracks between Jammu and the Kashmir valley.

June 7 is certainly special — the first train will roll out exactly a month after the May 7 attack on several terror infrastructure camps in Pakistan, including those in the heart of its Punjab province in Muridke and Bahawalpur. Those on the train are more than tourists; they are living affirmation of two ideas. One, that bullets cannot deter the brave and two, that only cowards use bullets, instead of ballots, to ram down instead of persuade, their point of view with their opponent.

This train to Kashmir is also both balm and attestation — in fact, three attestations. In the wake of the horrific Pahalgam massacre, tourism in Amir Khusrau’s jannat simply fell off the map. Kashmiris poured out their grief and vented their anger in both mosque and street protest. That’s the first piece of proof that the mood has changed in Naya Kashmir.

Poor Asim Munir. Time and again the Pakistan desire to drag the so-called “two-nation theory” out of the quagmire has been slapped down by none other than the Kashmiri in whose name it is called out. They didn’t want it in 1947 and they don’t want it in 2025. The Pakistan army chief is a smart man; it’s time he got the message and understood it. Leave Kashmir alone.

Munir and his military establishment should know that the Pahalgam violence was in a perverse way the last nail in the coffin of Article 370. That all those inside Kashmir who had mourned the end of their “special status” in 2019, and continue to believe in some chimera of “independence” today, now fully comprehend the high stakes in the great game afoot.

Perhaps, PM Modi must also introspect a bit more about the last nine months that have elapsed since elections were so successfully held in Jammu & Kashmir. And ask why the best weapon against Asim Munir’s two-nation theory, full statehood, hasn’t been restored to a state that voted with both its hands and feet in favour of democracy — and therefore, integration with the Indian Union.

The irony couldn’t be more evident. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, placed under house arrest on August 5, 2019, to crush all opposition to the ending of Article 370, stood beside the PM on the Chenab bridge on Friday and asked why he had been “demoted” from the CM of a state to CM of a Union Territory. There was both humour and grace in his words, but a trace of sadness too. Were Kashmiri politicians in general and the Kashmiri chief minister, the Wazir-e-Ala in particular, not fully considered trustworthy by the Hon’ble Wazir-e-Azam?

The truth is that Lt Governor Manoj Sinha continues to wield much more power than Abdullah, over law and order and security, postings and prosecution. Abdullah could throw a tantrum about being reduced to a titular head, cycling in Pahalgam and skiing in Gulmarg, while the man who should be what he is in effect today, L-G Sinha, holds most of the cards.

The truth is that Lt Governor Manoj Sinha continues to wield much more power than CM Omar Abdullah

But Abdullah has reinvented his job profile, a Naya CM for a Naya Kashmir, just reaching out and assuaging the hurt of those who have been hurt these past years. God knows, he has a long way to go. The job profile also demands that you swallow your own pride and ego, especially because you need to work with your ideological opponent in power at the Centre. Without him, you know you’re nothing much.

That is the second attestation that demonstrates how things have changed in Kashmir. The younger Abdullah knows he must not just reach out to PM Modi and Home Minister Shah — the men who put him under house arrest — but he cannot overly ruminate about his loyalty to a withering INDIA bloc.

The third attestation is Modi’s own. “Pahalgam mein insaaniyat aur Kashmiriyat dono par hua hamla,” he said in Katra, invoking at least a part of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s immeasurable slogan from another time, from 2003 — when the former PM had spoken of the need for a healing touch for Kashmir and that talks with all Kashmiris could take place in the wide arc of “Kashmiriyat, insaaniyat and jamhooriyat.”

Was the PM implying that a new “healing touch” for the jewel in India’s crown was on the anvil? Some of these out-of-the-box ideas were certainly present during the elections last year when Jamaat-e-Islami candidates were allowed out of jail to contest. Earlier there have been attempts at back-channel conversations with the Jamaat; earlier this year, a new political party, the Justice and Development Front, consisting of former Jamaat members, was formed.

The job of a train is to carry people and goods and ideas from one place to another. This train to Kashmir is already sparking new conversations. Perhaps it has already fulfilled its purpose. Things will never be the same in J&K again.