Reyaz Ahmad
This Assembly session has by far been the murkiest in the state’s history. It started with Mehbooba Mufti’s mike stunt that put news television on fire, followed by Muzaffer Beigh’s accusation that the chief Minister Omar Abdullah was involved in the 2006 Srinagar sex scandal. This sent shock waves across India and nearly brought the state government down. The PDP almost had its target when Omar decided to resign on the floor of assembly and subsequently even tendered a conditional resignation to the Governor N N Vohra.
However, NC soon got even with its chief political rival when the day after it came out with a slew of accusations against Beigh in the form of a questionnaire which listed the PDP leader’s liaisons with a number of women including the head of one of country’s premier legal firms. The NC even got the speaker Muhammad Akber Lone to read out the questionnaire.
The leaders hurled at each other the worst abuses that anybody can imagine, in many ways, overtaking even the declining standards at the national level. In a war for maximum political attention, PDP went for NC’s jugular and in response after a brief attempt at securing moral high ground by Omar, NC chose to do an equally unseemly climbdown. The party launched a public slander campaign against Beigh.
However, while the decline in the standards of the political discourse in the state is a cause for some concern, it isn’t a matter of such a serious crisis after all. While it was natural for the national media to play the development up, it wasn’t appropriate to take a protective line on Omar. Or for that matter for New Delhi to instinctively rise to young CM’s defense. It appeared odd how a very local political skirmish – which despite its bad taste is intrinsic to any democratic culture – was so personalized at the national level. A quick effort was mounted to guide and control the situation in Valley and run down the PDP as political party bent on destabilizing the Kashmir. Without in any way meaning to defend PDP, my contention is that it is time that the centre lets the Kashmir be. It shouldn’t catch cold, every time the Kashmir sneezes.
If Kashmir is to have a democracy, it should be allowed to run the full gamut of it: live with its inherent advantages as by far the best governing system in the world and its often flawed, chaotic operation. In fact, the flaws occasionally outweigh in the kind of third world societies we live in, even if we may imagine ourselves to be taking the first uncertain steps towards a new assertion of power in the world. After decades of denial and deprivation, Kashmir needs a democracy that doesn’t only operate in a goody-goody, refined ways but makes a lot of sound and fury.
I don’t say that if we allow this to happen, Kashmir will become sufficiently democratic. It will not be. Given the long pending dispute over the state between India and Pakistan , which has caused the state to evolve into a politically treacherous entity with various ideologies and discourses vying for superiority, the democracy is yet to span the entire society. A substantial section of population in Valley is yet to acknowledge it, let alone espouse it.
But that doesn’t detract from a certain degree of new-found relevance of the mainstream parties to the political discourse in Kashmir. Ever since the landmark 2002 election in the state, which spectacularly resulted in the change of the government, people have begun to repose some confidence in the political process. This followed by an unyielding tug of war between two dominant mainstream parties, NC and PDP, has kept the people engaged and ushered in an element of curiosity and interest in the political goings-on in the state. This political tussle has doubtless achieved its highs in creating a healthy political binary in the state and recently plumbed its lows in the form of mutual muckraking.
However, the bottomline is that there is nothing exceptionally abnormal with such political conduct. For needless to say, democracy by its nature is not devoted to a regimented discipline and order but prospers in an environment of debate and discussion, even bouts of political acrimony and at times scandalous digressions. And if this is true elsewhere, why should Kashmir be exempt from this experience. Why shouldn’t the New Delhi let the democracy in Kashmir just stumble along and hopefully find its own moorings.
