The Hindu : Kashmir: Sangh Parivar's Waterloo

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Nov 06, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Kashmir: Sangh Parivar's Waterloo

By Navnita Chadha Behera

The BJP and the RSS fail to realise that their defeat was... because their understanding of the socio-political realities of Jammu and Kashmir society is fundamentally flawed.

THE TRIFURCATION of Jammu and Kashmir has become a bone of contention within the Sangh Parivar. While the BJP has rejected this demand as `anti-national', the RSS is sticking to its guns. The Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, and the RSS chief, V. Sudarshan met recently in a peacemaking attempt and agreed to hold regular consultations for resolving their differences. This truce, however, is likely to boomerang in Kashmir. Kashmir has always been central to the Hindu notion of rashtra-rajya. And yet, the proponents of Hindutva have consistently failed in securing their political objectives because their ideological and political tenets are at variance with Jammu and Kashmir's deeply plural social realities.

Ideologically, the Hindu nationalist identity was predicated on the notion of "Muslim disloyalty to the Indian nation", while politically, it adhered to the strong state theory with total subordination of the minorities to the Hindu majority. These political forces represented by the Jan Sangh and the RSS lost the battle for State formation in 1947 to the Nehru-led Congress' modernist nationalism that upheld the idea of a secular and plural India. They, however, persisted in their efforts to take control of the Indian state. Jammu and Kashmir became important because of its Muslim-majority character. It had become the new battleground of contending nationalisms: secular nationalism vis-a-vis the two-nation theory as well as Hindu nationalism. Nehru believed that Kashmir's voluntary accession had strengthened the hands of secular nationalism. Determined to keep it within India's fold, the State was granted special status under Article 370 of the Constitution.

Nehru's extraordinary concessions to the State and his support for Sheikh Abdullah, a popular Muslim leader, against the Hindu Maharaja, Hari Singh, provided the Hindu nationalist forces with just the `cause' they needed for springing back into action and galvanising their cadres. It not only tended to reaffirm their core belief in the `Muslim disloyalty' theory but Kashmir's special status was also construed to be an instrument in weakening the Indian state. Jammu and Kashmir, therefore, became central to the Hindutva ideology.

The first salvo was fired through the Praja Parishad agitation in 1952. Founded on the RSS' existing organisational base in Jammu, the Parishad resented the transfer of power from the Hindu Dogra Maharaja to the Muslim leadership of the National Conference. It believed land reforms had fundamentally altered the pattern of social organisation of the State to its disadvantage. The Parishad's eight-point programme demanded the abrogation of Article 370; full integration of the State into the Indian Union; full application of the Indian Constitution; removal of the present distinction between `state-subjects' and Indian citizens; complete jurisdiction of the Supreme Court; removal of customs barriers between Kashmir and India; fresh elections to the Kashmir Constituent Assembly; and investigation of corruption in the State administration by an impartial tribunal. The Parishad sought to end Kashmiri domination by demanding the State's complete integration with the Indian Union. By transferring power from the Valley-based Government to the Centre, it hoped Kashmiri domination over the Jammu region would be reduced.

The Bharatiya Jan Sangh, the Hindu Mahasabha, the Ram Rajya Parishad, the Punjab Arya Samaj and some Akali leaders supported the Parishad's agitation. However, this movement failed to acquire a mass character owing to its limited social base, especially in the rural areas. The Parishad's identification with the Hindu landlords, jagirdars and sahukars (money lenders) who had enjoyed a privileged position under the Maharaja's rule delivered a body blow to its social and political appeal. The State's peasantry (mainly in the Valley, but also in Jammu) had reaped rich dividends from the NC's land reform policies. By making it a Hindu-Muslim issue, the Parishad leadership failed to gain the support of Jammu's Muslims who did not support the NC but also rejected the former's communal agenda. It also failed to mobilise the support of the small but influential minority of Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley and the Ladakhi Buddhists who shared its antipathy for Sheikh Abdullah.

The Parishad had erred in grasping the political imperatives of the diverse social realities of Jammu and Kashmir. Given its deeply plural character, a political mobilisation strategy could acquire a mass support base only by evolving a political agenda that appealed to different communities cutting across their ethnic, religious and linguistic affiliations. The proponents of Hindu nationalism never learnt this lesson. Fifty years later, the RSS is again resorting to a communal strategy of political mobilisation by seeking the State's trifurcation along a communal fault line.

The Jammu Mukti Morcha (JMM), a new regional outfit created by a group of intellectuals in the early 1990s, had revived Jammu's demand for separate statehood. Its rationale lay in political and regional imbalances favouring the Valley at Jammu and Ladakh's cost. Owing to Srinagar's total neglect and discrimination against Jammu in the matters of political and economic development coupled with the Central Government's Valley-centric thinking, the JMM argued that separate statehood was the only way out. Its modus operandi had remained largely confined to processions, strikes and memorandums to the State and Central Governments. Many intellectuals, journalists and politicians of Jammu insisted that it was a product of the Union Home Ministry, which had propped it up as a counterweight to the Kashmiri demand for independence.

The limited social base of the Jammu Mukti Morcha further dwindled when it joined hands with the RSS and converted itself into the Jammu State Morcha (JSM) to contest the 2002 Assembly elections. The political character of the trifurcation demand became communalised. Deploying a religious prism, the JMM-RSS alliance argued that the State's three sub-regions have their own separate cultural and religious identities. Jammu is largely Hindu, the Valley entirely Muslim and most of Ladakh Buddhist.

The BJP played a double game. Deviating from its original demand for statutory regional and statutory boards for development for the Jammu region, the party's State unit quietly endorsed the trifurcation demand of the JSM-RSS alliance. Notwithstanding the central leadership's opposition, the BJP State unit persisted in negotiating seat-sharing arrangements with the JSM. Although these did not materialise, both fought elections on the trifurcation plank and lost.

The BJP and the RSS fail to realise that their defeat was not due to divergent electoral strategies but because their understanding of the socio-political realities of Jammu and Kashmir society is fundamentally flawed. The Sangh Parivar is trying to transform the multifaceted religious system of Hinduism into a monolithic brand. It seeks to subsume different layers of community identity in terms of culture, language and caste under a single overarching category of religion. In Jammu and Kashmir's context, this is doomed to failure because there are no cohesive or monolithic political grouping of Hindus and Muslims at the grassroots level whose political affiliations cut across ethnic (Dogra, Gujjars and Bakkarwals), linguistic (Pahari, Gojri, Kashmiri and Dogri), caste lines and regional differences. The Jammu Muslims, for example, do not support the BJP's Hindu politics and a separate state of Jammu, nor are they willing to be assimilated completely into the Kashmiri Muslim identity. Moreover, the Jammu Muslims are in minority in the Jammu region but form a majority in Poonch, Rajouri and Doda districts. If the key issue is that Jammu Hindus must separate themselves from Kashmiri Muslims and create a new political entity to ensure their political and economic development, why should the Jammu Muslims agree to stay with Jammu Hindus in a separate Jammu State? Thus, attempts to superimpose the communal divide are not only part of a divisive agenda but also bound to flounder. Kashmir has once again proved to be the Sangh Parivar's Waterloo.

(The writer is Reader, Department of Political Science, Delhi University.)

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

Stories in this Section

Timely action

A lone hand by the Commonwealth

Kashmir: Sangh Parivar's Waterloo

Conversion politics - I

Europe's marginalised community

`Bill aimed only at forcible conversions'