Social Scientist

Kashmir
Author(s): Wajahat Habibullah
Source: Social Scientist , July–August 2020, Vol. 48, No. 7/8 (566-567) (July–August 2020),
pp. 17-28
Published by: Social Scientist

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 Kashmir: The Tragedy

Wajahat Habibullah

The spring of 2020 in the Kashmir Valley is beautiful. It is the rainy season
when almonds blossom amidst verdant greenery punctuated with swathes
of narcissus and dancing daffodil, tulip in full flower, the bulbul hopping
and playing in the refreshingly breezy air. Yet tragedy is writ large across the
history of Jammu & Kashmir ever since the sale of the state of J&K in 1846 by
a victorious East India Company to Gulab Singh, turncoat feudatory of the
fallen Sikh kingdom of the legendary Maharaja Ranjit Singh, for what was
even then hardly a princely sum, a Rajput niche in a predominantly Muslim
territory until recently Sikh – a neat arrangement of divide et impera. The
aspiration of Kashmir when J&K acceded to India upon Independence is
best summed up in the words of its principal protagonist of the time in his
discussion with Joseph Korbel, head of the UN Commission for India and
Pakistan; Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah explained:
I have meditated about four possible solutions to our problem. First or second
– accession to India or Pakistan through a plebiscite. This could not take
place in less than three years, because of the destruction of the country and
the dislocation of its population. Even then it would be difficult to ascertain
impartially the wishes of the people scattered over large areas and possibly
subjected to intimidation.
Would such a plebiscite be democratic, and would India or Pakistan accept
the verdict?
Third, there is a possibility of independence under the joint guarantee of
India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, and the Soviet Union. I would be willing
to meet the leader of Azad Kashmir, Ghulam Abbas, with whom I was once
tied by bonds of friendship and a common struggle. We had been together in
prison and often had discussed the future of our country.
But even should Kashmir’s powerful neighbours agree to give us a guarantee
of independence, I doubt that it could last for long. There is in my opinion,
therefore, only one solution open. That is the division of the country. If it is not
achieved, the fighting will continue; India and Pakistan will prolong the quarrel
indefinitely, and our people’s suffering will go on. (Korbel 2002, p. 248)

Such a division, with each part today administered by India and

Pakistan remaining with each, still continues to be, believes the Sheikh’s
son and heir Farooq, the only viable solution to the international issue of
J&K. The people’s aspiration then was simply the liberty to live in peace. 17

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 Social Scientist

The choice before Abdullah, leader of the National Conference,

Vol. 48 / Nos. 7–8 / July–August 2020

predominant political entity of the princely state in 1947, would have

been clear: he could join a Muslim nation whose leadership would surely
be Punjabi, from the most populous of Pakistan’s provinces that already
dominated the Pakistan army – a people who in Kashmiri eyes scorned
their distinctly Sufi identity. He could support the Maharaja’s quest for
independence of a constitutional monarchy, or he could join a secular state
where Kashmiris would be free to live a life of their own choosing. At the
time of accession, the portion of the state where Pakistan had the bulk of
its support lay not in the Kashmir Valley but across the Pir Panjal, trans-
Chenab in Mirpur and the old Poonch principality of the feudal state of
Jammu & Kashmir.
It is important to remember that the Kashmir movement was a
movement to rid Kashmir of despotism, a movement in tandem with the
national movement but not directed primarily against British rule. And
so, in face of efforts by Hari Singh’s Prime Minister Ramchandra Kak to
elicit the Sheikh’s support for independence, the latter stood steadfast
in his demand for an end to the monarchy. Visiting Srinagar in 18–23
June 1947, India’s Viceroy Mountbatten urged Hari Singh not to make
a declaration of independence. He conveyed Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s
message that ‘the States Department were prepared to give an assurance
that, if Kashmir went to Pakistan, this would not be regarded as unfriendly
by Government of India’ (Balachandran 2018). It was only when Jammu
& Kashmir forces faced an uprising by Poonch troops of the British Indian
Army’s decommissioned Sixth Punjab Regiment in the border district of
Poonch, and then a military rout by invading NWFP (North West Frontier
Province) tribesmen in the state’s border town of Domel on 22 October
1947, that the Maharaja turned in desperation to India. Although history,
and indeed the Pathan DNA, testifies that India’s then North West Frontier
Province (NWFP) is Afghan, artificially bifurcated by the Durand Line,
the NWFP was upon independence denied those roots. The invasion of
Kashmir by Mahsud and Afridi tribesmen of newly-born Pakistan’s NWFP
supported by Pakistan’s military making war on India, an action otherwise
irrational for a fledgling State, was calculated to divert the Pathan from an
uprising against Pakistan in his homeland, which it did. But it left India
forever robbed of 78,000 sq. km of the erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir
that had acceded to India.
According to the 1941 census, 77.11 percent of the population of
Jammu & Kashmir was Muslim, 20.12 percent was Hindu and 1.64 percent
Sikh. Pakistan has argued that the logic of Partition meant that the state had
to be part of Pakistan. But by recourse to military invasion Pakistan forfeited
that option, certainly in the eyes of Kashmiris. Indeed, Sheikh Abdullah
spoke for every Kashmiri at the United Nations in February 1948 as part of a
18 delegation led by Gopalaswami Ayyangar and accompanied by P.N. Haksar,

