Engineer Rashid

A Local Victory for BJP in Haryana Can’t Compensate Modi for His National-Level Setback in Kashmir

The Modi-Shah insistence was on ending the debate over the nature of autonomy and authority Srinagar was to have vis-à-vis New Delhi and they hoped voters would place a ‘democratic’ imprimatur on this argument. J&K’s electorate denied BJP that kind of endorsement. This is a strategic setback, whichever way the Modi apologists may want to slice it.

Tuesday, October 8, 2024 has turned out to be a curious and conflicted day in the life of the Republic – and for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Whereas the BJP and its Modi-Shah leadership can derive legitimate satisfaction from the Haryana mandate, the vote in Jammu and Kashmir can only be regarded as a very good day for the Republic. It is a sobering moment for Indian democracy.

It should be obvious that the outcome in J&K is of much greater consequence than the Haryana vote. In Haryana, the election results are reflective of the dynamics of social cleavages, while the post-‘370 abrogation’ vote in Jammu and Kashmir saw a contestation over continuing national arguments. The Haryana electoral victory for the BJP is mostly a local affair, the re-organized state of Jammu and Kashmir was clearly the electoral theatre for a national and global audience. No one in the BJP or in the larger Sangh parivar is entitled to any kind of satisfaction over the Kashmir vote.

In Jammu and Kashmir the voters were asked, mostly indirectly, to express a view on the acceptability of the Amit Shah-authored truncation of the traumatized state. For five years the Indian State showed its muscular hand, consciously setting out to tame the recalcitrant “Kashmiri” into a reluctant “Indian.” The electoral battle was muddied by a large number of assorted players, many of them propped up by our intelligence agencies. Not a few of them were products of the unfinished “struggle”, both silent and violent, against the Indian State but they – the Engineer Rashids, the Jamatis – had their reservations about the two main Kashmir parties, the National Conference and the PDP, and how these two outfits had negotiated the terms of co-existence with the BJP-dominated “New Delhi.”

Since Syama Prasad Mukherjee’s death in Sheikh Abdullah’s Kashmir, the Sangh and its front-shops – first the Bharatiya Jan Sangh and then the BJP—have dreamed of rolling back the ‘separatist’ constituency and its intractable quest for autonomy; the ultimate, though unstated, objective in 2024 was to install a Hindu chief minister. For Prime Minister Modi and his Home Minister, Amit Shah such a denouement would have brought even more satisfaction than the “pran pratishta” in Ayodhya early this year.

Both the prime minister and the home minister made the BJP case for “peace” and “development” in a stridently “nationalistic” idiom. The underlying theme in the BJP’s arguments and assertions was the correctness and permanence of the logic of “abrogation”. The Modi-Shah insistence was on a closure of the debate over the nature of autonomy and authority Srinagar was to have vis-à-vis New Delhi. The BJP hoped that the assembly vote would place a ‘democratic’, electoral imprimatur on this “closed for all time” argument. Unfortunately for them, voters in Jammu and Kashmir have denied Raisina Hill that kind of endorsement. This is a strategic setback, whichever way the Modi apologists may want to slice it.

Also read: As BJP Regains Reputation as Election-Managing Machine, Congress Could Learn a Lesson on Sharing Power

Understanding the Haryana vote

But has the Haryana voter compensated Modi sufficiently for his drum-beaters to claim that the prime minister has recovered his magic touch with the electorate? Certainly not. If anything, the Haryana vote is a validation of the BJP’s superior political management. The party’s central leadership had the prescience to realise that Manohar Lal Khattar had alienated even BJP karyakartas by his arrogant style, and it had the elbow room to send him packing and bring in a new face as chief minister of Haryana. His replacement, Nayab Singh Saini, authored a different –humbler – style of functioning and evidently succeeded in enthusing the BJP cadres and core supporters.

Yet it would be a mistake to credit Modi or any other BJP leader with the success in Haryana. The voters in their mysterious way exercised their democratic right to register a rebuff to Congress strongman Bhupinder Singh Hooda’s politics of a Jat assertiveness. Haryana is a curious site for unresolved equations between the dominant and domineering Jat community and the others, just like the Yadavs in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Much of party politics in the state has been shaped by this unresolved – and, probably unresolvable – equation. Give them a whiff of possibility of capturing power in the state and rough elements within the community start throwing their weight around in the most boorish ways, alienating the non-Jats who unwillingly find themselves aggravating towards the “Punjabi” formations and leaders.

It now emerges that even before the chickens could be hatched and counted, the Hooda supporters were already making a nuisance of themselves. The much-talked about Hooda-Selja rift drove away many Dalit voters. Not just Dalits, in many areas even Muslims preferred to vote for the BJP candidates. For instance, in Israna, the BJP candidate, Krishan Lal Pawar, was feted with a 101-yard turban by Muslims at the local mosque in Madlauda. This was a simple and straightforward reflections of local resentment and rancor towards the Congress leaders; the BJP candidate won the seat but it has nothing to do with Modi’s charisma or his vote-fetching abilities.

Haryana offers a lesson in moderation, particularly for the Congress leadership. The “Congress high command” has invariably struggled over how much of a “free hand” a provincial strong man should be given and if given, how to ensure that the strongman does not overplay and over-assert himself in the state. The Congress gave, or rather found itself having to give, a free hand to Hooda; and sadly, the former chief minister lacks the gift for accommodative politics.

