Take a leap of faith: Both New Delhi and Kashmir Valley must open up to each other

In the same week that the nullification of Article 370 in Jammu & Kashmir hit newspaper front pages, an important report was printed in the sports pages. The Real Kashmir Football Club scored a stunning victory over Chennai City FC in the Durand Cup – India’s oldest football tournament. Real Kashmir, a Srinagar-based football club started by a Kashmiri Pandit and a Kashmiri Muslim, is now going from strength to strength, its crack footballers making a mark across India. Real Kashmir FC is a mark of Kashmiri civil society in action.

The success of Real Kashmir attests to what reporters in Kashmir sometimes catch a glimpse of, fleetingly, like a lone firefly at dusk. Behind fortified streets and armoured vans, glows a tiny lamp of possibility. That lamp glows brightly when Kashmir’s talents are recognised. But it is in perpetual jeopardy of being snuffed out by that familiar blight: the Big State.

Kashmir is rich in artists, sportspersons, intellectuals, writers. An entrepreneurial, innovative people are able to prevail admirably over the challenging circumstances destiny has handed them. Many Kashmiris regularly top UPSC exams, Pervez Rasool has become the first Kashmiri cricketer to represent India, Zaira Wasim became a Bollywood star, Afzal Guru’s son Ghalib Guru once said he dreams of becoming a doctor at AIIMS.

Yet over the decades this nascent yet valiant civil society has become emasculated, trapped between New Delhi’s national security mindset on the one side, and strident separatists and their jihadist backers on the other. Caught in the coils of an angry victimhood combined with the force of zealous Islamisation, youthful aspirations are being choked. Yet joining Kashmiris to India can happen only by strengthening Kashmiri civil society, not by overwhelming force.

Both sides – New Delhi and the Valley – must make a leap of faith. Officials in South Block must back off and let a hundred flowers bloom in Kashmiri society, however difficult some shades of opinion might be for New Delhi to stomach. And Kashmiris for their part must try to find the courage to stride confidently into India’s mainstream.

Rolling back state power and increasing individual freedom in Kashmir has been attempted only rarely. In fact, why just in J&K, across India, the overbearing and intrusive Big State has kept on increasing its power at the cost of citizens’ freedoms.

In the first decades of Independence, Nehruvian socialists used state power to push their ideology. Next, so called liberal dispensations of Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh or even AB Vajpayee also used state power ostensibly for benevolent reasons. But even the “do-gooding” state ended up restricting autonomy, empowering New Delhi and disempowering citizens. Now the Hindutva nationalist government is similarly using mammoth state power to push its own ideological objectives of Hindutva majoritarianism.

In Kashmir, every prime minister has reposed faith in an all-knowing state. Jawaharlal Nehru saw Kashmir as the symbol of the moral superiority of the Indian national movement, a showpiece of the “noble mansion of free India”. Political freedom of individual Kashmiris was not that much on Nehru’s radar as shown by his government’s arrest of Sheikh Abdullah.

But then why blame the idealistic Nehru? In fact, he strained to make J&K feel secure in India by constantly emphasising secularism as India’s founding principle. It was Nehru’s successors who failed to maintain the outreach to Kashmir’s people.

Indira Gandhi saw Kashmir as close to a personal fiefdom. Ironically, her top bureaucrats – from PN Haksar to DP Dhar – were mostly Kashmiri Pandits, and she herself was fiercely proud of her Kashmiri Pandit identity. Yet the imperious manner in which she toppled the elected government of Farooq Abdullah in 1984 in the infamous midnight coup illustrated New Delhi’s persisting need to secure “loyal” Kashmiris in Srinagar. Rajiv Gandhi showed a similar disregard for Kashmiri freedoms when the 1987 election were shamefully rigged, a move that opened doors for armed militants and Pakistan to enter the turmoil.

Vajpayee and Singh had a slightly lighter touch on big state action, with Vajpayee shunning officialese to address the Kashmiri public in fluent Urdu in a public meeting in Srinagar and creating space for CM Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s healing touch approach. UPA-1 marked a forward movement in J&K too, with the start of the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus and robust peoples’ contacts between Kashmir and the rest of India.

Yet in spite of these brief moments of people-friendly policies, New Delhi has invariably fallen back on ministries, bureaucrats, intelligence officers and sarkari committees. And massive security forces.

But now the government says it wants to create ‘Naya Kashmir’. This means, above all, naya thinking and breaking with the model of punishing central control. The liberalisation of the economy in 1991 strengthened India, did not weaken it. In the same way J&K needs to be liberalised from the home ministry stranglehold. Widening the democratic space, re-energising panchayat elections and birthing young political leaders, outside the monopoly of the entrenched political families, are all vital needs. These goals also mean getting real on Kashmir by tolerating Kashmiris of all opinions, allowing the right of political participation to all and expanding citizen rights. Not shrinking a state into a Union territory to be run by proxy from Delhi and securing ‘peace’ at gunpoint.

Kashmir should look like Switzerland, not an armed-to-the teeth Shastri Bhavan in the hills. Now that their constitutional separateness is gone, like every other Indian region, Kashmiris must be allowed a genuine stake in governance processes. When the risk-taking founders of Real Kashmir FC started off, they were laughed at and told that bringing football to the Kashmir Valley was a supreme delusion. Today the team is so good that it may soon lift the Durand Cup. Can New Delhi take a similar risk and make many more Real Kashmirs possible?