The inverted question of Kashmir

THE Yasin Malik affidavit in the Delhi High Court, that should have created a much bigger storm, if only because it reveals how the Kashmiri separatist leader was both doted and despised by governments across the ideological spectrum over the last three decades, comes in the exact month elections were held in Jammu & Kashmir a full year ago.

Some would yawn, and ask, Yasin Malik who? Others, who know well his role in the kidnapping of then Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter, Rubaiya, in 1989; in the cold-blooded killing of four Air Force officers in Kashmir in 1990, are equally aware that Yasin has been wooed by every small and big prime minister since — Chandra Shekhar, PV Narasimha Rao, IK Gujral, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh as well as by PM Modi’s interlocutors in his first term.

In some ways, Yasin Malik’s affidavit is the story of Kashmir in these past decades. It spans the many experiments tried by the powerful Indian state to bring peace to a troubled region — from wooing both moderate and extremist leaders like Yasin and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq as well as those in the Hizbul Mujahideen, in the hope that these separatists would persuade their mentors in Pakistan to turn over a new leaf — and help prepare the ground for a more structured dialogue process between the leaders of India and Pakistan.

For at least 16 years, from the time Vajpayee became PM in 1998 to when Manmohan Singh lost power in 2014, the Indian state attempted this ambitious, triangular conversation — between Kashmiri separatists in India and Pakistan, between Indian Kashmiri leaders and Delhi as well as between India and Pakistan. (The Pakistani Kashmiris and the Pakistani establishment were one and the same.)

No one said it better than Vajpayee during a 2003 trip to Srinagar. “India will talk to Kashmiris under the ambit of insaniyat, Kashmiriyat and jamhuriyat,” he said. There was no mention of the word “Constitution,” but everyone understood what the lakshman rekha was — no violence; violence would shut the conversation down.

So when Manmohan Singh picked up the baton from Vajpayee, the country cheered. Never forget that Singh not only helped end the monarchy in Nepal in 2006, he also encouraged Kashmiri leaders for the first time ever to travel to Pakistan via the Line of Control, turning the rigid, turgid Line into a porous border. Meanwhile, Singh’s special envoy, former diplomat Satinder Lambah, was meeting his Pakistani counterparts in world capitals like Dubai and London to hammer out a four-point formula that would bring peace to Kashmir, as well as resolution to the India-Pakistan trauma that had gone on since 1947.

A shiver ran through the subcontinent. Was it too good to last.

There’s a story about Yasin Malik that Wajahat Habibullah, Kashmir-watcher and IAS officer posted in Kashmir in the awful days of the early 1990s, tells. It relates to the 2002 period when elections were to be held in J&K and Habibullah said to Yasin and Mirwaiz and the rest of the Hurriyat that they could not hope to speak for Kashmir if they didn’t stand for polls.

The Hurriyat agreed, but muttered they didn’t trust the Election Commission of India. Habibullah communicated the Kashmiri unease to then Chief Election Commissioner James Lyngdoh, who agreed that a State Election Commission could be set up. The Kashmiris confabulated amongst themselves and asked Yasin Malik to pick a few good men and women to be part of the state body — he picked Karan Singh as chairman.

It was delicious irony, of course. Karan Singh is the son of the last Hindu Maharaja of Kashmir Hari Singh, who had dithered about acceding to India till October 1947 until Nehru and Sardar Patel sent in the troops and gave him an ultimatum; Karan Singh succeeded his father as the Regent in 1949 and soon after as the last Sadr-i-Riyasat.

Fast forward to the present — a time of fewer greys, more clarity, much less irony. Under PM Modi’s charge, the missteps of Op Balakot have been rectified by Op Sindoor. Exactly a year ago, and five years after the revocation of Article 370, J&K went to the polls again to re-elect a Union Territory. The euphoria of installing your own CM has since given way to ennui, as everyone knows that Lt Governor Manoj Sinha continues to call the shots. Statehood is hardly on offer.

Even the questions are inverted. It’s no longer, ‘Ask not what the country can do for Kashmir,’ but ‘What Kashmir can do for the country.’ Can it help win, for example, an election in Bihar?

The story of Kashmir can be written in many ways — via the affidavit of Yasin Malik, in Tihar jail since 2022, sentenced to life imprisonment in a money-laundering case from 20 years before that may or may not have been true, but to which he has pleaded guilty; via the books of AS Dulat, a former special director of the Intelligence Bureau, head of India’s external intelligence agency R&AW and Vajpayee’s special advisor — his last book, The Chief Minister and the Spy, caused a national stir this April because he revealed, with an unvarnished eye, how the Indian state ran Kashmir for decades.

Perhaps that’s the moral of the story. That the state is primarily ruthless, and when it gives a long rope to people like Yasin Malik, it is actually giving him the illusion that he is, or was, an actor on the large geopolitical chessboard — only, he was a mere puppet on a string.

Never forget, too, the Pakistani military establishment’s overarching arrogance which has also brought us to this pass — Pervez Musharraf’s refusal to compromise with both Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, a compounded double barrel of short-sight and stupidity, is a perfect example of what should never have been. The Pakistanis exposed India’s weak underbelly in 2008 in Mumbai. April’s Pahalgam massacre reminded us of Mumbai. Op Sindoor was an avenging memory.

And so this Saturday morning, as I turn the Kashmir story over and over again, wondering how to write it, I know that we will always miss one writer, an outsider-insider, who was always such a delight to read. Sankarshan Thakur articulated the hopes and dreams and fears and above all, the battle of argument that have consumed so many generations of Kashmiris. He would have loved to weigh in on the Yasin Malik affidavit. In his passing, the story is so much poorer.