So, at the end of the day we have two very different outcomes – distinct discomfort for Modi and Shah in Jammu and Kashmir and an unmitigated disappointment for Rahul Gandhi in Haryana – and each will have subtle implications for the national polity. Gandhi and the Congress cannot continue to behave as if they have Prime Minister Modi on the run; nor can the BJP leadership conclude that today’s result is any kind of validation of its Chankaya niti. Above all, the prime minister cannot claim to have dissolved doubts about the unsettledness of his regime. A damaging tentativeness will continue to haunt the polity till the next battle in Maharashtra.

Harish Khare was editor of The Tribune.

LIVE Assembly Poll Results: In Haryana, BJP Crosses Halfway Mark; EC Rejects Cong Claim of ‘Slow Updating’ of Results; NC-Congress Sweep J&K; ‘Omar Abdullah Will Become CM,’ Says Farooq

Jammu and Kashmir has seen its first assembly polls in a decade. Will Saini be able to hold on to power in Haryana?

Votes of the single-phase elections in Haryana are being counted today. The campaign has seen the Bharatiya Janata Party struggle in the face of anti-incumbency and the Congress making inroads. Once dominant as local forces, the Indian National Lok Dal and the Jannayak Janta Party have struggled to maintain a foothold.

Over in Jammu and Kashmir, which has seen its first assembly polls in a decade, the opposition alliance of Congress and National Conference look geared to emerge the single largest coalition. However, whether they are able to cross the majority mark might depend on their ties with the People’s Democratic Party.

The live blog may take a few seconds to load.

J&K: National Conference Questions Engineer Rashid’s Intentions Amidst Rumours of Tie-Up With PDP

The NC’s accusations came after a press conference in Srinagar by Rashid, who has advised against forming the government till statehood of Jammu and Kashmir is restored.

Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (NC) president Farooq Abdullah on Monday (October 7) accused the member of parliament and Awami Ittehad Party (AIP) chief Engineer Rashid of bringing money from Pakistan into Kashmir while casting aspersions over his bail order.

“Who did he give the money to? Where are his slogans that Kashmir will merge with Pakistan and that there should be plebiscite in Kashmir? How can he be the well-wisher of Kashmiris?” an angry Abdullah asked reporters at his residence in Srinagar.

The NC chief’s accusations came after a press conference in Srinagar by Rashid, who has been accused of terror funding and is out on bail, who said that a party or a coalition which has enough seats to prove majority in the legislature should not be tempted to form the government till the time the statehood of Jammu and Kashmir was restored.

The results of the assembly election are scheduled to be declared on October 8 (tomorrow)

“For five years, the Gupkar alliance didn’t do anything. Now that the election has taken place, it is my humble request and suggestion to the INDIA bloc, PDP, Peoples Conference, Apni Party and other parties that we should resist forming the government unless the statehood of J&K is restored,” Rashid said.

The AIP chief, who did not seem confident about the performance of his party in the assembly election, said that all the regional parties should focus on the issue of urging the union government to restore J&K’s statehood while demanding restoration of Darbar Move, a Dogra era-practice under which the seat of J&K’s administration shifted between the twin capitals of Jammu and Srinagar.

“(Prime Minister Narendra) Modi ji has already changed the goalposts (of mainstream parties). It is time for us to come together and demand our prestige back. If they need the support of AIP for this, we are ready,” he said, adding that the issue of government formation was not a priority for his party.

Rashid’s views were also echoed by Ghulam Hassan Mir, senior leader of the Apni Party, a BJP-ally.

Hitting back, Abdullah, a former Union minister, cast aspersions on the order of a Delhi court on October 1 which extended the bail of Rashid.

The AIP leader was arrested by the National Investigations Agency in a terror funding case and bailed by the Delhi court on September 10, days ahead of the start of the assembly election, to allow him to campaign.

“He was in jail for five years, so which power brought him to J&K?” Abdullah said, “He was supposed to return to jail on October 2 but he has been given time till October 16 now. I am surprised. Which side he is on? Is he with the people or is the BJP his master? Has he ever spoken about (the issues of) people.”

Abdullah’s son and former J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah said that Rashid was “play(ing) straight in to the hands of the BJP”, “The BJP would like nothing more than to extend central rule in J&K if they aren’t in a position to form a government,” he said in a post on X.

A possible tie-up

The outburst by the NC chief comes on a day when the results of the assembly election are barely hours away and the INDIA bloc comprising Congress, NC and some smaller parties is widely expected to emerge as the single largest coalition in Jammu and Kashmir.

Some exit polls have, however, suggested that the Congress-led alliance could fall short of the halfway mark of 45 members once the results are out on Tuesday. In that situation, the coalition will have to warm up to its constituent, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) led by Mehbooba Mufti, and other smaller parties and independents for support.

Although there are reports quoting unnamed PDP leaders that the party was going to support the INDIA bloc in its government formation efforts, the PDP president’s daughter and media adviser Iltija Mufti, who contested the assembly election from Bijbehara constituency, termed these reports as “unnecessary speculations” on X.

Mufti, who is facing a close contest with senior NC leader Dr Bashir Ahmad Veeri, said that the final decision on the issue of supporting INDIA bloc was going to be taken by the party’s “senior leadership”.

