Opinion Passing the test

J&K Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh. (Source: PTI)

For a while back then, it had seemed that the fracas at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) in Srinagar was escalating dangerously. It had all the suitable ingredients for a perfect storm. The backdrop: A jingoistic debate on “nationalism” that had gained ground in Delhi and beyond after the JNU episode in which three students were jailed on charges of sedition after a campus event in which some “anti-national” slogans were raised. The staging ground: Srinagar, where it could be said that the “idea of India” is most contested and controversial in the country. The provocation: A group of Kashmiri students failing the cricket test, by cheering the West Indies side against India in a World T20 semifinal. An added edge was lent to the situation by the recent putting together of the Mehbooba Mufti government — taking forward, after a moment of uncertainty and pause, the audacious political experiment that her father, the late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, had forged in partnership with the BJP, bringing together the two extremities of Kashmir politics, soft separatism with hardline nationalism. The drama that started with some Kashmiri students cheering the “wrong” team did seem to be following an ominous script, with students labelled “Kashmiris” and “outsiders” and the J&K police “anti-national” — till a calming and firm intervention by Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh. The demand by some students to shift the NIT out of Srinagar is “not a demand worth raising let alone worth hearing,” he told this newspaper. And “we told (the students) that just like it’s your flag, it is also our flag and the flag of the J&K police”.

By his attempt to defuse the building tensions, the deputy CM has sent out a reassuring signal — that on Kashmir, his party has decided not to let the hotheads prevail. And that it is giving a breakthrough alliance a chance. Singh has promised a hearing to campus discontent due to lack of WiFi, strict curfew hours, restrictions on movements of girls. He has owned the responsibility of addressing the security concerns of students and of encouraging the possibilities of a more relaxed conversation with them, and within them, through seminars, cultural fests and exchanges. This moment is also refreshingly different from the dismal pattern that has gone before in Kashmir and outside it. In the last version of the BJP-PDP government, polarising issues involving Article 370, beef and the J&K flag had seemed to divide the ruling alliance into two, ranging the BJP against the PDP. This time, its deputy CM’s intervention on a matter on which the BJP has been seen to take the hardline elsewhere, defies the expectations of alliance pessimists.

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Then, the BJP has been seen to divide itself on controversial issues into the vocal so-called fringe and the silent ostensibly moderate mainstream. That division of labour, strategic or not, has also been upturned on the NIT issue in Srinagar. The BJP has ensured that the BJP-PDP alliance has passed its first test.