Chief Minister Omar Abdullah invited scathing reaction from BJP and a section of national media for his tweet on Afzal Guru. Omar’s tweet was hypothetical: If J&K Assembly had passed a resolution similar to the Tamil Nadu one for Afzal Guru would the reaction have been as muted? I think not. However, soon after he had punched it, the prospect of a backlash played itself out true to the prediction. BJP and its extended rightwing family didnt wait for the resolution to come to pass and instead took tweet for the resolution. A clemency plea for Afzal Guru? How can you even think of it and then also dare to write, a full sentence length tweet conjuring up a scenario of the state’s Assembly passing a resolution to this effect.
However, there is nothing exceptional about this political reaction. It has followed an eminently predictable trajectory. What Omar’s tweet has done is to serendipitously show up for everyone an aspect of essential sentimental divide between New Delhi and Srinagar. The larger political narrative across the country never connects with the discourse in Kashmir and similarly Valley remains eternally estranged from the goings-on in the mainland India. The disconnect between Valley and the recent euphoric campaign against corruption across India only brings this point more thumpingly home.
Omar, who otherwise generally appears removed from the hurly burly of the politics in Valley, sometimes displays a surprising knack of hitting the core of the Valley’s sentiment through his statements or tweets, something that certainly his father never did or could do, except for the brief mercurial moments like his speeches during the autonomy debate in Assembly in 1998. In comparison, Omar does at times epiphanically highlight the fault-lines between New Delhi and Srinagar. And his tweet on Guru does this exceptionally well. It helps set up a larger debate on the perennial sense of otherness Valley and the rest of India feel for each other.
Political class in India would allow the room for debate and discussion on the commutation of the sentence to Rajiv Gandhi’s killers. Media would similarly play along - adding even a dose of emotion by putting out an appeal by the daughter of one of the death row convicts Murugan. But there is an uncritical, instant political consensus on Guru with contempt for the fact that Guru’s hanging does play to a huge constituency in Valley whose deep sense of alienation and estrangement from the mainstream India is what essentially constitutes Kashmir problem. Bilateral dispute between India and Pakistan over the state would have hardly mattered if the Kashmiris were happy with their lot.
This disconnect comes through in varied aspects of engagement between Valley and the rest of the country. The recent aborted literary festival in Valley is a case in point. While the debate in India is about the Valley’s liberal elite ganging up against the event together with the vitriolic propaganda unleashed by a section of youth on social networking sites, Kashmir saw it as a covert bid to trumpet the normalcy in the state. Kashmir also found the choice of locations - Kashmir University and DPS school - for the festival odious. They didn't appear neutral places. A few, including influential Kashmir writers of global renown, raised queries about the “independence” of the exercise and its alleged “apolitical” nature.
The cumulative message from the range of these responses is the deepest suspicion Valley instinctively feels about any initiative in the state originating from New Delhi – sometimes as apparently harmless-looking as a literature festival. This raises some pertinent questions about the role of the organizers of the event . If the effort was independent - why did they so miserably fail to convey this across. Why did they rather chose to tamely defend themselves and defer the festival. Why did they not rather engage with the reservations being voiced by the people and try as far as possible to address them. The point is that Kashmir and New Delhi think radically different from each other and India’s collective political response to issues in Kashmir is invariably hijacked by the rightwing political class which looks at them in a pathetically unimaginative and unidimensional way. Its tenor is irredeemably communal even though couched in nationalistic terms.
There has hardly ever been a conscious effort to relate to Kashmir - not through hollow goodwill statements which come a dime by dozen - by at least engaging with the dominant discourse in Kashmir if not echoing and accommodating it. It is time New Delhi start doing this now if it wants Kashmir to become first confident of its intentions and trust it to resolve the problems of the state. What about starting by a symbolic grand gesture like grant of clemency to Afzal Guru
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