Mehbooba being cornered by BJP?

Arun Joshi

Tribune News Service

There appears to be a bigger game plan at play in the verbal duel over the Kashmir Police Service cadre review between the two alliance partners — PDP and BJP — in a Cabinet meeting here on Friday that witnessed a rare walkout by Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti.

A simplistic conclusion of the unseemly episode is that the BJP wanted Delhi to be consulted — meaning seeking its approval — before putting this review of the KPS cadre in the Cabinet meeting.

The review, mooted by Mehbooba Mufti, as Home Minister, was to remove a long-time irritant in which the local officers could be posted as Inspector Generals and Deputy Inspector Generals without their induction into the IPS by way of promotion quota reserved for them.

This was to enlarge the presence and the role of the KPS cadre at higher positions than the Senior Superintendent of Police. Then there is a precedent with regard to the Kashmir Administrative Service officers who rise to occupy the positions that are also held by the IAS officers.

In the immediate context, this would be KPS versus IPS. That’s ominous. Secondly, the KPS has become PDP’s baby, while the BJP has taken ownership of the IPS officers, most of who hail from outside the state like IAS officers. This can cause serious disciplinary problems in the belt force, which has its record of extreme sacrifices, as also the rebellion in April 2003. There already are fissures between the local and the outside officers, which have become too open in the recent times.

Kashmir is a sensitive place where exploitation of regional and religious sentiments can have worse kind of consequences. The infusion of this sort has already vitiated the administrative services where political and communal cronyism has undermined the governance of the state.

This is ominous for the governance. The BJP by taking refuge in peddling Delhi’s wish or dictates, over stalling the proposal of the KPS cadre review, has challenged the authority of the state government. There were other ways to get the matter deferred till such time some consensus could have been worked out. The BJP ministers who would nod in affirmative to everything in the Cabinet, despite rants in public, could speak so voluminously and loudly demonstrated that it was not the business as usual.

The party has conveyed, and confirmed, that Delhi pulls strings in Kashmir and the local elected governments have no locus standi in taking major policy decision. A handle has been given to all those sections in the Valley, separatists in particular, that the local elected governments were “puppets of Delhi.” This is no way of underscoring the fact that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India, rather it works in reverse. This erodes the credibility of the elected representatives in Kashmir and puts a question mark on the basic democratic process of elections and inevitably gives lot of fodder to the inimical forces operating in strength in the state.

The Chief Minister was irritated by the BJP’s Delhi’s permission first stand for what she wanted to do as head of the coalition government. She left the meeting, fuming and anger-driven stinging remarks about Delhi establishment. “If Delhi is to decide everything in the state, then let Delhi run the state,” she is reported to have remarked before leaving the Cabinet meeting.

Worse still, the repeated echo of her father late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s assertion and justification for forming government with the BJP like coming together of North Pole and South Pole for the overall conciliation and development of all the three regions of the state is under strain. Who gains by it, the question needs to be asked.