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 Kashmir: The Tragedy

who was to be Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s trusted Principal Secretary

Wajahat Habibullah
(Ramesh 2018, p. 17), firmly declaring, ‘We shall prefer death rather than
join Pakistan. We shall have nothing to do with such a country.’
And so J&K became part of the Indian Union to the rhythm of Amir
Khusrau’s poetry recited by Abdullah at the Lal Chowk – Srinagar’s
Red Square – in the Farsi of the fourteenth-century poet, devotee of
Nizamuddin Auliya and doyen of India’s poetic tradition, ‘Mun tu shudam
tu mun shudi, Mun tun shudam tu jaan shudi’ (I have become you and you
me, I am the body, you the soul). But as explained by Dr Ambedkar in a
debate on the People’s Representation Bill in Parliament in 1950, there was
a qualification:
The Article relating to Kashmir says that only Article 1 applies, that is to say,
Kashmir is part of the territories of India. The application of other Articles of
the Constitution, that Article says, will depend upon the President, who may
in consultation with the government of Kashmir, apply the rest of the articles
with such modifications and alterations as he may determine.

At the UN meeting referred to, Sir Gopalaswami Ayyangar had on 15

January 1948 clarified to the Security Council:
Whether she [Kashmir state] should withdraw from her accession to India,
and either accede to Pakistan or remain independent, with a right to claim
admission as a member of the United Nations – all this we have recognised to
be a matter for the unfettered decision by the people of Kashmir after normal
life is restored to them. (Underlined for emphasis)

Nevertheless, accused of plotting secession, the Sheikh was arrested in

the wee hours in August 1953. In and out of jail thereafter, the Sheikh finally
returned to power in February 1975 after the November 1974 settlement
with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the Indira–Sheikh Accord. This accord
was, in light of the Simla agreement of 1972, the best option open to the
Sheikh, in keeping with his aspiration for liberty.1 But it is looked upon
by Kashmiris to this day as a betrayal. Nevertheless, the questions framed
by Sheikh Abdullah in his speech at Mujahid Manzil, an ancient Mughal
mosque in Srinagar that served as his party’s headquarters, on the eve of
his assuming the office of Chief Minister consequent to the 1975 accord,
remain relevant to this day.
In referring to the state of emotional integration since 1953, the year of
his ouster, Abdullah asked,
Do you honestly feel that the foundations of democracy and secularism are
more stable than before? Can you honestly dare say that the shackles of distrust
between Kashmiris and India are broken? . . . Have the people here got the
clean administration which they have long yearned for? Were they freed from
the morass of unemployment . . .? (Khan 2018, p. 70).
19

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 Social Scientist

The answers to the Sheikh’s questions will summarise the tragedy that
Vol. 48 / Nos. 7–8 / July–August 2020