Abdullah, however, welcomed the decision, “There have been no talks (with PDP). But I extend my heartfelt gratitude and congratulate her (Mehbooba) from my heart that she also wishes to see J&K out of this difficult time. If we come together, we will be able to work faster,” he said.

The NC chief also warned the Lieutenant Governor’s (LG) office against nominating five members of the next legislative assembly in Jammu and Kashmir without the consultation of the elected government, “His excellency must desist from doing that,” he said.

Abdullah added: “When a government is in power, that government has the right to nominate (five MLAs) and the LG has to forward that list back and agree. We are not going to put people (in the assembly) who are not worth it.”

The J&K Reorganisation Act 2019, under which Jammu and Kashmir was bifurcated and downgraded into a Union territory, has empowered the LG to nominate five members of legislative assembly on the advice of ‘council of ministers’, which will take the final strength of the legislature to 95.

However, there are speculations that the LG, who is appointed by the political dispensation in the union home ministry, could be tempted to nominate these members without the counsel of ministers, which could flip the balance of power in Jammu and Kashmir in the favour of the ruling Bhartiya Janta Party if the INDIA bloc falls short of the majority mark.

In Photos: A Day in the Life of Engineer Rashid – as He Campaigns for the J&K Polls

Sitting in the front seat of a Mahindra Scorpio, circled by security forces, he responds to shouts of, ‘Aya aya sher aya.’

Srinagar: Engineer Rashid sits below a framed inscription of the last sermons of Prophet Muhammad at his residence at Jawahar Nagar in Srinagar.

Rashid sips his morning tea and bazir tchot – a flat Kashmiri bread – looks at the ceiling and bursts out, “The Kashmiri people are humiliated all the time by all governments sitting in Delhi since 1947 and now Modi and his government are no less.”

Engineer Rashid on the campaign trail. Photo: Shome Basu.

Engineer Rashid’s supporters while he is on the campaign trail. Photo: Shome Basu.

He says, “I was never a militant, I am not a politician either, I am an activist and want honour back for Kashmiri people. Today I feel this election may be one of the processes to give back the honour to my people.”

Engineer Rashid rests while on the campaign trail. Photo: Shome Basu.

The ceiling of his room is damp. Rashid looks tired. He is out of jail for the election campaign and will be back in Delhi’s Tihar Jail by October 2. He says he wants to see peace in the valley and has no tolerance for political gimmicks.

Rashid breaks down while talking about the Union government’s treatment of him. Photo: Shome Basu.

Engineer Rashid on the campaign trail. Photo: Shome Basu.

Rashid notes that statehood needs to return to Kashmir to restore the little autonomy Kashmiris are owed. “Kashmir has come to a crossroads where communalism, criminalisation and commercialisation is how everyone and especially the BJP treats it,” he says.

Engineer Rashid’s convoy on the campaign trail. The pressure cooker is his symbol. Photo: Shome Basu.

He believes in solving the problem by sitting together and looking for a common roadmap.

When I asked about the future of Jammu and Kashmir, he says without elaborating that stakeholders need to sit together and devise a solution.

Engineer Rashid with a local leader at his house. Photo: Shome Basu.

Engineer Rashid talks to a voter on the campaign trail. Photo: Shome Basu.

What compelled Rashid to launch the AIP and take part in party politics while refuting the charges of money laundering invoked against him by the NIA ,which have kept him in prison for the last five and a half years? A chance run-in with Yasin Malik – whose politics Rashid was not a fan of – at a court in 2019 led to this decision. Both leaders had been incarcerated by then. “Have you seen India’s democracy? Jump into politics then,” Malik told him, he says.

Rashid flashes a victory sign on the campaign trail. Photo: Shome Basu.

Rashid is called the ‘angry man’ of Kashmir. When I met him in the early 2000s at a Kashmir Conference in New Delhi, he had little by way of popularity. Now, he has a huge support base in Baramulla, Uri, Kupwara and Patan.

Engineer Rashid near the end of a day of campaigns. Photo: Shome Basu.

The campaign has left him tired. But still, sitting in the front seat of a Mahindra Scorpio, circled by security forces, he responds to shouts of “Aya aya sher aya (the tiger has come).”

All photos by Shome Basu.

The Modi-Shah Game in Kashmir Is to Split Opposition Vote and Pave Way for BJP to Form Government

The only way for the NC-Congress alliance to ensure the government of Kashmir remains in Kashmiri hands is to approach every small party and candidate and assure them that, no matter who wins in the most seats in Kashmir, all of them will become a part of the next government.

Kashmir has one chance to win back the autonomy that it had enjoyed under Article 370 of the constitution. With the first phase of voting for the assembly polls over, it is apparent that its main political parties are throwing this chance away. The Bharatiya Janata Party strategists have known from the very beginning, that they will not get a single seat in Kashmir, and that solid support for the party exists only in a part of Jammu. As a result, it does not have the faintest chance of winning an absolute majority of the Union Territory’s 90 assembly seats. Kashmiris therefore have a real chance – possibly their last – of winning back the autonomy they lost after Modi read down Article 370.

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah are fully aware of this. That is why, from the very beginning, their aim has been to break the Kashmiri vote into pieces, use the BJP’s almost guaranteed 25-seat block of seats in Jammu to emerge as the largest single party, and claim the right to form the government of Jammu and Kashmir. Once the BJP has secured that right, it will seduce, buy, or coerce a sufficient number of independents and smaller parties in Kashmir, using the Public Safety Act, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and a host of ancillary laws, to seduce or compel a sufficient number successful individuals and small parties to join it, till it has a majority in the J&K assembly.

