Voting apart, the ongoing election has mortally upset the reigning post-1989 political compass rooted in the separatist politics
RIYAZ AHMAD
For all its carnival like atmosphere it was mortifying to see a steady stream of people turning out to vote across Bandipore and Ganderbal and now Islamabad and Kupwara. Not that it was not expected but the sheer numbers of the people participating in the exercise was unimaginable. And that too in the freezing winter, even beating the warmer Jharkhand by many percentage points. How one wished it was the normal democratic exercise unburdened by its politically problematic dimensions. Then you could go about the simple electoral analysis of the turnout and its impact on the fortunes of political parties and the major leaders. But it isn’t. And the voters who stormed the polling stations in great numbers, jostling and shoving each other to cast their vote were conscious of this reality. They dished out complicated explanations for their decision to vote, like the simultaneous need to support the mainstream politics and the separatist cause and how this was not contradictory for them.
Many others in the long queues outside polling booths were not inclined to be drawn into the conversation, exhibiting a sense of fatigue about a recurrent political theme which forbids easy answers and a foreseeable resolution. They lived in the moment, captivated by the thrill of the village rivalries and the excitements unleashed by the local electoral dynamics. Their participation was occasioned by the bonds of kinship, acquaintance or deference to the local candidates, of whom every constituency boasted an average of nine. There was no memory of what had gone before and no concern for how things should pan out in future.
Or may be there was. It would seem very righteous to trash the collective wisdom of the lakhs of voters. But one thing is sure. The unprecedented groundswell for voting apart, the ongoing election has mortally upset the reigning post-1989 political compass rooted in the separatist politics. Never before in the past two and a half decades has mainstream politics been practised so uninhibitedly and with so few a nods to the political conflict and its attendant discourse in the state – a fact only underlined by the too close for comfort proximity between the integrationist Hindu nationalism and a ‘mainstreamed’ shade of the separatist politics. Never before have separatists been so marginalized in their political standing and reduced to inconspicuous spectators to the unedifying play of an unrooted power politics. And never before has an entire political system, with an odd exception or two, been so comprehensively suborned not to reflect or echo the fears and anxieties of their people.
Even Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, who has been unstinting in his opposition to BJP and has often righteously rejected any prospect of allying with the party is now open-minded about the support to a BJP-led government. Gone is the NC’s vitriolic rhetoric against Modi that was on full display during parliament polls. And the other marginal actors on the scene from People’s Conference to Awami Mutahida Mahaz to independents to half a dozen of newly forged parties seem to be falling over one another to be on the right side of BJP. NC’s Autonomy as plank is out the window. PDP’s Self-Rule as the slogan is no more in discourse, even while the two may figure in the respective manifestoes of the parties.
Something has fundamentally changed in Kashmir. There is no doubt that an election discourse is playing out in full force but it hardly follows from the ground. What we hear is a rhetoric that is fake and invented and doesn’t even distantly echo the one that was reigning supreme for the past two decades. In this election for the first time the political parties feel the overriding need to put premium on being more Indian by conviction than the other. And what’s more, as the first and second election phase have demonstrated a predominant majority of people are not complaining.
In one of his recent write ups my fellow columnist Ajaz ul Haque serendipitously termed the current election as ‘chutzpah’ season, a take on a famous monologue from the film Haider. And which it is. The chutzpah is in evidence not only among leaders, political activists but also among voters. Though it could yet again turn out to be another temporary phase, the general mood among people now is to forget and move on.