ELECTIONS 2004

Voting against all the odds

PRAVEEN SWAMI
in Poonch
Photographs: V.V. Krishnan

In Poonch, even the remote hamlet of Nediyan, once a heartland of terrorism, roots for the ballot. But will democracy fail the brave voters once again?

OF the many marvels of the modern world, four-year-old Mohammad Khaliq had seen only the Kalashnikov. On the morning of April 20, he and a gaggle of friends had a second encounter with a changing world - in the form of an electronic voting machine (EVM) glimpsed fleetingly before they were shooed away by polling officials.

At the polling booth in Nediyan, on the edge of the Hari Budha forest area of Poonch.

Barring the brief visit of the EVM, there is nothing in Nediyan, nothing at all that is, to bear evidence that this is the 21st century except the manufactured-on dates on the goods in the village shop, which sells mostly low-end soaps, candles and match-boxes. There are no roads, no telephones, no electricity, or medical facilities, no fair price shop, no safe drinking water, and no veterinary care for the buffaloes on which the local economy depends. It does have a one-room school, which serves three adjacent hamlets, but for years no regular teacher has been willing to work there. The last teacher assigned to the school, Mumtaz Ahmad, fled six months ago, after telling his bosses in nearby Surankote that he was quite happy to lose his job.

Yet, by lunchtime, a third of Nediyan's 800-odd registered voters had cast their votes; by evening, the number had risen to 42 per cent, a figure which puts most major cities to shame. In Hil Kaka, the scene of a murderous battle between Indian forces and Islamist terrorists last year, 41.5 per cent of the voters exercised their franchise. The only hold-up at Nediyan was caused by an elderly woman who could not locate the buttons on the EVM, her eyes misted over by cataract. After a few minutes of confusion, choosing compassion over election regulations, a poll official guided her fingers to the party of her choice. With buffaloes waiting to be milked and a sheep that needed tending, Abdul Khaliq complained bitterly about the length of the queue, and the fact that women were being allowed to jump it. He stayed in line, though: "Elections are the only shauq (passion) we have here."

A police patrol in the hamlet.

A back-breaking two-and-a-half-hour walk from the nearest road, the small hamlet of Nediyan is nestled on the edges of the Hari Budha forests. One of the major heartlands of Islamist violence in Poonch, Hari Budha was until recently described by jehadi groups as a liberated zone. A liberated zone, not a place where people were free - most men in the Hari Budha belt continued to work as migrant labourers in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, as they always had. The few who stayed back ended up being press-ganged into hauling supplies and construction material to terrorist hideouts up in the mountains. Rape and beatings were common; in Marrah, some kilometres away, local villagers felt compelled to set up an armed vigilante group to resist terrorist atrocities. Those in Nediyan who did have some real cash to their name moved away to Surankote or even further, to Poonch.

The rope bridge that connects Nediyan to the rest of Poonch.

In December, shortly after a ceasefire came into effect along the Line of Control (LoC), the Indian Army and the Jammu and Kashmir Police launched a massive sweep of the Hari Budha forests. A permanent military post was established on top of Jabbi Toti, the massif that dominates the Hari Budha belt, and pickets were established around the larger hamlets. The action succeeded in pushing jehadi groups back to Sillan Dhoke, a cave-riddled mountain bastion a further three-hour hike into the Pir Panjal. Offensive operations in Sillan Dhoke have been unsuccessful, since the main access route is still snow-bound, but the offensive has brought freedom to Hari Budha. "The Hari Buddha sweep was very risky," says Poonch Senior Superintendent of Police Mukesh Singh, "but voter turnout figures show they were worthwhile. The fact is that terrorists were ruling the area, not the government and the people."

Voters lining up at the polling station in Nediyan.

It is hard to say, though, just what freedom actually means in Hari Budha. For all practical purposes, the state does not exist, and villagers must make the best of what they have. Abdul Rashid, a local resident with rudimentary literacy, teaches the children in return for contributions of corn and milk. Since he is hearing-impaired and has leg injuries that make it impossible for him to engage in physical labour, the job is something of a social security measure. Nasir Ahmad, a resident of the nearby town of Surankote, joins him occasionally. A middle-school graduate, Ahmad receives Rs.1,500 a month as salary under the Rehbar-e-Talim scheme, a Jammu and Kashmir government project which pays school graduates to work as teachers in their communities. However, Ahmad needs other jobs to make ends meet, and in practice Rashid is the school's principal, store-keeper and teacher, all rolled into one.

Polling agents outside the booth.

Government officials, to be fair, had good reason not to work in areas like Hari Budha. Mumtaz Ahmad, for example, claimed to have received extortion demands from terrorists who regularly visited Nediyan. Such stories are common in the Poonch mountains, but villagers claim that for the most part they are just a form of malingering. The fact is that out-of-sight mountain communities simply do not figure on the government's administrative map. For the past three months, Mohammad Sharif has been struggling to receive Rs.30,000 due to him in compensation for the land occupied to build an Army post in Nediyan. Officials in Surankote have asked for bribes to release the cash, and Sharif does not have either the cash or the time to travel to Poonch to complain to higher authorities. The only officials who do visit the area are from the police and the Army - neither of whom are of much use in matters related to development or administration.

Voters being frisked outside the polling booth.

