Take the wheel

Jammu and Kashmir crawls closer and closer to a dangerous tipping point where the hard-won electoral success and sense of a provisional peace now looks like yesterdays story. After a series of covert killings and open clashes between security forces and stone-pelting protesters,the Valley has been engulfed in violence,a situation that was sharpened by Chief Minister Omar Abdullahs slow reflexes at the start.

Mosque loudspeakers,many of them calling up memories of 1990,are now summoning people to the barricades. The states police are being beaten on the streets,and two senior officers including a senior superintendent of police recently refused to be moved to Baramulla district. Some even use civilian ID cards in the evening to get by without harm. Meanwhile,though the government emphasises that the CRPF and police have exercised maximal restraint,all too many young protesters have been killed,each death provoking more anger and confrontation. The states hold looks increasingly feeble,its political authority almost bankrupt. As Home Minister P. Chidambaram said in Parliament,there have been 872 stone-pelting incidents in June and July 2010 and 1,456 security personnel were injured,and indeed,security forces have shown great fortitude this time.

But Omar Abdullah finds himself walking a delicate tightrope,with no real channels of communication with this tired and disillusioned citizenry. And those channels will not be obtained before a semblance of quiet is restored. The political opposition,the PDP,and the Hurriyat are themselves trying to assess the situation for its political drift. Even a hardliner like Syed Ali Shah Geelani has appealed to the people to abjure from violence. The state government is faced with inchoate discontent,with no interlocutors of substance. For all the scare talk about a new intifada,there is reason to believe that Kashmirs current crisis is resolvable,and different in character from the rage and resentment of the 90s. This is a specific,locatable grievance that is being adeptly channelled along tired anti-India lines,and it is crucial that Omar Abdullah rescue it from spinning into more lethal hands. He has indicated that he knows his mission to first restore some calm in Kashmirs seething streets,and then to do what he has failed to do so far,work on the administrative instruments and political imagination needed to solidify the peace.