J&K mobilises on religious lines after abrogating Article 370

Hindu-majority Jammu, Buddhist-majority Ladakh and Muslim-majority Kashmir have been pitted against each other since decades. Along with the underlying development imbalances, it has always been the imbalance along religious lines that has added to the instability across these regions. While a regional religious divide has always had a communal undertone to it, this communal gap did not crop up abruptly. Through the early formative years of the state, right after its accession to India, the politically charged years between 1948 and 1954 played a major role in giving a communal colour to its historiographic origins. These years took J&K and its subjects through severe communal hostilities where the Muslim Conference for the Muslims of Jammu, the Jammu Praja Parishad in Jammu for Hindus, the National Conference under the Sheikh for Kashmir and Sardar Ibrahim’s rebellion in the hill regions of Poonch (that included present day Rajouri as well) captured most of the political space. This political scenario was not without communal flare and mainstream political factions failed miserably in dissipating the communal atmosphere ripe at that time. Those early years had been bitterly communal where Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims both in the Valley, in Jammu and in the hill areas of Rajouri-Poonch witnessed some of the most barbaric communal episodes.

The scene, however, did not stay the same and tensions did fizzle out in successive decades, when despite the National Conference’s stronghold in the Valley, the Congress entered as a key player in the Jammu region. Tempers cooled down especially because the Muslim Conference and its leadership had completely shifted to Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) by the 1948 ceasefire, hence putting an end to the National Conference-Muslim Conference rivalry that indeed deepened the gap between Muslims of Jammu and Muslims of Kashmir, with the Praja Parishad engaging itself intensively with securing the interests of Hindus by aligning itself with groups like the RSS and the Akali Dal.

It were these unfortunate turn of events that the state of Jammu and Kashmir was battling with that made Jawaharlal Nehru grant “special status” to the same, keeping in view the history of conflict and the tragic political and social transformations the state had witnessed or was witnessing at that time, both at its borders with continuous intrusions from Pakistan and within, with the state being caught up in the communal tides of the times. Perhaps, the tides have re-emerged and have grown stronger and more fierce today. For anyone on the ground, one can clearly ascertain how the recent abrogation of special status has left the subjects of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir divided into two camps: non-Muslims, particularly the Hindus supporting the move with Sikhs and others offering a mixed-response, and Muslims standing against the same. For a moment, let us drift away from the debate, whether this abrogation is for the benefit of the state or not — but the basic question that should be asked here is: How did these grounds emerge where people of a particular religion today are rallying behind the abrogation and people of another religion have stood firmly against it?

Or to put it another way, did communal tensions really die after the 1950s or were they lying dormant, waiting for a chance to flare up again? If yes, then what could that chance have been, given the political developments the state has seen in the last few decades? Did incidents like the 2008 Amarnath land row land us in the situation we are in today? The year 2008 had been a turning point because it was for the first time that the BJP was able to gather sufficient seats in Jammu. Was the significant rise of right wing parties a moment when the dormant seeds of communal tension from the 1950s rose up again?

The existence of such a communal drift existing between key communities in a social set-up do not just threaten stability and social order, but is also a key threat to the secular fabric that keeps inter-community interactions going in a society. How will the abrogation of Article 370 address regional instability when it has bifurcated not only the territory, but also the people into two camps. Besides talk of development and progress, is there anyone who is looking at the repercussions that this decision has unleashed on community ties that people exchange and share with each other on the ground? An atmosphere of fear and uncertainty prevails under the wrap of an eerie silence on the streets. The implication of abrogation is such that it has divided Muslims and non-Muslims in a neighbourhood today and the force that has led to such developments ought to be communal in nature, similar to how the massacres and the bloodshed that followed after 1947-48 left the state and its people divided into communal cohorts.

“Separatism grows when people feel disconnected from structures of power and the process of policy formulation — in contrast, devolution(decentralisation) ensures popular participation in the running of the polity… it can be reasonably argued that it is the erosion of Article 370 and not its creation which has aggravated separatist tendencies in the state,” wrote Amitabh Mattoo in an article in the Hindu on December 6, 2013.

Indeed, what the erosion of the article has led to is that it has disintegrated communal harmony by mobilising people on religious lines. The abrogation has not only drawn lines across neighbourhoods, it has followed a pattern in its execution where the regimented steps taken to confine people under the lockdown have had stricter implementation in Muslim-dominated regions than say the non-Muslim Hindu belt of Jammu-Kathua. If the need to put curbs on areas dominated by one particular religion was intense, then how does abrogation qualify to be a non-communal step? Isn’t such a top-down approach that has dissected J&K on religious lines also a step towards regional instability?

Those who still believe that abrogation was done to address regional instability and developmental aspirations need to take notice that besides conflict and non-development, instability also includes breakdown of the secular fabric of a community. If the concern at hand was the stability of J&K, then the primary objective should have been to address this communal divide and bridge it through a process where people of all religions and ethnicities would have had a say in the abrogation without such stark divisions on the ground. More than this, what ought to have been done is to enter into a dialogue with those against such a step and democratically engage with them. With such a decision being taken in haste, we are now left with uncertain and unpredictable consequences where an entire strata of the population is in total disagreement and is in fact angry and irked. Will we ever be able to reconcile the divided communities and actually integrate the people and not just the territory — only time will tell. But things do not look encouraging at the moment.

The writer is a PhD scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The views expressed here are personal.