JAMMU AND KASHMIR

A communal divide

The report of the Regional Autonomy Committee, which was established by the National Conference Government, reinforces fears that attempts are on to restructure Jammu and Kashmir along communal lines.

PRAVEEN SWAMI

ABOUT the same time that the Report of the State Autonomy Committee, with its far-reaching recommendations for grant of political autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir, was released, another report - of the Regional Autonomy Committee - was released, on April 13. However, it has been kept well hidden from public view. The release of the RAC's Report has underlined fears that powerful figures in the National Conference wish to restructure the State along communal lines. The Report recommends that the historic regional formations of Kashmir, Jammu and Ladakh be broken down into new entities. It holds out more fundamental threats to the prospect of a secular and democratic Jammu and Kashmir than any number of terrorists do.

In essence, the RAC has recommended the creation of eight new provinces, each with an elected provincial council. In Kashmir itself there would be three new provinces - Kamraz, made up of Baramulla and Kupwara districts; Nundabad, comprising Budgam and Srinagar districts; and Maraz, made up of Anantnag and Pulwama districts. Although all three provinces have some prehistoric resonance, there is no compelling need to carve them out anew. The peoples of the districts have demanded more local power, but they have never asked for new administrative boundaries built along non-existent fault lines.

If the RAC has its way, Ladakh would be subjected to an undisguised communal cleaver. The mountain region would be broken up into two new provinces, consisting of just one district each - predominantly Buddhist Leh and predominantly Muslim Kargil. Ladakh has already been sundered by the exclusion of Kargil from the Ladakh Autonomous Council, set up in 1989; the transfiguration of the two districts into provinces would serve only to sharpen communal and ethnic boundaries. Had protests by local chauvinists in Kargil been disregarded in 1989, the deepening fissures between Buddhists and Muslims may have been averted. As things stand, voting in the region since 1996 has largely been on communal lines, and many political groups in Leh have been calling for a consensus candidate from among the Buddhists to contest this year.

But the most dramatic impact of the RAC recommendations would be on Jammu. Here, the RAC Report makes no effort to hide its authors' motives. The district of Doda, and the single Muslim-dominated tehsil of Mahore from the adjoining district of Udhampur, would go to form a new Chenab Valley province. Perhaps the best index of the RAC's blithe disregard for secular values is that not a sentence in the Report seeks to explain this decision. The largely Hindu districts of Jammu, Kathua and Udhampur would make up Jammu province. Poonch and Rajouri districts would form Pir Panjal province. The existing province of Jammu would thus be turned into three provincial blocks divided along the fault lines of Hindu and Muslim communities in the region.

Shabby reasoning and appalling research characterise the RAC Report. Paragraph 32 suggests that "the prevailing classifications of Provinces/Divisions are hampering the processes of social/human development. The Committee is also of the view that this arrangement is coming in the way of democratic participation at the grassroots level within the State." Yet, after making its recommendations, the RAC Report executes a neat volte-face just three paragraphs later. Paragraph 35.1 "recommends that the Government may consider setting up District Councils as an alternative to the Regional/Provincial Councils." Such district councils are clearly irreconcilable with the assertions of Paragraph 32, since they would work within the existing provincial arrangements.

On more fundamental issues, the Report offers few insights into the RAC members' thinking. Why development could not be achieved within the existing district and province boundaries is nowhere explained. There is no serious discussion on how the creation of new provinces would aid development. Indeed, the RAC only calls for changes to be made to the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir in order to enable the new provincial or district councils to be established, without spelling out what they might be. Nor are the powers of the new councils and their specific responsibilities spelt out. Since this was presumably the purpose of setting up the RAC in the first place, it is hard to escape the conclusion that it did not do its work.

THE history of the RAC offers insights into how some of its more outrageous recommendations came into being. The RAC was set up shortly after the National Conference Government took office in October 1996; Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah was the RAC chairman. Academic Balraj Puri was appointed its working chairman. The members consisted of State Finance Minister Mohammad Shafi Uri, legislators Syed Mushtaq Bukhari and Mubarak Gul, and Ladakh representative Pinto Narbu. The raison d'etre of the RAC was to ensure that the N.C's demands for greater autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir as a whole did not alienate minorities in the State, since they would be given guarantees of regional autonomy.

Puri was, however, besieged with demands from N.C. leaders and other politicians that the RAC recommend the creation of new provinces and districts. He flatly refused. The RAC's terms of reference said nothing about new provinces; they had asked only for recommendations that would "promote better involvement and participation of people in different regions for balanced political, economic, educational, social and cultural development (and the) evolving of instrumentalities, like local organs of power at all levels." The RAC was also to examine the powers that local organs of power were to be vested with, and "whether any changes in the State Constitution would be needed to bring them about."

NISSAR AHMAD
In June 1998, when the Ladakh parliamentary constituency went to the polls, voters queue up in Leh town. The RAC has recommended that the mountainous Ladakh region be broken up along communal lines into two new provinces.

