Identity crisis

Forty hectares of forest land. A hundred acre wood. Anywhere else in India, unfortunately, transfer of such land at...

Forty hectares of forest land. A hundred acre wood. Anywhere else in India, unfortunately, transfer of such land at an official8217;s whim would hardly be a problem of national proportions. Kashmir, however, is not anywhere else in India. As the Constitution recognises, land ownership and demography are central to the possibility of permanent peace; and there, as elsewhere in the world, any impression that those are being used as weapons in a civil conflict is deeply provocatory.

The nature of the Amarnath Shrine Board, set up when the National Conference was in power in the state, is the first mistake. The restriction that a governor must be Hindu in order to be part of it dramatically undercuts the message that the government must send to the people of Kashmir; indeed, it runs in direct opposition to the unique syncretic heritage of Kashmir and the history of the yatra itself. The People8217;s Democratic Party had an opportunity to reform this in 2003. Instead, they chose to set up a state Waqf Board as a sort of Muslim counterpart. The local Congress leadership in Jammu is guilty of leading the politicisation of the Amarnath issue: if not for sensible intervention from Akbar Road, this problem might well have blown up four years ago.

However, short-sighted as the local political leadership has been, the central responsibility rests with the outgoing governor, S.K. Sinha, and those who sent him to Kashmir in the first place after he had amply proved in Assam that he was capable of making sensitive situations worse through irresponsible and ill-informed public assertions as well as partisan political interference. His military background made inevitable the perception 8212; perhaps justified 8212; that he backed the security forces over the elected leadership, just when Kashmir needed reassurance that power was in civilian hands. Raj Bhavan8217;s use of the Shrine Board to try and impose his singular vision of Kashmir8217;s future direction, in a state which is particularly alert to meddling by Central organisations, is the primary reason for today8217;s looming crisis. Here, as in Assam, he demonstrated both lack of

vision and lack of ability: if, even after five years in Kashmir, he is capable of statements that reduce the entire complex of resentments and identities fuelling separatism into a religious problem alone, it is not surprising that he has been unable to do anything but communalise state machinery. New Delhi has chosen well in Governor Vohra and it must work quickly to defuse the issue.