India needs to take a leap of faith on Kashmir

The decision taken by BJP to cut the rope on its alliance with Mehbooba Mufti’s People’s Democratic Party in Jammu and Kashmir can be understood sociologically as a fatal dualism that had to part. Some say it was for electoral reasons, and elections do make people behave differently.

The calculations and numbers become more important at the time of election. As numbers get thin, the nation loses its importance and the rules of the party start to take over. The BJP prefers the nation state to the nation and talks about law and order as a substitute for unity. It prefers the party to the nation state. When the chips are down, political survival becomes critical. It is all arithmetic and there is no sense of care or concern for Kashmir or the country. People don’t matter except if they are voters.

US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un are seedy characters, yet even they seem desperate for peace. Maybe the Madhav Ashishes behind the two are more courageous, more readily willing to take risks. Even if this political round ends in a farce, they have shown that guts and imagination can change politics. It also shows even a Trump knows the limits of his blustering, the bully boy politics.

The BJP, working within its politics of blinders, is content with electoralism. Its short-run mentality has no sense of the future. It can not dream beyond the logic of history like other politicians. Mr Modi’s game run of policy as far as Kashmir goes is losing steam. In fact, one often wonders whether India will make a leap of faith into the future on Kashmir.

Breaking up after Kathua would has sent a different message. To declare the alliance as terminally and congenitally ill. It adds a gravitas to it, a touch of inevitability. The onus is now on governor N.N. Vohra. Governor’s Rule is evaluated purely in terms of the logic of control, of decline in casualties or of future electoral advantage.

Citizens are becoming black boxes or black holes of politics. Violence does not merely silence people. It virtually erases the presence of a people. Civil society should now be ready to challenge the Orwellian language of security. Civil society in India has always been cautious, in fact, proper, when challenging the idea of security or even foreign policy.

Civil society as rights groups, peace groups and environmental groups has to break in so that the people of the nation can break out of the current paradigm which we call thought. This civil society has to create little “panchayats” of debate and problem-solving. The law and order issue makes more sense when peace is a prospect on the horizon.

Kashmir desperately needs to experiment with peace from the nukkad and the bunker to the state level. Politicians, who have lost the habit of peace or even forgotten its language, should have the modesty to work with these groups and explore new possibilities. The university that has been the subject to such corrosive undermining by the current establishment, should reassert its courage and its intellectual responsibility rethinking history and philosophy into the new idea of peace.