Late in 1998, Puri circulated his proposals for regional autonomy, which essentially consisted of strengthening existing institutions at the panchayat, block, district and regional levels. Much of the emphasis in his Report was on removing the State Government's powers to nominate members of local bodies. One-third of all panchayat members, for example, are government nominees, along with representatives of the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, and what State laws describe as "Other Classes". District Development Councils, an institution unique to the State, have an entirely nominated leadership. Puri sought to replace this burlesque with real democracy.

But although N.C. members on the RAC had expressed no reservations with drafts that were circulated, they rapidly distanced themselves from Puri's report, claiming that it did not have their support. On January 21, 1999, Puri was informed that his term, along with that of the RAC, had expired. Then, on March 4, the State Government issued orders extending the term of the RAC retrospectively. The order revived the terms of all members except the working chairman. The new Report was assembled in just three months. Curiously, the final RAC Report tabled in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly bears the signatures of neither its chairman (the Chief Minister) nor Narbu.

The strange history of the RAC and its equally bizarre recommendations suggest that meaningful democratic change is the last thing on the N.C's mind. Indeed, the proposal to set up smaller provinces will erode the powers of the existing ones, since each in itself will simply not have the resources to take up large-scale developmental work. Nor will local bodies like panchayats and block-level bodies be democratised and empowered. The sole outcome of the RAC proposals will be to enable N.C. politicians in the Jammu region to represent themselves as defenders of local Muslim communities against a largely fictional hegemony of Jammu's largely Hindu urban trading communities.

WHAT then, was on the RAC's mind? In the wake of the Pokhran-II nuclear tests in May 1998 and the subsequent contrived and ill-fated show of subcontinental goodwill between Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif and Atal Behari Vajpayee, culminating in the Lahore Declaration, the United States political establishment offered some insights into its vision of a final settlement on Jammu and Kashmir. This came in the form of a report, Kashmir: A Way Forward, circulated by the high-profile think tank, the Kashmir Study Group. The Kashmir Study Group is controlled by a non-resident Indian, Farooq Kathwari, a furniture tycoon from a well-heeled Srinagar family. Two Indian establishment figures, former Foreign Secretary N.K. Singh and retired Vice-Admiral S.K. Nair, have been associated with the Group, although both deny they endorse the thrust of the report.

Kashmir: A Way Forward advocated that "a portion of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir be reconstituted as a sovereign entity enjoying free access to and from both India and Pakistan." The report, which was widely circulated among politicians in the State and details of which were published in Frontline (March, 26, 1999), suggested that the new entity have its own legislature, citizenship and internal law and order force, with its defence guaranteed by both India and Pakistan. It was evident that the "portion" referred to was the Kashmir Valley, the area under most bitter dispute. Interestingly, Kathwari came to India shortly after the report was released, and visited what one intelligence official described to Frontline as a "who's who of the BJP hierarchy".

The Kashmir Study Group's proposals in effect meant a sundering of Kashmir from Jammu, and a division of the State on communal lines. In 1950, Owen Dixon, the United Nations mediator on Kashmir, had suggested a similar plan. The Dixon Plan called for the international border to run broadly north of the Chenab river, cutting apart predominantly Muslim Doda, Rajouri and Poonch from Jammu, and joining them to the Kashmir Valley. Kathua and Jammu, which have a predominantly Hindu population, would have stayed with India. The proposal was unacceptable to India's secular political establishment. The revival of the idea by the U.S. had obvious significance in the context of the meeting in February 1999 between two right-wing Prime Ministers.

However, the most important players in the enterprise were those firmly entrenched in the State's political apparatus. Since at least 1996, influential figures in the N.C. have been pushing hard to transform the character of Jammu, a communally diverse but culturally coherent region which is the principal barrier to Kashmir-centred secessionist claims.

SUNIL MALHOTRA / REUTERS
A demonstration by 'Panun Kashmir' activists in New Delhi in August 1998, following a series of massacres by terrorists in Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh.

In 1996, N.C. leaders from the predominantly Muslim areas of Jammu broadly north of the Chenab river, which would have gone to Pakistan had the Owen Plan succeeded, demanded the creation of a new pahari (mountain) region, separating the predominantly Muslim Rajouri-Poonch belt from Jammu province, and integrating it with Uri to the north in Kashmir province. Later, during meetings of the RAC headed by Puri - whose original report the N.C. Government has refused to make public - the N.C. leaders again said that they did not want to governed by Jammu's "kanak mandi lalas" (grain market traders).

The N.C. has made a similar demand to separate the sprawling district of Doda from Jammu province. These demands are in part driven by short-term political considerations. The demand for a pahari region, for example, was designed to undermine the influence of Gujjar and Bakerwal leaders in the region; these two communities have traditionally backed the Congress(I). But the demand rests on the untrue proposition that these regions have no common culture with Jammu.

With panchayat elections due in Jammu and Kashmir later this year, the RAC Report could have been the basis for ensuring that local bodies truly represent the people who elect them, and have the power to transform the countryside. Instead, the RAC Report has dedicated itself to furthering a spurious debate designed solely to deepen the alarming communal rifts in Jammu and Kashmir. Puri's statement in March 1999 that he was "almost entirely without hope" pointed to grim portents for the State. Those fears are proving to be alarmingly close to the truth. If people are not given the resources to govern their lives, communal mobilisations will continue to be the sole basis for mass action.