Democracy and coercion

The first interlocutor to travel to Kashmir was R.K. Mishra; he had no formal mandate. He came to Kashmir several times and talked, only to fall silent after a while. Last summer saw deputy chief of Planning Commission K.C. Pant nominated as the government’s official negotiator. He arrived in Srinagar and announced himself open to everybody who wanted to talk.

His efforts failed to attract the main separatist conglomerate, the Hurriyat Conference. But he met a few former militant commanders and leaders in the guest house overlooking the scenic Dal lake. His stay in Kashmir certainly helped him and his family to get out of the Delhi heat for a few days on government expense. He left the Valley, claiming it was the beginning of a serious process, and never returned. What happened to that process, nobody knows, and nobody bothered to follow it up in Kashmir. Another interlocutor had already arrived.

Senior Kashmir bureaucrat Wajahat Habibullah’s trip was shrouded in mystery. He never acknowledged any brief from Delhi. He did hold a meeting with Hurriyat chairman Abdul Gani Bhat one night, capturing the headlines for a few days. Bhat claims they talked of ‘‘Delhi’s weather’’.

By the time Habibullah retired to Mussoorie, where he heads the IAS academy, it was winter in Kashmir. The weather had changed, and so had the interlocutor. This time, the prime minister’s Kashmir point man A.S. Dullat made the rounds of Srinagar, meeting the separatist leadership. Although his efforts made inroads into the Hurriyat executive, and raised dust across Kashmir’s political spectrum, there was no visible outcome.

After a few months of hectic activity, Dullat too was overshadowed by the former law minister, Ram Jethmalani, who has formed a Kashmir Committee. He also met with the deputy prime minister to exhibit his locus standi as a private interlocutor with official blessings. The separatists, who had been shying away publicly from talks, have shown excitement. But the question is, what will the talks be about? Jethmalani appeals to the separatists to join the fray even as the Hurriyat distances itself from the electoral process and talks only of separatism. Through it all, former diplomat Salman Haider has run a separate show holding Ford Foundation-sponsored seminars on conflict resolution at Chandigarh, attended by a few Kashmiri separatists and Pakistanis. Nothing substantial has come out of that either.

As the first fissures start surfacing in the Jethmalani-Hurriyat dialogue process even before it takes any shape, one wonders who will be the next Kashmir interlocutor. Going by tradition, it will be the turn of a Delhi based retired diplomat or a jobless politician deemed close to the PM.

The other process being simultaneously pursued is the conduct of ‘free and fair’ polls which remains an exclusively official business. Ironically, the conduct of polls and the negotiations with separatists remain two different issues. If the Centre’s efforts to talk to separatists irritates mainstream political parties like the National Conference, the election issue has the same effect on the separatists.

So how does the government pursue these elections, ostensibly aimed at restoring the people’s confidence in democratic traditions? Are the polls in Kashmir part of a process to establish an accountable popular rule or a mere state instrument to prove that all is well in this violence riddled valley? If the beginning of this process suggests anything, it runs contrary to the very basics of democratic traditions.

These are the second elections after violence erupted in Kashmir in 1989. Their significance is much more than even the 1996 polls which saw an end to six years of governor’s rule in Kashmir. Each side might hold different views as to why a separatist sentiment has smouldered in the Valley for five decades but nobody disputes one fact: it is the way in which the electoral processes were tampered with that took the lid off the discontent, turning it into a violent separatist campaign. The 1987 elections are a vivid example of how a choked political opposition took the extreme option because it was denied a rightful space in the electoral process.

Today, the Election Commission maintains that though acquiring the special voter identity card is a good idea, it is not mandatory. Legally, the card is not a compulsory tool of identification even for exercising one’s franchise. But in the streets of Kashmir, all other identity cards have been rendered invalid and if anybody fails to produce this special card, he is automatically a suspect. Who has issued these instructions and what does it achieve? Nobody knows. The police top brass even deny the fact that people are ever asked to produce their identification.

Proving one’s identity before the security personnel became mandatory in Kashmir — even as it had no legal justification — ever since violence erupted. Over the years, people, especially the men folk, have become so used to it that it is a prized possession for every Kashmiri. Mothers might forget to ask their sons to eat but they will not forget to remind them to carry their identity cards when they step out of their homes.

The only possible justification for forcing people to rush to the local municipal and revenue offices to procure these cards is to exhibit the people’s participation in the electoral process. But, in the process, the government revives yet again that old question: can democracy be enforced through coercion?