has beset the emotional integration of Kashmiris or its absence with their
Indian identity. The Union government’s initiative of 5 August 2019 has
only exacerbated, not redeemed, the conflict.
Article 370 (Article 306A of the Draft Constitution) was a self-
contained Code that defined and regulated the relationship between the
state of Jammu & Kashmir and the Union of India, drafted so as to ensure
the smooth accession of the former princely state of Jammu & Kashmir to
the Indian Union, compelled by a Pakistani invasion in October 1947 to
accede to India. Notwithstanding, on 26 November 1949, the Maharaja of
the state of Jammu & Kashmir was not amongst the signatories when the
Rajpramukhs of the princely states that had acceded to the Union of India
signed and adopted the Constitution in its entirety – hence Ambedkar’s
statement quoted above. Meanwhile the Constituent Assembly of Jammu
& Kashmir drafted a Constitution for the state, specifically affirming Article
1 as elucidated by Ambedkar’s statement quoted above. Crucially, Clause
(3) of Article 370 provided that any change to the relationship between
the state of Jammu & Kashmir and the Indian Union, as expressed in
Article 370, could only be brought about on the recommendation of the
Constituent Assembly.
Pakistan was defeated in Bangladesh in 1971, and in July 1972, India’s
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Pakistan’s President Z.A. Bhutto
signed the Simla Agreement. Although the subject of much debate for its
importance in a settlement of Kashmir, in the Agreement, both sides agreed
outright to discuss the ‘establishment of durable peace and normalisation
of relations, including the questions of repatriation of prisoners of war and
civilian internees, a final settlement of Jammu & Kashmir and the resumption
of diplomatic relations’ (emphasis mine). The Agreement thus juridically
removed the issue from the UN auspice. The threat from Pakistan had
receded. But if the Kashmir issue was to be resolved, the only route was
the integration of Kashmiris as participants in India’s democracy; their
undisputed leader remained Sheikh Abdullah. Protracted negotiations with
the Plebiscite Front, known as the ‘Beg–Parthasarathi talks’, between Mirza
Afzal Beg, adviser to Sheikh Abdullah and founder of the Plebiscite Front,
and G. Parthasarathi, a retired Indian civil servant, resulted in the Accord.
The elections to the state assembly of 1977 were a referendum on the
Indira–Sheikh Accord. Similarly, the state assembly elections in March 1987
were supposed to give popular endorsement to the Rajiv–Farooq Accord
that followed in 1987. That was not simply a political settlement between
two hitherto contending parties; it was laced with an ambitious agenda
of development projects designed to meet primary public needs, focused
on power and transport connectivity. It included plans for the extension
of India’s railway into the Kashmir Valley from its railhead at Pathankot
20 in Punjab, 400 miles away, together with a plan for modernising the

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 Kashmir: The Tragedy

infrastructure of Jammu & Kashmir. Although there was indeed progress,

Wajahat Habibullah
to display the immediate benefits to the deprived power consumers of the
Valley, who were particularly affected when freezing waters stalled hydel
power generation in winter, the authorities resorted to investment in
expensive gas power generation.
Another infrastructure advance, the activation of international
subscriber trunk dialling in February 1987 – among the earliest in India –
sought to promote Kashmir as an international tourist destination and give
its people access to the world. And snow ploughs, of which the state had
none, with snow having to be cleared every winter by brooms of disgruntled
municipal workers, were imported. But notwithstanding the Planning
Commission’s generosity in extending financial support, expensive power
generation required a high power tariff, whose imposition led to a
violent agitation across the state in mid-1988. The lumbering bureaucratic
framework of the state and central governments could not overcome the
ossified procedures of a bureaucracy designed to maintain the status quo.
The corruption and nepotism within Kashmir’s bureaucracy, unaddressed –
and, in fact, encouraged – by those in authority, ensured that the public had
no sense of participation in what was intended to be to that public’s benefit.
The National Conference–Indian National Congress alliance was
returned to power with an overwhelming majority with 66 seats between
the two parties: 40 for the National Conference and 26 for the Congress
party. The Muslim United Front secured 4 seats. Yet this election was so
sullied that it fed directly into insurrection. Sumantra Bose – a professor of
international and comparative politics at the London School of Economics,
and grandson of Netaji Subhas Bose, who has researched extensively on
ethnic conflict and democratisation in divided societies – graphically
describes the election in Amira Kadal, the constituency with the highest
profile in Srinagar city (Bose 2003, pp. 47–49). Farooq Abdullah, on the
other hand, declares that there was no rigging whatever.
Not in J&K at the time, I am nonetheless satisfied that there is no
exaggeration in Bose’s account of what transpired in the Amira Kadal
constituency. A tragic consequence, however, was that many of the young
men who were election and polling agents for Syed Mohammed Yusuf Shah,
MUF (Muslim United Front) candidate for Amira Kadal went on to lead
the insurgency in 1989. Amongst these the most prominent was the group
going by the name of Islamic Students League, from which was Mohammed
Yasin Malik who was to go on to lead the JKLF (Jammu Kashmir Liberation
Front). At the time of the 1987 elections, these young men were imprisoned
without bail for months under the state’s draconian Public Safety Act, 1982,
detained in interrogation centres and tortured, leading in the case of Malik
to blood infection and a damaged heart valve. Yusuf Shah himself became
Syed Salahuddin, head of the terrorist Hizbul Mujahedeen. But to suggest
that every constituency in Kashmir was corrupted in equal measure would 21