If the BJP succeeds, it will have five full years to destroy Kashmiriyat – that unique, syncretic blend of Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism, that Sheikh Abdullah and the Maharaja had been determined to protect when they refused to accede to Pakistan but asked for the safeguards (eventually provided by Article 370 of the constitution) prior to signing the Instrument of Accession to India in 1947.

When, realising their folly, Kashmiris begin to rebel against their subjugation once more, Delhi’s crushing response will reignite armed militancy in the valley and bring various ‘Lashkars’ sponsored by Pakistan back into J&K. Kashmir will then sink back once more into the hell in which it had existed from 1990 till former prime minister, the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee went to Srinagar in 2003, and held out a hand of reconciliation towards Pakistan, from that city.

The Kashmiri intelligentsia is fully aware of this, but has been made powerless to prevent it by the illiterate and irresponsible behaviour of Kashmir’s main parties, the Congress, and the National Conference. It should have been apparent to them from the moment the Supreme Court mandated a return to full statehood for Kashmir that if they wanted to protect J&K’s autonomy, they would have to fight the elections as a single coalition, with a single common platform – the release of all Kashmiris held without trial in jails all over India, and restoration of Kashmir’s cultural autonomy, i.e Kashmiriyat.

Also read: The NC and the Congress’s Hubris Has Put Them – and All of Kashmir – in a Risky Place

This required the NC and Congress to join hands with the People’s Democratic Party. Mehbooba Mufti, leader of the PDP, understood this from the very beginning but the Congress and the NC did not, and still have not understood the need for doing so. Indeed, the NC has continued to make her a major target of attack in Kashmir.

As for the Congress, Rahul Gandhi’s preference for being in the United States to lecture the Indian diaspora for 10 crucial days from the September 7-16 – after paying a single visit to a single constituency to campaign for a single candidate in Kashmir – and his refusal to go back there while the BJP ensures, step by step, the fragmentation of the Kashmiri vote, speaks volumes for his political naiveté and lack of awareness of the role he needs to play.

Neither of the Abdullahs has spoken out against the reign of terror that the BJP unleashed on Kashmir valley for four long months before it read down Article 370. Neither of them has protested against the prolonged imprisonment of every Kashmiri who has dared to speak out against the actions of the Delhi-imposed administration, during the president’s rule that followed.

Neither protested against the specious meaning that the Supreme Court attached to the word ‘temporary’ to vindicate the reading down of Article 370, when it had to have been was obvious to the judges that this referred only to the fact that it applied only to a part of the princely state of Kashmir that had acceded to India, and that the rest had still to be liberated from Pakistan’s illegal occupation.

It should have been apparent to them that the BJP, knowing that it could not win a single seat in Kashmir, would do its level best to split the Kashmiri vote into as many fragments as possible. It had already split the Peoples’ Conference by tempting, or coercing, assassinated leader Abdul Ghani Lone’s son Sajjad into joining them. It had also done this with businessman and former friend of Mufti Sayeed, Altaf Bukhari, by forcing him to choose between defection and jail.

Also read: Ahead of Polls, a Timeline of How Media Freedom Has Disappeared from Jammu and Kashmir

The pathetic performance of both Omar and Sajjad in the Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency – their combined vote did not even come close to that of Engineer Rashid – seems to have convinced the BJP’s strategists that releasing other Kashmiri radical leaders and allowing them to stand for election would split the Kashmiri vote into many more irreconcilable pieces, and severely dent the NC-Congress combine’s share of the vote.

The BJP coined this strategy only after witnessing the doubling of the number of votes cast in Baramulla, in comparison to 2014, and the fact that virtually all of the increase went to Engineer Rashid. But even there, it hedged its bets by releasing Rashid only after the first round of nominations had been completed. By the time he came out of jail, Rashid was able to nominate only 12 candidates to fight the assembly elections, against the 18 assembly segments of the Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency where he had gained the largest number of votes.

This was a product of careful calculation. For if Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party won all the 12, seats neither the Congress, nor the NC would be able form a government without its support. But, recognising that incarceration has endowed political activists with the halo of martyrdom, the BJP’s strategists have decided to release more political dissidents from jail, in ones and twos from other parties and religious affiliations to scatter the Kashmiri votes more widely and prevent them from going to the Congress-NC alliance.

The only way for the Congress-NC alliance to ensure that the government of Kashmir remains in Kashmiri hands is to approach every small party and candidate and assure them, that no matter who wins in the most seats in Kashmir, all of them will become a part of the next government of the state.

This will not be as hard as it looks, for far more difficult reconciliations have taken place in other countries. The most striking was the Lebanese peace agreement signed in Doha in 2008. On that occasion, the Christian leader, Michel Aoun, parted company with his more die-hard co-religionists and the American-backed Lebanese Sunnis, and agreed to Hezbollah’s demand to make it a part of the Lebanese cabinet, in proportion to its vote.

