Kashmir’s musical chairs

The election and installation of governments in Kashmir has been and continues to be nothing but a game of musical chairs. On March 1, another government, a coalition of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) led by former Indian home minister Mufti Mohammad Syed and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was appointed to govern the ‘disputed’ territory.
The installation of this government is not different from all the post-1947 dispensations in the state. Whatever their title – chief emergency administrator, prime minister or chief minister – their status has not been different from the proxies appointed by earlier rulers like the Sikhs (1819-1846) who were kicked out by Ranjeet Singh from their coveted position. The rulers in the state can be dismissed from their offices by just a scrap of paper from New Delhi.
In 1953, the then Indian prime minister Jawharlal Nehru had sent an unsigned paper through his envoy to Dr Karan Singh to dismiss Sheikh Abdullah, who was deposed and detained without much ado. Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley reminded us about these grim realities during his speech in parliament on February 2, 2015. Intervening in the Rajya Sabha debate on the motion of thanks on the president’s address he candidly questioned the genuineness of the elections held in Jammu and Kashmir after 1947.
The leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad, taking a dig at the BJP’s victory in Jammu had said that the ‘red rags’ had won in the state. Azad was perhaps referring to the communal polarisation orchestrated by the BJP during the 2014 assembly elections in Jammu that had raised the tally of its seats from eight to 24 in the house. Hitting back hard at the Congress leader, Jaitley reiterated a historical reality about the sham elections held in the state. He in fact joined the people’s discourse about the travesty of democracy in Kashmir that has been reverberating for decades not only in the state but also at many

other international forums.
Jaitley informed the house that elections in the state were rigged in 1953, 1957, 1962 and 1967. He perhaps meant the August 1951 elections as no election were held in the state in 1953. In the 1951 elections all candidates except two had been declared elected unopposed.
Jaitley honestly exposed the modus operandi adopted for conducting the farce elections in the state. To quote him:
‘Those days there would be an officer (deputy commissioner) before whom an affidavit was to be submitted by the candidate and it was a joke that the government was not of the people but of that very officer who would allow [the] affidavit of only favourite candidates.’
In 1951, besides intimidation and terror that had scared other parties from contesting the elections, it was not the people but the deputy commissioners who virtually elected the members for the State Constituent Assembly. He was bold enough to expose the dubious role played by the Congress governments in holding farce elections in the state and selling them to the world outside as ‘people’s rule’ in the state. Nevertheless, he was not the first person to tear apart the facade of democracy in the state by denouncing the Congress for ruling the state for five decades without the ‘people’s support’.
In 1977, the then state governor, L K Jha, is on record to have said that all earlier elections in the state were rigged. In 1982, none but the former prime minister of India, Morarji Desai, told this writer during an interview that “all earlier elections in the state were rigged” and it was he who gave the state first fair elections to the State in 1977. All think tanks and intellectuals during the nineties attributed the birth of militancy in the state to the rigged 1987 elections. The Muslim United Front (MUF) candidates, despite winning the elections, were declared to have been defeated by the election commission.
The 1996 elections had internationally earned the dubious heading: ‘Elections at gun point in J&K’. These were held when political parties in the state had asked people to boycott them. In order to tell the world outside that everything was now hunky dory and that democracy had struck its roots in the ‘disputed’ state, the government in New Delhi conjured new regional parties and there was a change of guard in the state at regular intervals. Why and how that was done is no secret.
The honest remarks by Arun Jaitley in the Rajya Sabha do not only refocus on the sham and rigged elections held in the state but also place a big question mark over the ratification of accession of the state with India by the Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly or the actions taken by the state assembly for integrating the state with the Union of India more particularly during the Congress rule. It may not be possible to recap the whole history about the genesis of the Constituent Assembly but to put it briefly:
In his arrogance and total disregard of the UN resolutions of 1948 and 1949 Sheikh Abdullah, then Nehru’s protégé in the state, convened a meeting of the National Conference General Council on October 27, 1950, recommending the convening of a constituent assembly for the purpose of determining the “future shape and affiliations of the State of Jammu and Kashmir” with India.
The matter was brought before the Security Council. During the debate, Indian envoy B N Roy committed before the comity of nation that the actions of the State Constituent Assembly would not influence or affect its commitment for holding of plebiscite in the state under aegis of the United Nations. The Security Council passed another resolution on March 30 1951, categorically stating that ”any action that [the] Assembly may have taken or might attempt to take to determine the future shape and affiliation of the entire State or any part thereof, or action by the parties concerned in support of any such action by the Assembly, would not constitute a disposition of the State.”
Despite the UN resolution, on November 7, 1956 the same Constituent Assembly that was conjured through a sham election as admitted by Jaitley also adopted the state constitution, Article 3 of which affirms, “The State of Jammu and Kashmir is and shall be an integral part of Union of India."
The UN resolution of January 24, 1957 did not approve the actions of the Constituent Assembly with regard to ratification of the Instrument of Accession. Instead, it reaffirmed the holding of a plebiscite under supervision of a plebiscite administrator to be appointed by the United Nations for deciding the future of the state.
The moot point remains that even if there were no UN resolutions, are not all actions taken by the Constituent Assembly that has been created through ‘fraudulent and sham elections’ illegal and against the principles of justice and fair play? These actions also include the ratification of accession of the state with the Union of India by the Constituent Assembly.
The writer is a freelance contributor based in Srinagar.
Email: zahidgm@gmail.com