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 Social Scientist

be an overstatement. Clear indications of malpractice in the 1987 election

Vol. 48 / Nos. 7–8 / July–August 2020

had been found in only ten constituencies, primarily in parts of Srinagar,

where the support base of the National Conference had been tenuous.
This was a state that had repeatedly experienced rigged elections until
the assembly elections in 1977, when Morarji Desai headed the Janata
Party government at the centre and was roundly defeated by the Sheikh
Abdullah-led secular National Conference, despite the Janata’s alliance
with local right-wing parties like the Jamaat-Islami led by Syed Ali Shah
Geelani and Mirwaiz Farooq’s Awami Action Committee. But with the
dismissal of the elected assembly by Governor Jagmohan in 1990 on
grounds of rigging, Kashmiris were given credence by no less than the
Government of India that freedom, which the Indira–Sheikh Accord of
1975 and subsequent elections had promised, was a chimera. In January
1990, insurgency erupted in the Kashmir Valley; it quickly overflowed into
Jammu with terrorist infiltration across the LoC. A major India–Pakistan
crisis was averted in consequence, in part through a very public US
intervention by Robert Gates, then President George H.W. Bush’s emissary
to the subcontinent.
At the dawn of Independence, as northwest India was engulfed in
unprecedented communal carnage, Mahatma Gandhi had seen a ray of
hope in Kashmir. Despite a bloody communal eruption in neighbouring
Punjab and the murder of thousands including some Kashmiris in Jammu,
summer capital of the state and today’s Union Territory, there had
been not a flicker of communal frenzy in Kashmir. This was part of the
Kashmiri heritage, imbibed since the advent of Islam in Kashmir through a
vibrant Sufi movement, and conceptualised in the early twentieth century
by its intellectual elite, mostly Kashmiri Pandit, as ‘Kashmiriyat’. This
heritage goes well beyond mere tolerance, converging on confluence.
The outbreak of 1989–90, the rise of terrorism and consequent disorder
leading to severe restriction in the exercise of civil liberties with a long
spell of central rule (1990–96), has resulted in a whole post-’90 generation
of Kashmiris being nurtured on pure violence. Early in this period, in a
deliberate effort by Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Inteliigence) to unleash
communal sentiment, cultural sinews binding Kashmiri society came
undone and, under Governor Jagmohan’s rule in 1989–90, the terrified
majority of the miniscule Kashmiri Pandit community fled the Valley.
Today, a scattering of Kashmiri Pandits numbering a few thousand are all
that remain. And because of the violent ambience with terrorism rising
even after the confiscation of vestiges of civil liberties on 5 August, large
sections of Kashmir’s youth have succumbed to radicalisation, believing
that martyrdom alone will bring liberation, a sensibility again actively
promoted by Pakistan’s ISI.
The J&K police were trained to deal with attempts to incite public
22 support for Pakistan through mischievous rumour and stealthy intrusion

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 Kashmir: The Tragedy

of armed groups across India’s frontiers in the wars of 1965 and 1971.