A similar, pre-election agreement between the three major parties, Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party and the Jamaat-i-Islami would enable a stable government to be formed in Jammu and Kashmir once the results are in.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

As Engineer Rashid is Granted Interim Bail, Kashmir’s Mainstream Parties Will Be on Their Toes

Rashid’s interim bail is also likely to fan rumours that his Awami Ittehad Party is a proxy of the BJP-led Union government and that he had “struck a deal” in exchange for his release from jail.

Srinagar: A Delhi court’s move to grant bail to Engineer Rashid, the Lok Sabha MP from north Kashmir, is likely to fire up his party’s electoral campaign ahead of the assembly election in Jammu and Kashmir.

Rashid, who has been languishing in New Delhi’s Tihar jail on terror funding charges, was granted interim bail on Tuesday (September 10) by Delhi’s Patiala House courts when the assembly elections, which are being held after a decade, are scheduled to commence in J&K.

The firebrand leader of the Awami Ittehad Party (AIP) and two-time MLA from north Kashmir’s Langate constituency had moved the court for interim bail in order to campaign for his party’s candidates ahead of the assembly elections, which are scheduled to be held in three phases on September 18, September 25 and October 1.

The court allowed his petition and granted him bail till October 2.

Although the AIP leader faces serious charges of terror funding, the interim bail granted to him by the Delhi court is likely to fan rumours that the AIP is a proxy of the BJP-led Union government and that its leader had “struck a deal” in exchange for his release from jail.

The party has, however, denied these rumours and accused its detractors of waging a defamation campaign against it.

After Rashid’s unlikely win from north Kashmir’s Baramulla constituency against former J&K chief minister and National Conference (NC) vice-president Omar Abdullah earlier this year, the AIP has grown steadily, with former Kashmir Chambers of Commerce and Industry chairman Sheikh Ashiq, a leading businessman from Srinagar, joining the party recently.

Rashid’s party is contesting the elections from about three dozen assembly seats, mostly in Kashmir. His young son, Abrar Rashid, has been leading the party’s election campaign.

While Ashiq has been fielded from the Ganderbal assembly constituency against the junior Abdullah, the Lok Sabha MP’s brother Khursheed Ahmad Sheikh, a government teacher who resigned from service, has been fielded from the Langate constituency.

Javed Hubbi, the son of former senior Hurriyat leader G.N. Hubbi, is also contesting on an AIP ticket from central Kashmir’s Chrari Sharief constituency.

Altaf Bhat, brother of top Hurriyat leader Peer Saifullah, is also contesting as an AIP candidate from the Rajpura assembly constituency.

The jailed separatist leader Nayeem Khan’s brother, as well as the brother of 2001 parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, are also in the polling fray as independent candidates.

Observers argue that the political winds blowing in J&K are part of the saffron party’s project to lead the government in the country’s only Muslim-majority region with the help of smaller players like Rashid, who is going to pop up on the electoral landscape in coming days after several independent candidates, including some from the Jamaat-e-Islami, and those from other smaller parties.

They believe that if the gamble pays off, the saffron party will project the new electoral equation in Kashmir as the mainstreaming of separatist ideologies that have been propagated more recently by Rashid’s party – which has called for granting the people of Kashmir the right to self-determination – and earlier by the Jamaat-e-Islami, which called for implementing the UN resolution on Kashmir.

Rashid’s appearance in Kashmir’s charged electoral landscape in time for campaigning is likely to give jitters to traditional mainstream outfits such as the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) and the NC, whose leadership has been cornered by the Union government in the aftermath of the reading down of Article 370.

PDP chief and former J&K chief minister Mehbooba Mufti – whose two young leaders Raja Waheed from Shopian and Harbaksh Singh from Tral joined the AIP recently – labelled Rashid as a “proxy of the BJP” on Monday.

Mufti’s remarks came after her party’s candidate from south Kashmir’s Shopian assembly segment, Yawar Shafi Banday, was injured in an alleged attack by AIP workers.

The police later said that it had taken cognisance of the “scuffle” between the two parties but no case was registered.

Earlier, Abdullah, who suffered a comprehensive defeat at Rashid’s hands in the recently concluded Lok Sabha election, claimed that a conspiracy had been hatched against him by the BJP-led Union government.

“When I contested the [Lok Sabha] election from the Baramulla constituency, a candidate who was behind bars filed a nomination against me. This is a strange election. I knew that the leaders in Delhi didn’t like me. But now I have known that they hate me,” he said referring to Rashid during an election rally last week in central Kashmir’s Ganderbal.

The NC and the Congress’s Hubris Has Put Them – and All of Kashmir – in a Risky Place

The prospect of a return to popular rule has breathed new life into Kashmiri politics, but the decision by the Congress and the NC to leave out the PDP and the AIP could lead to the BJP emerging the largest party in J&K.

This is the second of a two-part series by the author on Kashmir. Read the first here.

Srinagar: If the Congress had returned to power in 2014 under Manmohan Singh, then long before the present day, there would have been no Kashmir problem left to resolve.

This was because, as Thomas Friedman, the veteran columnist of the New York Times, pointed out in an article comparing Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas attack and Singh’s response to the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba attack on Mumbai that killed 175 persons and injured scores more in 2008, the Indian prime minister had done with restraint what Netanyahu has been unable to do with blind reprisal.

The Indian prime minister, he pointed out, had brought remorseless international pressure to bear on Pakistan till it was left with no option but to arrest, try and reluctantly punish the masterminds behind the attack, and to provide the US and Canadian governments with the information they needed to arrest and punish David Headley, the mastermind and Tahawwur Rana, the financier behind the plot.

