Clock turns: Mood in J&K as UT votes

At a community election meeting in Palipora, a village so small in the Ganderbal constituency you would never suspect that behind the row of higgledy-piggledy houses on the main road, a bright red shamiana with a white cloth flower has been strung up over the stage on which Farooq Abdullah is sitting. Men are in the front and women at the back. The area’s upstanding citizenry is on either side of Farooq, and his grandsons, Zahir and Zamir Abdullah, somewhere on the side. In glass goblets, dry fruit is passed around. Farooq, himself a large and lumbering man, rests one extended hand on a walking stick. Sometimes, he cups his face in his hand. He listens — first, as a thin man in dark green recites the opening prayer in front of the microphone, and then, many men, one after the other, have their say. Only then, he speaks. It is his turn.

“In Manipur, katl-e-aam (a massacre) is taking place. Here, in Kashmir, we have an election. This is our opportunity to vote and elect our leaders,” he says, in words to that effect.

Everyone listens carefully, imbibing the wisdom of this ageing man. He is asking them to vote for his son, Omar Abdullah, of course, who is standing from the Ganderbal (and Budgam) constituency, but that’s only part of the message. Amar Singh Dulat, the former head of India’s external intelligence agency, R&AW, once said that nothing in Kashmir is straightforward, except the poplar tree.

But here in Palipora, on this clear, end-of-summer morning, the story is absurdly simple. Vote. Exercise your undeniable, constitutional right. No one can prevent you from doing so. Vote and elect the people who will speak up for you. Hear the cries from Manipur, so far away, because they resonate right here in Kashmir.

“I speak about Manipur because it is a part of me, a part of India,” Farooq Abdullah tells The Tribune, softly banging his chest with his fist, adding, “I want people in Jammu and Kashmir to know that we are all fighting for the same thing.”

Across the five-year-old Union Territory, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised again in Srinagar last week that the BJP will restore to statehood, people are flocking to election rallies, participating in village processions, chattering with strangers — journalists, even — willing to listen about their suffocating grief during the last many decades. The first phase of the three-phase polls has just taken place in south Kashmir, and it has not just gone off smoothly, it has clocked an inspiring 60 per cent turnout.

The chatter is nonstop. In Narwa, a Pulwama village, women in brightly coloured pherans and matching dupattas sing along in the vanguard of PDP candidate Waheed Para’s election campaign and announce his arrival, “Sher aaya, sher aaya.”

In Kulgam, young men participating in CPM candidate Yusuf Tarigami’s rally are ready with their rebuttals (“until yesterday, the banned Jamaat said the vote was haram, how has it suddenly become halal today?”). Tarigami’s main opponent, the moon-faced Sayar Reshi, a pro-Pakistan Jamaat-i-Islami member-turned-Independent candidate, tells The Tribune, “I am a political science scholar and I believe in and will abide by the Constitution”, even as his supporters scream out his election symbol aloud, “Top, top, laptop.”

In fancy tea-rooms overlooking the placid trickle that is the Jhelum in Srinagar, women in black, Arabic-inspired hijabs spoon-feed Nutella crepe to their male partners and nod seriously as the men speak — “the best thing that has happened to Kashmir is the L-G rule and Modi these past five years”.

In Rasana village in the Jammu region, where an eight-year-old Gujjar girl was brutally raped and murdered in 2018, in nearby Kathua and in Jammu city itself, traders, political analysts and taxi drivers, best friends of parachuting journalists, echo their confusion over why the BJP seems to have abandoned its stronghold. With the deletion of Article 370 from the Constitution, they ask plaintively, “Hum ko kya mila?” (What did we get?)

It’s a melee in Jammu and Kashmir these days. It’s also called an election. Pro-separatist leaders like MP Engineer Rashid — an engineer in the state administration aeons ago who fought the Baramulla Lok Sabha election from inside his jail cell in Tihar, defeating Omar Abdullah, and has been released by the courts to campaign for his candidates — have never had it so good. He openly talks about how awful the “Government of India” is, to every print, TV and online journalist in town. He has been held under the dreaded UAPA, an Act that believes you are a terrorist and doesn’t need proof to make the arrest, and will return to jail the day after the last phase of the Kashmir election on October 1.

Jamaat candidates, now Independents, because their organisation remains banned — a ban that was extended only this February — are tying up with Rashid and have called their coalition the Awami Independent Party, in the hope that pro-separatist sentiment in the Valley will send them romping home to the new Assembly.