Wajahat Habibullah
Mostly Kashmiris themselves, they were best equipped to help keep their
own people informed. In the early 1970s, in the aftermath of Bangladesh’s
birth, there was a crackdown that ended a flutter by a group calling itself
the Al Fatah, unearthed and eliminated without loss of life by the Anantnag
police. Under the leadership of Surendra Nath and his successor IGP
J&K, Peer Ghulam Hasan Shah, the state police forces were honed to deal
precisely with such challenges. Yet, after the fall of the Congress government
at the centre in 1989, pressure mounted to give this responsibility to the
Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). Among the most widely respected
of Kashmiri policemen, the IGP of Kashmir at the time, A.M. Watali, has
described the turn of events that set the state on the road to disaster. With
the supplanting of the government at the centre at the close of 1989, Chief
Minister Farooq Abdullah was pressured by the Home Ministry, now led
by fellow Kashmiri and political adversary Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, to
deploy the CRPF instead of the JKP for enforcing law and order. Because
he stoutly opposed the very idea, Watali was transferred to Jammu. He
describes what followed in his Kashmir Intifada: A Memoir: ‘It is estimated
that in this period about 15,000 boys crossed into PaK [sic], which must
have been a windfall for the sponsors of militancy there. It was because of
this human material that the insurgency is sustained for more than two
decades’ (Watali 2017, pp. 61–62).
Watali goes on to baldly accuse the Border Security Force (BSF),
deployed to guard the LoC, of ‘allowing their own citizens in thousands
to cross into enemy territory, knowing that they will get arms training and
return with lethal weapons to fight them. This dereliction of duty amounts
to high treason.’ He demands an explanation from the Government of
India – the state was under Governor’s Rule ‘to the nation for this brazen
offence by security forces. Nothing short of a high-level judicial inquiry is
warranted to bring out the truth.’ Worse, the Kashmiri public, from whom
the J&K police were drawn, was left unprotected from ISI propaganda.
It has been contended by no less than Prime Minister Narendra
Modi that because of the special status enjoyed by J&K, development was
impeded. But the fact is that the state was able to legislate and successfully
enforce the Big Landed Estates Abolition Act 1950 under its first Prime
Minister, Sheikh Abdullah, which was, as any critic will concede, the most
progressive land reform effected anywhere in India, expropriating 4.5 lakh
hectares of cultivable land held in excess of 22.75 acres (excluding orchards)
from 9,000 absentee landlords without compensation and redistributing it
amongst the landless peasantry. This also accounts for the former state of
J&K, despite skewed development, having at 12 per cent, the lowest poverty
ratio of any state in India to this day. J&K under Abdullah was also the first
among India’s states to provide free education to all children up to high
school. The success of that initiative is demonstrated by the present high rate 23

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 Social Scientist

of success of young men and women educated in the state in the All India
Vol. 48 / Nos. 7–8 / July–August 2020

Service examinations. The Rhodes Scholar for 2019 is a Kashmiri. India’s

official Human Development Index on all counts will attest to the state
being amongst India’s most developed on this account. And the six years of
central rule described is hardly testimony to any revolution in development.
Because of its adherence to customary law, J&K gave to women,
including Muslim women, rights equal to or superior to men. The
overriding importance of the customary law in Kashmir is borne out by
section 4 of the Jammu & Kashmir Sri Pratap Consolidation of Laws Act
1920 (1977 Samvat Vikram), which specifically provides that in all questions
regarding succession, inheritance, special property of females, divorce,
dower, adoption, guardianship, minority, bastardy, family relation, castes
or religious usages or institutions, the rule of decision in this province is
the personal law of the parties excepting in so far as such personal law has
been modified by any custom applicable to the parties concerned. This is
in keeping with traditional jurisprudence recognised by Islamic law-makers
but supplanted in modern times by modernists.
That said, from 1954 onwards amendments to Article 370 initiated by
the state legislature had brought the Article to almost complete compliance
with the Indian laws. A good example would be the Jammu & Kashmir
Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 2007, which replaced the
progressive personal law described with the regressive Muslim Personal Law
(Shariat) Application Act (1937) of India. In 1982, J&K adopted the Public
Safety Act designed to protect its priceless forests from encroachment, but
after 1989 increasingly used as a draconian security tool to keep detainees
in prison without trial for months, even years, although cases usually failed
when brought to trial. A recent demonstration of this has been the arrest
of the entire political leadership of J&K including all its former living Chief
Ministers and the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) ally and former minister in
the last coalition government, placing them in detention for months, with
the judiciary ignoring its duty to these citizens of India. Successive state
governments have used Article 370 to delay application of central laws
to the state, an example being the RTI Act of 2005. Yet the final J&K RTI
that came only in 2009 drawing down on the Indian law was in many ways
superior to the national law.
But it was the perception of erosion of Article 370 that led to the
revival of separatist sentiment under Maqbool Bhat of JKLF, today an icon
to Kashmir’s separatists. It was not then the excess of freedom permitted
by a separate constitution that had precipitated insurgency, but instead
its repeated denial. The abrogation of Article 370 therefore could readily
have been explained to a disgruntled citizenry as a logical conclusion of a
phase of the state’s constitutional evolution and their cooperation sought
in building a new, more promising phase, thereby seeking their support.
24 Notwithstanding, Presidential Order C.O. 272 uses Article 370(1)(d) –