This restrained response kept Pakistan in the dock for the next decade and was largely responsible for its being put on the watch list of the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism.

Singh’s restraint in 2008 was also the reason why Pakistan turned to India for help in weathering the foreign exchange crisis that the US plunged it into, four years later, when it abruptly cut off all foreign aid and payments after Islamabad reacted angrily to a bungled US helicopter attack on the Taliban in November 2011 that hit two Pakistani military border posts and killed 28 of its soldiers.

India came to its rescue then and used that as a lever for reopening talks to end the Kashmir dispute on the basis of Musharraf’s four-point plan. These had almost come to fruition when the UPA government fell, and Modi came to power in 2014.

Modi’s government lost no time in turning the clock of Indo-Pakistani relations back to where they had been in the early nineties. He did this in August 2014 by abruptly ending all communication with the Hurriyat, banning its members from even meeting the Pakistan high commissioner, and resuming heavy firing across the Line of Control on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Five years later he used his brute majority in parliament to end Kashmir’s special status and turn it into a Union territory.

From then till now, Kashmir has been a police state. Police states do have some advantages, for in the short run they are capable of imposing peace upon a turbulent society. This has been so in the valley, especially in Srinagar, which was the cockpit of militancy in the early nineties.

The city has grown rapidly in size. Business seems to be booming and, in the more affluent parts of the city that most tourists visit, there is an absence of the fear that was ever-present in the nineties, of not knowing where and when the next confrontation between militants and the police would take place.

Also read: Five Years After Article 370, J&K Continues to be a Tragic Saga of Control and Erasure

But these benefits are limited to Srinagar and a few other tourist destinations, and even in Srinagar to its more modern and affluent parts. In these areas, armed police or Border Security Force (BSF) personnel are no longer stationed out in the open at key points and intersections. Instead, they patrol the city discreetly from armoured cars that move slowly and unthreateningly through the streets. This change has virtually eliminated the sudden “cross fires” that killed or injured hundreds of civilians over two decades from the nineties till 2010.

In most of Srinagar, therefore, life is almost normal. But in the rural areas a different kind of peace is maintained through constant patrolling by the Rashtriya Rifles and the BSF, and frequent arbitrary arrests and incarceration of suspected militants, almost always in jails far from home. Experience has taught them to concentrate on the youth, of whom as in the rest of India, up to four-fifths are unemployed.

During a visit to Pulwama this writer saw a rounding-up operation in progress. Half a dozen or more young men were being led away in shackles. The villagers were standing around, angry but helpless. Their fear and anger was palpable, but so was their helplessness.

The one bright spot in this sorry tale is that the army and the BSF have become more discriminating in their exercise of force. The data that the army command regularly releases show that the spontaneous mass militancy of earlier years has been replaced by an organised, low-level infiltration of terrorists from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, who use caches of arms, much of it flown in by drones, from Pakistan and logistical support from disaffected youth.

An idea of the scale on which this is happening, and the degree of Kashmiri involvement, can be had from the annual and monthly statements released by the army command in Jammu and Kashmir. Its release on January 13 this year revealed that of 76 terrorists killed in encounters in 2023, only 21 had been locally recruited.

The decline in local participation is welcome but the numbers of local youth being killed is still sufficiently high to maintain tension and alienation in the rural population.

It is in these conditions – of an uneasy peace bought by force – that Kashmir is holding its first election after ten years. The prospect of a return to popular rule, even though Jammu and Kashmir is still a Union territory, has breathed new life into Kashmiri politics, for it offers a chance to end the enslavement that has followed the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019.

Kashmir’s political parties are therefore conscious of the need to avoid splitting the vote in Kashmir because of the BJP’s formidable hold on Jammu, where it was the leading party in 29 out of 36 assembly segments in the Lok Sabha elections.

They are also aware that the Modi government is deliberately holding this election at a time when J&K is still a Union territory and the lieutenant governor has an unchallengeable right to decide which party he will call upon first to form the next government.

If the seats in Kashmir are divided between two or more recognised parties in such a way that the BJP wins more seats in Jammu than either the National Conference (NC) or the Congress win individually in the state as a whole, then the governor will be well within his rights to call upon it to make the first attempt to form the next government. After that, Modi’s ‘friendly persuasion’ machine will go into top gear.

All Kashmiri parties are acutely aware of this, so the Congress and the NC have immediately formed a seat-sharing alliance, with the former putting up 32 candidates, and the latter 51. They are fighting each other in only five constituencies where their local leaders could not be persuaded to agree to a seat sharing arrangement. They have called this a friendly contest because no matter who wins they will still be a part of the same coalition.

The two parties of consequence that they have left out of their calculations, and therefore of their alliance, are Mehbooba Mufti’s Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) and Engineer Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party (AIP).

Also read: Engineer Rashid May Emerge as ‘Kingmaker’ as AIP Gains New Members Ahead of J&K Polls

Boycotting the PDP at such a pivotal moment in Kashmir’s history simply did not make sense. It is true that Mufti Sayeed lost most of the following his party had gained between 2002 and 2014 by trying to make a coalition government with the BJP in 2014, when he had no real need to. But voters do not hold grudges forever, and this year’s Lok Sabha elections had shown that the PDP had remained the largest party in five assembly segments in South Kashmir.

