Srinagar: The August 5, 2019 actions in the former state of Jammu and Kashmir, Union government spokespersons said, was taken to resolve the conflicted dispute ‘once and for all’. The declaration was followed up with supporters of the action making clarion calls for the reclamation of – or war for – the other side of the Line of Control (LoC).
Meanwhile, most if not all of India’s political parties’ reactions to the bold action of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ranged from tacit support to grudging envy to some criticism at the way the action was taken; not to in-principle objections.
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in New Delhi promoted the action as its “mission accomplished” and was palpably elated by the shock-and-awe effect of the action in Kashmir, the deer in the headlights reaction in Kargil, the celebratory clamour in Leh and excited optimism in Jammu.
To close observers of the state’s politics, these reactions appeared to cement the political rifts – nurtured by successive Union governments – between regions and religions, to erect solid walls reinforcing existing intra-regional fissures. They also raised the expectations of political wannabes that new power centres/individuals – political, economic and commercial – would emerge in the former state.
However, three years on, it can safely be said that the seeds of confidence in the BJP-led government’s claim that it had “resolved” the conflicted dispute appears to have fallen on barren soil. Instead, whereas until August 2019 the country’s security apparatus was focused on one trouble spot in the former J&K state, today it is faced with four worrisome zones; one each in Srinagar, Kargil, Leh and Jammu, albeit for different reasons in each case.
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Indeed, the region has become a fresh complex of conflicts. In a sense, this is in keeping with the tacit BJP maxim that confusion is control. Indeed, the country appears to have grown habituated to accepting perplexity as the new normal for the 1.4 billion strong Indian state – made up of a myriad nations and large swaths of communities that are multiply polarised and provocatively segregated – as they expectantly elect local rulers in the hope of some relief from the routine.
Ladakh’s pushback
However, at least one region in India, territorially remote, demographically tiny and geopolitically crucial, is challenging the politics-as-usual approach. In the newly minted Union Territory of Ladakh, there is a calculated peoples’ pushback to Delhi’s delivery of a hollow Union Territory.
Admittedly, UT status was sought and received by Ladakhis without substantive pre-vision or research on their part. But Delhi appears to have underestimated Ladakh’s capacity to recognise subterfuge, learn from the experience of other Himalayan communities and even cement historical internal divides. A cursory inventory of Ladakhi reactions to Delhi’s three-year condescending disregard of this important constituency’s political demands may offer a glimpse of local resolve to pushback.
Once the euphoria after the achievement of Union Territory status had subsided, it became clear to Ladakhis that their victory was but a semantic one. That, in fact, they had lost the protections provided since 1952; for land rights, livelihood rights and local self-rule rights as a direct result of the reading down of the constitutional safeguards they were provided before the dismantling of the former state. The inevitable slide from confusion to confronting New Delhi began within months.
Arguably, the disillusionment had set in for some well before the August 2019 action. It began with the November 2018 resignation of Thupstan Chhewang from the Lok Sabha and from the BJP, the Ladakh unit of which he was the president.
His reason was simple and logical. His experience as a member of Parliament led him to not trust the BJP’s vision or intent to narrow the gap between promise and delivery. His act was transparent, personal and principial. However, the representations of a demography of 300,000 citizens cannot be expected to move Parliament significantly or force the hand of a government for a population that is 1.4 billion strong. Especially because, since 1979, when the then single district of Ladakh, India’s largest, was divided into two separate districts, there has been a steady increase of the divide between them.
The next move came in August of 2021. Leh’s ‘Apex Body’ and the ‘Kargil Democratic Alliance’, two local groupings meant to repair intra-district divides, met and announced that they would unite in their struggle for meaningful autonomy for UT Ladakh. It was a first after four decades of disunity. The moot point here is that it took Leh and Kargil just three years to reunite after more than forty years of the opposite. The reason? The gap between BJP’s promise and delivery on the de-centralisation of power, the dilution of local land rights and the loss of employment rights for Ladakh’s future, its young.
Also read: ‘Unrepresented’ in Parliament, Ladakh’s Political Forces Unite to Protest Against BJP Govt
To be sure, the unity is not without intra-district doubting Thomas politicians in both districts. But in a third move, these doubters were dealt a significant blow when leaders from Leh and Kargil demonstrated their unity by resolving a more than half-century old controversy surrounding Leh’s claim to build a Buddhist monastery (gonpa) on land within Kargil town apportioned in 1969 for residential and commercial use by Buddhists from Leh.
On September 3, Kargil agreed to allot additional land just outside the main town on which to construct the monastery. It was a blow to confrontationist politicians between the two districts and quickly marginalised the UT’s sole BJP MP. He had demanded that the monastery be built on the land in the Kargil bazaar. The September Resolution concluded with a pledge to “promote communal harmony in Ladakh”.
Then came yet another blow to divisive forces a few days after the accord over the monastery. It came in the shape of a by-election in the Tingmosgang constituency of the Leh Hill C0uncil which was won by the Congress candidate in a head-to-head prestige contest against the BJP. The victory was contrary to all expectations but, more importantly, it demonstrated a rapid-fire pushback to politics as usual, this time in intra-Leh politics.
An example for the region?
Political relations between the Leh and Kargil districts of Ladakh has swung between being suspicious, wary and antagonistic for decades. To be sure, it has not disappeared, but doubts about Union government plans in both districts began to surface a few months after the 2019 dismantling of the state.
To allay their skepticism, Ladakhis conducted a series of pan-Himalayan consultations, primarily with compatriots in northeastern Himalaya. Unsurprisingly, the inquiry revealed that the UT status conferred on Ladakh was an ambiguous one, setting off a series of Ladakhi representations to New Delhi for a better definition of its meaning and implementation.
The citizens of the former state of J&K, in its entirety, have learned the hard way that representatives who act for New Delhi more than their constituency, who pretend that carpetbagging job-seekers constitute a committed political “cadre” and that politics mimicking the methods of mammoth-sized electorates does not work for everyone. Instead, they have learned that the crux of any analyses of “ground conditions” in political constituencies, large or small, lie in the details.
In that context, if the successive steps towards unity in the newly minted Union Territory of Ladakh is any indication, at least in this corner of the country, the worry for New Delhi may have only just begun. This would be especially true if the other two power centers in the former state take their cue from the UT of Ladakh.
It could complicate the immediate future for the BJP.
Siddiq Wahid is a historian and former vice-chancellor. He is a native of Leh but now resides in Srinagar.