A new Kashmir initiative: Is it time to scrap Article 370?

On Tuesday morning, the BJP finally snapped its impaired and injurious alliance with the PDP in Kashmir. Admitting that it had become “untenable,” party general secretary and master strategist, Ram Madhav, said: “Keeping in mind the larger national interest of India’s integrity and security” and “in order to bring control over the situation prevailing in the state, we have decided that it is time the reins of power in the state be handed over to the Governor.”

Behind this unravelling, there is a hard and bitter truth that the BJP may find difficult to swallow. It seems they have lost Kashmir, which is bad enough, but they may also lose Jammu. Whatever calculations went into the BJP’s conditional, some would say opportunistic, support to the Mehbooba Mufti-led coalition, the inevitable break-up has now occurred. Perhaps, the PDP has gained marginally from it, but the BJP has suffered badly.

Given the widely held belief, not just in Delhi, but in Jammu & Kashmir, that the PDP is covertly supportive of separatists, the party can now blame the BJP for all its failures. This may earn it some goodwill among the Muslim voters in the Valley. BJP, on the other hand, took a calculated risk in forming a government with the PDP. True, its options were limited. It did not have a majority on its own. This was the only way it could keep the “unholy” alliance of National Conference and Congress out of power.

But at what cost? Did it imagine that it could push its agenda, which included the elimination of cross-border terrorism, using the PDP as its cover? If so, this plan has boomeranged. From the blinding of stone-pelters to the use of human shields, to the assassination of journalists, to the indictment from the UN Human Rights Council — the BJP seems only to have earned flak for sharing the hot seat with the PDP. No surprise that the PDP-BJP deal lasted just over two years, from April 4, 2016, to June 19, 2018.

When I visited Jammu twice during this brittle, if not doomed experiment, I got the distinct feeling that people in Jammu were feeling sorely disappointed, if not outright betrayed. Given that famous pressmen look to local taxi drivers as reliable “native informants,” I may perhaps be excused for doing so since I am not at all one. Yet my taxi driver, quite politically well-informed for having, as he claimed, driven many a local leader, declared, “Sa’ab, this government is a flop; mark my words, no one in Jammu is going to vote for BJP now.”

I was rather taken aback by such a categorical and unforgiving remark. So, I began asking several people, from top professors to local reporters, from bureaucrats to clerks, from RSS cadres to ordinary voters. I was told sad, sometimes alarming, stories not only of failed promises, but also of impending demographic disasters. Many areas in Jammu, it seems, were being “taken over” by Muslims from the Valley and elsewhere, which meant that the BJP would not be able to hold on to the seats it had won.

Indeed, according to some, it was after this alliance came to power that the “Islamisation” of Jammu became aggressive. For instance, in February this year, then CM Mehbooba Mufti reportedly directed the police and the administrative machinery not to evict the Muslim Gujjar and Bakerwal tribals from government and private lands that they had occupied, nor move against them under IPC 188 (prevention of cruelty to animals) if they were found transporting cattle and other animals. This was seen by some BJP supporters as a naked “Islamo-Fascist” land-grab and cattle-smuggling ploy. The nationwide, some might say worldwide, controversy over the Rohingya settlements also suggest that some demographic mischief was possibly afoot. In Ladakh, too, such moves, with Muslims from the Valley and from Ladakh marrying Buddhist girls, are allegedly rampant. An attendant influx of Valley settlers, the rise in the number of mosques, and visible signs of both demographic and cultural change are also evident.

Is there any way the BJP can make up lost ground in the sensitive state? There is. The abrogation of Article 370. This bold step will make a huge difference not only to the political future of the Valley, but also buoy up the ruling party’s Lok Sabha chances in 2019, particularly among its Hindu vote base. The intrepid and irrepressible Subramanian Swamy tweeted the day after the PDP-BJP government fell, saying, “I have sent a Note to PMO along with photocopies of the Constituent Assembly Debates and my legal arguments on why Art 370 can be deleted without Parliament concurrence, and by a Presidential Notification. I want it timed for mid-September.” Of course, Swamy has not always been reliable. About four years back he had predicted that Article 370 “will be deleted around September 2015.” If it happens three years later, this will be an irreversible turning point in the history of independent India.

No doubt, there are some constitutional and legal issues to be ironed out. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. The question is whether Narendra Modi and Amit Shah will have the guts and the gumption to take it.

The author is a poet and professor at JNU. Views expressed are personal.