What is more, Mehbooba Mufti had offered not to put up any PDP candidates if the Congress and the NC adopted her seven-point agenda. Since these were very similar to their own agendas, all that these parties had to do was formally accept her offer and offer the PDP the five seats in South Kashmir where it is strongest. But by treating her and her party as pariahs, they have forced her to nominate candidates for 30 seats.

Another formidable contender whom the Congress and the NC have both underestimated and spurned is Rashid’s AIP. Every psephological indicator shows that Rashid owed his colossal victory in the Baramulla parliamentary constituency to the emergence of a huge protest vote that had been absent in earlier elections, for want of a candidate in whom it could place its trust.

The first is the voter turnout in the constituency. At 1.033 million, it was more than double of the 458,000 who voted in 2019. Second, Rashid’s own vote more than quadrupled, from 102,168 in 2019 to 472,481 this year. Third, his vote was greater than that of Omar Abdullah, Sajjad Lone and the PDP candidate Mir Mohammad Fayyaz put together. Fourth, the AIP was the largest party in 18 out of Baramulla’s 21 assembly segments.

With Rashid still in jail despite being a member of parliament, would anyone like to bet against the AIP winning three quarters, if not more of these 21 assembly seats?

So if the PDP wins five seats in the south, the AIP 15 or thereabouts in the north, and two seats go to other parties or independents, it is perfectly possible that the NC and the Congress may be left with as few as 25 seats in the valley. Whether they are able to form a government or not will then depend on how they do in Jammu.

To sum up, the hubris that has made the Congress and the NC ignore both the PDP and the AIP could easily lead to the BJP emerging as the largest single party in Jammu and Kashmir and claiming the right to form the government.

Were that to happen, it would open the gates in Kashmir for the kind of bargaining that has corrupted democracy in the rest of India. It will also increase substantially the possibility of another intifada in Kashmir at some time in the future.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

Engineer Rashid May Emerge as ‘Kingmaker’ as AIP Gains New Members Ahead of J&K Polls

Meanwhile BJP, with its Jammu unit in disarray and Kashmir witnessing a groundbreaking shift towards Rashid’s idea of democracy, could find it difficult to crack J&K’s electoral arithmetic.

Srinagar: The meteoric rise of Engineer Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party (AIP) has deepened political uncertainty in Jammu and Kashmir amid speculations that the controversial politician could emerge as a potential kingmaker in the upcoming assembly election.

Rashid’s fortune has shone through at a time when the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) allies in Kashmir appear to be struggling to expand their political appeal after suffering spectacular setbacks in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

Despite enjoying the Union government’s patronage, the J&K Apni Party, led by Altaf Bukhari, put up a forgettable show with its only prominent candidate and former J&K minister, Ashraf Mir, losing his security deposit after securing less than 10% vote share in the Srinagar Lok Sabha constituency.

Sajad Lone’s party, the Jammu and Kashmir’s People’s Conference (JKPC), also seems to be struggling to hold its ground. The party’s vote share in Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency went down from about 22.65% in the 2019 election, when it fielded Raja Aijaz Ali, to 16.75% in the recent election when Lone himself was in the fray.

To maintain its grip on J&K, the BJP recently curtailed the powers of any elected government in the erstwhile state through a recent gazette notification that expanded the powers of the Union territory’s lieutenant governor – a Union government appointee.

But with its Jammu unit in disarray and the voting behaviour of the electorate in Kashmir witnessing a groundbreaking shift towards Rashid’s idea of democracy, the saffron party could find it difficult to crack J&K’s electoral arithmetic. The National Conference-Congress alliance is widely believed to emerge as the single largest bloc in the elections, but it too may fall short of a comfortable majority.

Against this backdrop, speculations are rife that the BJP is extending an olive branch to the AIP leader and treating him with kid gloves after his spectacular victory in Lok Sabha polls in which he defeated former J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah.

Rashid got permission from the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which arrested him in 2019 on terror funding charges, to take oath as a member of the Lok Sabha.

In a contradictory move, Sarjan Barkati, a popular religious figure who rallied masses at the peak of unrest in Kashmir in 2016, was squeezed out of the upcoming electoral contest after the Election Commission rejected his nomination papers for Zainapora assembly constituency of Shopian in South Kashmir.

Both Rashid and Barkati have been booked under the provisions of the stringent Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and face serious charges of financing terrorism in J&K. Rashid has also faced allegations of “misusing” the phone facility in the Tihar jail, according to a disclosure made by the NIA at a Delhi court on Wednesday (August) 28.

Meanwhile, AIP’s ranks have swelled in recent weeks, with the son of a former Hurriyat Conference secretary and JKPC leader, among a motley group of lower- and middle-rung political activists and workers from the National Conference (NC) and People’s Democratic Party (PDP, joining Rashid’s party.

In this scenario, Rashid, who led in 18 out of 21 assembly segments of Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency, could well emerge as a kingmaker, if not the king himself. With some members of Jamaat-e-Islami also entering the electoral fray, analysts believe that the emerging political developments will further fracture the mandate in Kashmir which suits the BJP.

“Rashid’s party is playing the same role as the PDP which appeared on J&K’s political horizon in late 1990s and went on to form a coalition government with the Congress in its electoral debut in the assembly election. Whether the AIP succeeds in maintaining its grip on the electorate and how far, if at all, the centre is willing to concede the ground remains to be seen,” said a Srinagar-based political analyst, who didn’t want to be named.