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 Kashmir: The Tragedy

which was meant to apply other provisions of the Constitution to the state

Wajahat Habibullah
of Jammu & Kashmir – to transform Article 370 itself, and thereby the
terms of the federal relationship between the state of Jammu & Kashmir
and the Union of India, with no consultation with those most affected.
Having been passed during an extended period of President’s Rule, the
Presidential Order substitutes the concurrence of the Governor for that
of the government (and effectively, therefore, amounts to the central
government, taking its own consent), to change the very character of a
federal unit. Whether, therefore, the Presidential Order takes cover of
a temporary situation, meant to operate until the return of an elected
government, to accomplish a fundamental, permanent and irreversible
alteration of the status of the state of Jammu & Kashmir without the
concurrence, consultation or recommendation of the people of that state,
acting through their elected representatives, is a matter that the apex court
should by now have considered.
But, in addition to the Presidential Orders which abrogate Article
370 of the Constitution, Parliament has – through the Jammu & Kashmir
Reorganisation Act of 2019 – done down the status of the state of Jammu
& Kashmir, making it two Union Territories (one with a legislature and
one without). It is again moot whether the Indian federal scheme – as
exemplified by Articles 1 and 3 of the Indian Constitution – allows for
Parliament to downgrade statehood into a less representative form, which
a Union Territory is. Again, it is for the Honourable Supreme Court to
determine whether the right to autonomous self-government and to one’s
identity within a federal framework are essential fundamental rights for
the purpose of Part III of the Constitution, and whether these valuable
rights have been abridged without the ‘procedure established by law’. Dr
Ambedkar memorably equated constitutional morality with ‘a paramount
reverence for the forms of the Constitution, enforcing obedience to
authority and acting under and within these forms’.
By imposing a brutal lockdown in the state to back the tearing away
of what was no more than a fig-leaf, detaining even those that had always
been first servants of the Indian State and participants in governments that
had readily acted under the directions of the IB (Intelligence Bureau), the
Union government has administered to the Kashmiri public a slap in the
face. Yet, given the fact that the new dispensation is unlikely in any way to
affect the functioning of government within J&K that will continue with its
existing instrumentalities , the way forward can only be secured by reaching
out to those very people, by allowing them the liberty of Article 19 (1)(a) of
the Constitution of India, their right of freedom of speech and expression,
including the free use of modern technology. It is contended that young
participants in the panchayat electioneering will provide the leadership.
But surely even that leadership will want voice. An early restoration of self-
respect through removal of the lockdown with the restitution of statehood 25

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 Social Scientist

must be the first step if a way forward is to be found. This will give residents
Vol. 48 / Nos. 7–8 / July–August 2020

of Kashmir the opportunity of ensuring their own full participation in the

electoral process, abysmal in recent times, ensuring election of a legislative
assembly that fully represents their aspirations.
Instead, nearly eight months after the abrogation of its constitutional
status hitherto the Union government has laid down rules for domicile
in the UT and incorporated anyone who has resided therein for 15 years
or studied there for seven. The J&K Reorganisation (Adaptation of State
Laws) Order 2020 has, among 138 laws of the erstwhile state, also amended
the J&K Civil Services (Decentralisation and Recruitment) Act that had
protected jobs up to Group 4 for State subjects. This caused a furore
amongst the mainstream political parties including by the latest entrant
thereto, the BJP-sponsored Apni Party led by former PDP (People’s
Democratic Party) Minister Altaf Bukhari. And this at a time when the
entire country is reeling under COVID-19.
A report that the Home Minister of India, upon election in 2019,
was reviewing the delimitation of constituencies in the then state of J&K,
brought a host of reactions from different parts of the country, whether
affected directly or not. Most curious was the variety of responses from
within the state, ranging from hope of redress for long-standing grievance
to panic at what was seen as an assault on autonomy guaranteed by Article
370 and thus on the very raison d’être of the state’s accession to India
in October 1947. The Home Minister did not clarify what it was that he
was reviewing and what action was planned, except to make known that
reservation of constituencies for Scheduled Castes as required under the
law will be considered.
The constitutional structure of the country seeks to balance the
interests of all sections of the Indian community, as India has evolved
into today’s modern nation-state. The electoral system from panchayat
to parliament is the means through which the interest of each section of
India’s citizens is represented and secured democratically. Like all states of
India with a multi-ethnic religious and cultural composition, in J&K too
the majority community in the UT is a minority in some districts.
In the state of J&K there were six parliamentary constituencies, three in
the Kashmir Division, two in Jammu, and one in the newly created Ladakh
Division. Whereas the first was predominantly Kashmiri Muslim, the second
had a majority Hindu but with a substantial and ethnically diverse Muslim
population, Kashmiri, Pahari and Gujjar, the latter being listed as Scheduled
Tribe (ST). Ladakh is classified entirely as ST, with a Muslim majority.
The highest population growth rate has been in the districts of Kashmir
Division, with Anantnag district recording a 38.58 per cent decadal growth
in the last census followed by Ganderbal with 36.50 per cent, then Kupwara
in the northwest, followed by the Muslim-majority districts of Jammu
26 Division. The largest extant district in population is indeed Jammu, winter

