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Mehbooba Mufti ji, your remarks have cut deep

Let’s face it. Jammu and Kashmir cannot afford a vicious and vindictive political discourse. It can further wreck the state that is already struggling to fight the disruptive forces of communalism and polarisation.

Mehbooba Mufti ji, your remarks have cut deep

Mehbooba Mufti



Arun Joshi

Let’s face it. Jammu and Kashmir cannot afford a vicious and vindictive political discourse. It can further wreck the state that is already struggling to fight the disruptive forces of communalism and polarisation. Militancy is one of many problems that has darkened the future of its youth. Any suggestion to revive it on the scale of the 1990s is nothing but a rush toward catastrophe.

Former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti held out a threat of dire consequences if her Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was split by Delhi. She listed the rebirth of Syed Salahuddin and Yasin Malik, two prominent faces of the militancy in 1990s, as one of the serious repercussions of Delhi’s attempts to fiddle with the unity of her party. It is predictably grim.

The throwback to the 1990s, an era thought to be born out of the rigged elections of 1987, is a spine-chilling reminder of the horrors of selective killings, massacres, and the horrible days when darkness descended on towns in the afternoon. Children were separated from toys, guns were romanticised and the shock of bloodshed gripped streets. One had to live through that era to grasp the earth-shaking tragedy.

Today, the situation is much more serious in many ways. The elements of shock and fear have been replaced by defiance and death-wish among the youth.

Mehbooba as a leader and politician who has seen it all should have known that words cut deep in such situations.

Each alliance has its tension. The PDP-BJP alliance was no exception. The inevitability of its falling apart was written the day it was sealed on March 1, 2015, when newly sworn-in Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed thanked and hailed Pakistan, Hurriyat Conference and militants for making the 2014 Assembly elections a success, outraging the whole nation.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had attended the swearing-in ceremony of the first of the two-phased PDP-BJP government, was so angry that he told BJP general secretary and in-charge of J&K Affairs Ram Madhav to call it off. But it was allowed to survive. It was kept alive even after the death of Mufti Sayeed in January 2016. That it had to fail, so it failed on June 19.

The stakes for Mehbooba are quite high. The party that she founded and nurtured like a child is threatening to fall apart. She has to protect that, and she is within her rights to spell out her anger if she suspects that her erstwhile alliance partner is playing foul. For that she should have made a choice of different words and references unless she wants to profile the PDP into the role of the Muslim United Front (MUF), an erstwhile alliance of separatist parties that contest the 1897 election. The PDP already has adopted the pen-inkpot election symbol of the MUF and many constituents of the now dismantled MUF, particularly Jamait-i-Islami, form her party’s support base in south Kashmir.

She would have to answer a question, has her party’s manifesto changed from peace to promotion of the ideas of Salahuddin or Yasin Malik?

Till last month, Mehbooba was appealing to local militants to return to their homes — a fair call given the situation in which the killing of local militants, their funeral processions and the civilian empathy started a new and dangerous phase of insurgency in the Valley. The BJP cannot absolve itself of charges of not doing anything to fiddle with the PDP or other groups as it is looking at government formation. It has given enough reasons that why it cannot form the government, but the idea of a Hindu CM, or the third front is being spoken by its own leaders in J&K.

The two parties should halt their blame game, and work for engendering new hope for the youth of Kashmir. They should know, as Nelson Mandela once said: “hope is a powerful weapon even when all else is lost.”

Kashmir has not lost everything as of now. There is a lot of scope to work on hope and it would be good for the political parties and the people whom they claim to represent.

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