These speculations were also spotlighted in a recent interview of Rashid’s star campaigner and son, Abrar Rashid, who, without taking names, lashed out at the “regional parties” for “building palaces out of the blood spilled by Kashmiri youth”, even though he steered clear from commenting on the prevailing political uncertainty and his father’s prolonged incarceration in Tihar jail.

“They (regional parties) are afraid that if Rashid walks out of jail, their political careers will be finished. To save themselves, they are accusing him of being a separatist. My father is pro-people and pro-nation, and its biggest proof is that he contested election under the ambit of Indian Constitution,” Abrar said, adding that the charges of terror funding against his father were “politically motivated”.

While Rashid has taken on the security establishment over human rights problems in Kashmir – including the issue of bonded labour previously practised by the army in some pockets of north Kashmir of which he has been a victim himself – the AIP leader and former junior engineer in J&K’s power department has in the past faced allegations that he was the establishment’s loose cannon nurtured to keep the regional parties in check.

Whether Rashid will have a role in the assembly elections and how he will play it, once the results of the J&K assembly elections are out on October 4, remains to be seen.

Can Engineer Rashid Return?

The firebrand AIP leader and former J&K legislator handed a shocking defeat to the former J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections.

Srinagar: With his bail application due to be heard by a New Delhi court this week, the possible return of Engineer Rashid, the incarcerated leader of the Awami Ittehad Party (AIP), to the electoral scene ahead of the assembly election has set the rumour mill churning in Kashmir Valley.

While there are rumours that Rashid could be transferred to Srinagar’s central jail, some speculate that the courts could grant him another parole, like they did in the case of Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, to enable him to campaign for his party ahead of the three-phased assembly election in Jammu and Kashmir which will be held next month.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the legal principle, ‘bail is rule, jail is exception’, was applicable even for suspects held in serious offences under special statutes such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act under which thousands of suspects have been arrested after 2019 when J&K was bifurcated into two union territories.

“Without Engineer Rashid, the assembly election in Jammu and Kashmir will be meaningless, given the mandate that people gave to him in the Lok Sabha election. The court should consider this fact. We are hopeful that he will get bail,” AIP spokesperson Firdous Baba told The Wire.

The firebrand AIP leader and former J&K legislator handed a shocking defeat to the former J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections. Rashid, who has in the past called for holding referendum for resolving the Kashmir issue, defeated Omar with a margin of more than two lakh votes by polling 472481 votes while Peoples Conference chairman Sajad Lone stood at third position with 173239 votes.

Rashid’s landslide victory marked a significant break in the behaviour of Kashmir’s electorate who have largely stayed away from electoral politics following the eruption of insurgency in the early 1990s, but came out to vote in large numbers for the AIP leader against the backdrop of an emotional election campaign run by his two college-going sons.

Rashid’s stunning win shook the political landscape of Kashmir. Omar said that his victory will “without doubt .. empower secessionists and give Kashmir’s defeated Islamist movement a renewed sense of hope.” Strategic experts argued that the victory of Rashid will “embolden Kashmir’s separatists.”

However, many political observers argued that the “soft separatism” peddled by the likes of Rashid, who doesn’t shy away from advocating talks between India and Pakistan for the resolution of Kashmir problem, like Kashmiri separatists and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) led by Mehbooba Mufti do, has always been part of J&K’s political discourse, given the region’s troubled history.

They point to the time of National Conference founder Sheikh Abdullah who set up ‘Plebiscite Front’ to seek a referendum in Kashmir following the partition of the sub continent in 1947. “Unlike separatists, Rashid used non-violent means to propagate his politics. At the peak of recent unrests in Kashmir, his Langate constituency in north Kashmir remained relatively peaceful,” said a Srinagar-based political analyst, who didn’t want to be named.

The rumours of Rashid’s return to Kashmir’s electoral arena are floating as a time when the Jamaat-i-Islami, which is believed to be the ideological mentor of Hizbul Mujahideen, Kashmir’s biggest militant group, has announced that it was willing to enter the electoral fray, provided the union government lifts the ban which was imposed on the outfit ahead of the bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories in 2019.

Jamaat, a pro-Pakistan group which is also involved in social work in J&K, derives its ideological underpinnings from the teachings of Islamist ideologue and scholar Syed Abul Ala Maududi, “But history tells us that Jamaat was tamed when it got formal entry into the system,” the political analyst quoted above said.

There are reports that the AIP is gearing to contest the assembly election on a “grand scale” and the party was likely to field its candidates on all the constituencies of Kashmir. The possibility of Jamaat joining hands with the AIP has also not been ruled out. Rashid’s brother, Khurshid Ahmad Sheikh, a government teacher and acting president of the party, is also reportedly entering the political fray from a north Kashmir constituency.

Rashid, who is currently languishing in New Delhi’s Tihar Jail, was booked under the stringent anti-terror law and arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) along with Kashmiri businessman Zahoor Ahmad Watali and a host of separatist leaders including the JKLF chairman Yasin Malik and others in a terror funding case in 2019.

In July this year, after the NIA gave its nod to the AIP leader’s bail application, a Delhi court granted him a conditional, two-hour parole to allow him to be sworn in as a member of the Lok Sabha.