National - Elections 2004

In the lap of paradise, the politics of hate

Praveen Swami
LEH

With summer setting in, hordes of tourists have begun to descend on Leh, hoping to experience paradise. If they hang around long enough, they will also be treated to one of the most ugly election campaigns in India.

Seen from the outside, the notion of Ladakh as a site of communal warfare seems improbable. Voters here, unlike in Gujarat or Uttar Pradesh, have not made a habit of burning down mosques or slaughtering their neighbours. Yet, the big question in this sprawling and strategically-sensitive Lok Sabha constituency is whether Leh Buddhists will put up a single, consensus candidate, and whether Kargil's Shia Muslims will respond with a communal candidate of their own.

Politics in the Ladakh mountains is underpinned by a cultural crisis. Long bound by ties of trade and shared cultural practices, the two main religious communities have been pushed apart in recent years. In Buddhist Leh, this is manifested in everything from the Sindhu Darshan festival, which provoked a furore last summer by excluding artistes from the Muslim parts of Jammu and Kashmir, to ostentatious displays of loyalty to the Dalai Lama. In Kargil, there has been a self-conscious adoption of Shia practices inspired by Iran, including the rejection of traditional women's costumes for the all-covering Hijab.

Some observers believe Ladakh's tourist-dollar fuelled prosperity has a good deal to do with its current communal problems. Much of the inflow consists of visitors seeking salvation through Tibetan Buddhism, and Leh elites have little reason to market Kargil's rich Shia traditions instead. The Dalai Lama's summer presence in Leh has led to a proliferation of Non-Governmental Organisations in the area - few of which have much of an interest in equally impoverished communities to the west.

Kargil, in turn, has seen the rise of a new Shia consciousness. The region's two major clerical schools, the Iran-funded Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust and the reformist Islamia School, have brokered an end to their ideological differences. Central among them was the question of whether blood needed to be drawn by penitents during Muharram festivals, a practice insisted on by the IKMT and rejected by the clerics of the Islamia School.

Modern communal politics developed in Ladakh after 1989. Soon after riots broke out between Buddhists and Muslims in Leh, the Government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao set up an elected local body, the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council. For reasons which have never been explained, the district of Kargil was not represented in the Council. National Conference leaders set the stage for the next phase of communalisation. In 1999, the party's controversial Regional Autonomy Committee Report recommended, among other things, that the province be administratively divided along communal lines.

All these communal strains reached a climax during last year's Assembly elections, when the Ladakh Union Territory Front was formed to spearhead an agitation for separation from Jammu and Kashmir. State Ministers MK Togdan Rinpoche and T Namgyal as well as Rajya Sabha member K Thiksey, resigned from the National Conference in deference to the LUTF's call for Ladakh to be granted Union Territory status. The LUTF had the national-level backing of the BJP, but all major parties in Ladakh backed the new organisation.

Shia clerics in Kargil responded in kind, and put up a consensus candidate of their own, Haji Nisar Ali. Here, unlike in Leh, the National Conference displayed some resistance. Sitting MMLA Qamar Ali Akhoon was offered the Kargil Assembly constituency. Akhoon won the contest, but LUTF-backed consensus Buddhist candidates were unopposed in the Leh and Nobra assembly constituencies.

Both LUTF-backed MLAs, Nawang Rigzin and Sonam Narboo, threw their weight behind the People's Democratic Party-led alliance government after the Assembly elections.

Nothing further, interestingly, has been heard from the LUTF on its demand for Union Territory status for Ladakh. The PDP has, at the same time, made significant concessions to communal chauvinists in the Kargil region. Kargil now has its own Autonomous Hill Development Council - an institutional arrangement very similar to that the National Conference had proposed in 1999. What happens now is anyone's guess. Optimists believe the LUTF's affiliation to the PDP will subvert its claims to represent all Buddhists; others believe the damage is irreparable. Unless all major parties in Ladakh decide to resume fighting elections on the basis of their ideologies, not communal affiliations, the pessimists might just turn out to be right.

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