For most other purposes, too, the people of Hari Budha are on their own. The nearest fair price shop is in Madana, on the road to Poonch. The shopkeeper, Nediyan residents say, hands out a month's entitlement of below poverty line (BPL) rations every three months or so. No effort seems to have been made to have rations brought up to the village on mules and disbursed to end-users in a transparent manner. In any case, most villagers have found that they have been struck off BPL rosters since they own animals. Less than a tenth of the villagers are now entitled to BPL benefits, but the list, oddly enough, includes some families with up to 100 kanals (40 acres, or 16 hectares of land), and upwards of 10 buffaloes. "I was struck off the BPL list since I have four animals," says Noor Baksh Gujjar, "but my sons have none, and are not registered either. We just do not have the money to bribe our way into the BPL list."

A member of the Gujjar community before casting his vote.

Predictably enough, villages near the road soak up the few projects that are under way, where government officials do not have to work too hard to erect them, and supervisors can see the results with ease. On paper, Nediyan is entitled to two electricity transformers, but both have been installed at Seri Khwaja, on the main road. The village has pipes to carry water from mountain streams, but for the past several years the residents have had to pay for the repairs themselves. Mushtaq Bukhari, Member of the Legislative Assembly from Surankote, wisely concerned for his life, has never visited the village; neither has the Member of Parliament for Jammu, Talib Husain Chowdhury. The Sarpanch, Haji Ghulam Mohammad, has been assigned police protection, but stays in Poonch, handing out panchayat development funds for non-existent projects at a considerable distance from the people he represents.

Women turned up in large numbers to vote.

WHAT is clear, then, is that the elections in Hari Budha are not about bijli, sadak or pani. No one in the village seriously expects their vote to bring electricity or roads to Nediyan. Nor do caste issues, the ostensible theme in this Lok Sabha election in Poonch, cut much ice. Nediyan is populated exclusively by Gujjars, a community of buffalo-rearing pastoralists. The National Conference (N.C.) has sought to corral Gujjar resentment against a recent State government attempt to accord Scheduled Tribe status to elite Muslim and Hindu communities in the region, which claim to belong to a tribe unknown to sociologists, the Paharis. If popular sentiment in Nediyan is a guide, the N.C. plan has not worked. "Just three people from here have government jobs," says Rashid, "so reservations are of no use if someone does not build us a proper school first."

Waiting outside the booth.

Much of the voter enthusiasm has, instead, to do with the erosion of political freedoms during the period of terrorist domination in the area. Few people in Nediyan voted in the Assembly and general elections from 1996 to 1999. The ostensible reason was jehadi threats, but the anti-election violence had a distinct political nuance. Panchayat elections, for example, were not held not because of threats, but because no one dared to oppose Sarpanch Ghulam Mohammad, who had the backing of terrorists. In the 2002 Assembly elections, the local N.C. candidate succeeded in securing the support of terrorist groups, and with it the unhappy backing of Nediyan voters. In case anyone had missed the point, terrorists opened up with a machine gun at the Nediyan polling station on election day last year - not to kill but to demonstrate their presence. The Gujjars of Poonch, who have been traditional Congress voters, now had the chance of backing the N.C., or no one at all.

Outside their home, waiting for their elders.

Such violence goes on elsewhere along the Pir Panjal range. On April 22, for example, terrorists cut off the ears of Kalwa village's Deputy Sarpanch Misr-ud-Din and Haji Mohammad Amkala near Mahore, in Udhampur, for carrying election posters. In Hari Budha, however, terrorists are not a major presence any longer, freeing up space for democracy. Most observers believe that the Gujjars in the Jammu region have voted almost en bloc for their traditional Congress(I) leadership again, and that this movement could pose a very real threat to the Bharatiya Janata Party in the region. If something of the kind does happen, the outcome of the elections could hold out lessons on the limitations of communal politics for the N.C., which has been busy appropriating Islamist themes and ideas in the Kashmir Valley, much as it did in the Jammu province from 1996 onwards.

Nediyan residents are forced to send their children to madarassas because teachers refuse to work in the local school.

Whoever wins, though, will have to apply their minds to the real costs of the failure of democracy to address the everyday lives of ordinary people. A massive seminary, partly funded by remittances from Saudi Arabia, has already come up at Seri Khwaja. Unlike other similar institutions in the region, the Seri Khwaja madrassa does not take modern learning seriously, focussing instead on imparting a particularly intolerant strain of Islamic theological knowledge. Although the Wahabbi religious traditions taught in Seri Khwaja are alien to Muslim culture on the Pir Panjal, parents have few choices as there are no state-run schools to send their children to. Gujjar community leaders in Jammu have sought to engage with the problem, and have set up a massive charitable boarding school in the city. But without state support, it is a losing battle. Children without education, teenagers without jobs, adults with no incomes - for all these, the cash held out by the mujahideen offers some respite.

The people of Hari Budha registered their choice on the EVMs, and now the people they voted for need to act. Mohammad Shabbir, who has never been to school, nonetheless has a sharp understanding of the perils ahead. Hamein to apnon ne loota, Gairon me kahan dam tha, (We were looted by our own; strangers did not have the power)," quoting a popular Urdu couplet, Meri kashti wahan doobi paani jahan kam tha (My boat capsized where it was shallow).

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