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 Kashmir: The Tragedy

capital of the UT, but it is followed in succession by Srinagar, Anantnag

Wajahat Habibullah
and Baramulla, followed closely by Kupwara and Budgam, all within the
fast-growing Kashmir Division.
The population of erstwhile J&K according to the 2011 census was
68.31 per cent Muslim and 28.47 per cent Hindu. And although this figure
is almost identical to the balance on Independence, the demographic
distribution stood at 64.19 per cent Muslim and 32.24 per cent Hindu
in 1981. Since then the Muslim population has steadily increased. The
investment of Sheikh Abdullah’s government in public health and education
in the ’70s and early ’80s is what brought the turnaround in health and life
expectancy amongst Kashmiris.
So, what is it that a review of delimitation expects to achieve?
Redistribution on the basis of population? Kashmir is a narrow, densely
populated Valley with settlements now scaling river and crag up ridge and
mountainside, and hence stands to benefit most from such an exercise. If
the criterion is to be size, the hill areas of Jammu located in the Pir Panjal
foothills of the mighty Himalayas, all primarily Muslim, would gain, as they
would in consideration of connectivity. A concerned government of course
has the responsibility to keep such issues under review so as to ensure that
every section of the citizenry finds representation in proportion to its size.
And if indeed government in its wisdom were to decide on appointing
a Delimitation Commission, such a Commission would be required
to undertake extensive study and consultation before arriving at any
recommendation, which will give every section of the affected population
the opportunity to register its views.
But because the challenge of administering J&K today is loss of trust
in government, a challenge manifested in the quality of debate that the
country is now witnessing on the issue, the government would be well
advised to act in accordance with its own objective oft reiterated by no
less than Prime Minster Narendra Modi, by cleaving to transparency and
accountability to allay mistrust. This is even more essential at the present
time when J&K is a Union Territory.
There is little doubt that Pakistan has taken advantage, even exacerbated
our discomfiture with every means at its command. But did we have any
reason to doubt that it would, even after its violent birth and the wars that
followed? The need of the hour is to address real issues that beleaguer the
unhappy state. The government has shown little inclination to addressing
this despite being well served. The present Deputy Commissioner Srinagar
has won praise for his handling of the stout public response to the
Coronavirus pandemic. As attested by their success in the IAS competition,
the UT abounds in qualified, resourceful and accomplished youth bonding
with their own professional associations who could, through a well-
conceived policy of promoting entrepreneurship, be harnessed to bring
economic revolution. But my foreboding for the next phase of the 27

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 Social Scientist

relationship of Kashmiris with India is grave, for if we have lost Kashmir’s

Vol. 48 / Nos. 7–8 / July–August 2020

youth, educated, talented and consumed with hatred, who will lead the
state into its future?

Note
1 So I argue in Habibullah (2011).

References
Balachandran, Vappala (2018), ‘The Half Truths on Kashmir’, The Tribune, 4 October.
Bose, Sumantra (2003), Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Habibullah, Wajahat (2011), My Kashmir: The Dying of the Light, New Delhi: Viking by
Penguin Books.
Khan, Nyla Ali (2018), Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s Reflections on Kashmir, Palgrave
Macmillan, Springer International Publishing.
Korbel, Josef (2002), Danger in Kashmir, Karachi and New York: Oxford University
Press.
Ramesh, Jairam (2018), Intertwined Lives: P.N. Haksar and Indira Gandhi, New Delhi:
Simon & Schuster.
Watali, A.M. (2017), Kashmir Intifada: A Memoir, Srinagar: Gulshan Books.

Wajahat Habibullah is a retired IAS officer of the J&K cadre (1968), who
has served in various parts of India and in the US. He was India’s first Chief
Information Commissioner and is the author of My Kashmir: The Dying of
the Light.

28

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