One of them, Mohammed Sikander Malik, fighting from Bandipora, shows the GPS tracker clipped around his right ankle — a thick, rubberised contraption that will set off an alarm in the intelligence agency offices, if the gent in question so much as steps outside the territory that he has been allowed to roam around and campaign in, just like in American TV serials. He insists that he and the Jamaat have never been “pro-Pakistani”, never mind that the organisation’s ideologue, the fiery late Syed Ali Shah Geelani, spent his life fighting to be united with the Islamic republic next door. Malik, arrested in 2019, was recently let out to campaign for his election.

In Shopian, once part of the heart of the Kashmiri insurgency, BJP flags flutter in the shadow of the quietly beautiful Jama Masjid. Women must pray in the women’s section, but one Kashmiri woman ignores the unspoken convention, as the muezzin calls for afternoon prayer, so you must follow. It is serene in the quadrangle inside. Outside, young men in black uniform from the once-dreaded Special Operations Group — Kashmir valley’s many dreaded agencies are all very much around — are directing traffic away because “the BJP candidate is coming”. A young shopkeeper, returning with half a bowl of borrowed curd from a neighbour to ferment more at home, points to one of the black-uniformed men in a ponytail and asks, “Do these men think they are in Afghanistan? Just look at the way they are dressed and walk around with their assault weapons.” The BJP candidate doesn’t show up. Perhaps, he will come later.

Driving around the Kashmir valley looking at its first election in 10 years has been like witnessing a National Geographic documentary — everything is so beautiful, it’s almost a cliche. Village roads lined with poplar and weeping willow, the golden paddy ripening in the fields on either side, labourers bent over their bundles, small figures against a giant mountainside. By the middle of October, the saffron in Avantipora will be ready to cut — pale purple flowers bobbing their tiny heads in the wind, while the handful of rock-cut temples stand guard close by. You cross the stretch where the attack against the CRPF convoy took place in February 2019, which killed all 40 personnel in the bus and provoked the Balakot missile attacks later that month, which in turn led to the gravest India-Pakistan tension in recent decades — and you realise how fragile this peace is.

Few outsiders care. The tourists have been coming in droves, as many as 2.5 crore in the last two years, hooked by both Amir Khusrau and Hindi cinema. If there is jannat on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this. You hear Malayalam on the Jhelum bundh in Srinagar and Punjabi on the jam-packed flights. Butter chicken has made it to the restaurants that line the Dal Lake. The magic of Kashmir valley, overwrought by insurgency over the past 30 years and uncertainty and chaos through large parts of the previous decades, is still a charm that is a permanent keepsake, a memory that makes you want more.

That one fact is enough to gnash the teeth of the Jammu folks. Where are the tourists, they wail; most trains (15 out of 25) that used to touch Jammu, where the devout would get down for Vaishno Devi, now go straight to Katra. Those trains are believed to be full for weeks and it’s tough to get a ticket — great for the pilgrims themselves, but not so great for Jammu’s forlorn hoteliers and traders, grappling with terrible traffic, open drains and other unsmart city-like credentials. The Durbar Move, when the entire administration in Srinagar moved to Jammu for nearly six months every winter, has given rise to much discontent. It was an anachronism that belonged to a wilful and whimsical Maharaja in a bygone era, that was inherited and kept by the determinedly secular governments that followed, but was discontinued in 2021.

That’s because Jammu used to prosper from rentals and trade and such like. Now that big shot in the arm, ostensibly to cut costs, has been dealt a fell blow. If the charms of abrogating Article 370 in real terms were enough to replace all these small things that make up the economy — such as consolidating the Hindu population and make them one cohesive unit — then many might not be as confused as they are now. They continue to like the BJP, agree with its ideology and want to vote them back to power, but then the question confronts itself: what else has the BJP done for Jammu, besides abrogating Article 370?

Jammu may yet steel itself to push the lotus button when it votes on October 1. If it does and gives the BJP enough seats, and if the National Conference-Congress coalition doesn’t get enough to win a majority in the 90-member Assembly, then the post-election game is wide open. After all, politics is the art of the possible, never mind NC vice-president Omar Abdullah telling The Tribune that he and his party “will never ally with the BJP”.

And so, Jammu and Kashmir is voting again, for the first time in 10 years. For better or for worse, people are going to the polls. For the moment, that is enough.