Abrogation of Article 370: Historical blunder with colossal consequences

Seen in the right shade of the sun, the resolution passed in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly on November 6 for the restoration of the former state’s constitutional autonomy, and thereby the restitution of its original place in the federal status of India, will in time be commended as a model of restraint. This is regardless of the current efforts by the ruling dispensation at the Centre to demonise it.

Constitutionally, the effort to restore the earlier autonomy is theoretical at this stage because it will need overwhelming parliamentary approval for the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution to be undone. And, that’s far from likely in the current political climate.

A sensible resolution

It needs to be emphasised, however, that the Assembly resolution is by no means a hot-headed throwing down of the gauntlet by Srinagar, as some might imagine on account of Kashmir’s long struggle with terrorism.

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Its passage was not an “anti-national” act, as the regime leaders and the BJP seek to make out.

On the contrary, the resolution is imbued with the aspiration of the people who gave the National Conference (NC) a handsome majority in the Assembly elections to adhere to a federal, democratic and secular India, and to seek a dialogue with the Centre as an equal member of the Union along with other states, not a lesser member.

People must be empowered

Only if this is done will the people of Kashmir, a sensitive frontier region with a tortuous history, be able to stand up to the threats and blandishments of either Pakistan or China.

Alienated people do not defeat political and military adventurists across the border. Military force alone is never enough to thwart such designs. Harnessing people power is crucial.

Laughably, the Kashmiri opponents of the NC-led winning INDIA bloc (including the Congress and the CPI-M) that was voted to power last month — with the NC forming the government — have chosen the other extreme angle from which to attack the resolution.

The ‘revolutionary’ critics of Omar

They seek to sound moralistic and revolutionary. Their ostensible complaint is that the articulation of people’s aspiration, passed by voice vote by an overwhelming majority, and truculently opposed by the BJP bloc, does not go far enough in denouncing the Centre’s action of 2019 in removing Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy by abrogating Article 370.

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For several years, and even in the just held election, the politics of these elements have provided succor to the Narendra Modi regime. Their trajectory has clearly not changed after the elections, and is likely to continue unaltered, with the Centre’s blessings, through Omar Abdullah’s term as chief minister.

Some of these parties, fronts and individuals are separatists or crypto-separatists, others pro-Pakistan — and all thoroughly opportunistic. Most are working for short-term gains but some, like the Jamaat-e-Islami individuals aligned with one of these parties, are ironically looking to re-establish their lost strategic space on the BJP’s watch.

The Opposition parties are angry with the resolution because they are angry with the people who neutralised their efforts.

VP Menon’s memoirs

The Integration of the Indian States by VP Menon, the constitutional advisor to Governor-General Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was made Secretary of the States ministry (the expression denoted princely states of the time) headed by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, is a fascinating tale in a thick volume published in 1956.

It talks of how the princely order — under the aegis of some 600 big, medium, small and tiny states — were integrated into free India as the British colonial rule ended.

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Were it not for this gigantic effort completed in less than six weeks before August 15, 1947, there may well have been hundreds of independent kingdoms subsisting within the territory of India after Independence and Partition. In short, this was a tailor-made situation for a potential balkanisation.

To prevent such a disaster, Menon conceived the idea of getting the rulers of the 140 “fully empowered states”, i.e. the major kingdoms, to sign the Instrument of Accession only in respect of “defence”, “external affairs” and “communications” — in other words, surrender the rights over these subjects to the Government of India that was about to be established on Independence Day.

Hari Singh bowed to pressure

The idea was backed by Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mountbatten. But many states proved recalcitrant. There were difficult negotiations and considerable cajoling.

Travancore and Jodhpur, for instance, demanded independence from India to begin with. Junagadh, in fact, acceded to Pakistan but was made to row back. In the end, nearly all were brought around peacefully and signed up by August 15, 1947 as India was entering upon freedom.

Jammu and Kashmir, contiguous to both India and Pakistan, declined to sign the Instrument of Accession by August 15.

According to Menon, the ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, “was toying with the notion of an ‘Independent Jammu and Kashmir’”. The dream shattered when he was attacked by tribal forces organised by Pakistan. Then, Hari Singh, in haste, signed the same Instrument of Accession as the others had done before but not before losing some 40 per cent of his territory to Pakistan.

Mukherjee's support

Being the only outlier state was the reason why the case of Jammu and Kashmir was discussed in the Constituent Assembly. And Article 370 of the Constitution was devised to incorporate the state into the territory of India after the day of Independence and while Pakistani forces were on Jammu and Kashmir territory.

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The provision was piloted in the Constituent Assembly by N Gopalaswamy Ayyangar, a minister without portfolio in Nehru’s interim government. He had earlier been a prime minister of Hari Singh and knew the ground well.

It is noteworthy that the Hindu Mahasabha leader, Syama Prasad Mukherjee, who would later be the founding president of the Bhartiya Jana Sangh, the BJP’s precursor floated by the RSS, supported Article 370 in the Constituent Assembly which established free India’s Constitution.

Peddling falsehood over Kashmir

And yet, Union Home Minister Amit Shah could falsely say in an election speech in Maharashtra recently that Article 370 would imply that Kashmir is not an integral part of India.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was subsequently quoted as saying at a Nashik rally, again in the context of the passage of the resolution in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, that India will only be run on the basis of Dr Ambedkar’s Constitution.

But Article 370 remains a part of Ambedkar’s Constitution and has only been diluted, and the Prime Minister was implying a falsehood. Senior functionaries of the State ought to desist from uttering or implying falsehoods knowingly.

The official reasons for taking away Jammu and Kashmir’s constitutional autonomy in 2019 and converting the state into two Union Territories have turned out to be false. There was no positive substance in the move — only hatred for the majority community in Kashmir.

No tangible benefits as 370 goes

Contrary to the much-hyped presumed future benefits of the whittling down of Article 370 propagated by the Centre, lives and livelihoods have suffered.

Daily news reports of a rising wave of terrorist attacks over the past two years in the Jammu as well as Kashmir division — frequent killing of civilians and soldiers — mock the BJP and the regime.

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Since Jammu and Kashmir was downgraded to a Union Territory and has been run directly from the Centre for long, no excuses can be proffered. The security grid remains with the Centre. The formation of a popular government in a Union Territory severely limits the Abdullah government.

Ideological reasons

Looking back, it does seem that those who authored the phoney reasons to force cataclysmic change in Kashmir did so for purely ideological reasons.

They appeared to calculate that removing Kashmir’s autonomy would lead them on to power in Jammu and Kashmir in the country’s only Muslim-majority state.

These forces shaped the media narrative, and promoted Bollywood films demonising the Muslim community wholesale.

When Article 370 was abrogated in August 2019, predominantly Hindu Jammu and Buddhist Ladakh were elated (such was the force of the propaganda). They uncritically believed the Centre’s promises and thought the provision was a hindrance to their lives. But this communal make-believe proved short-lived.

Within a few months, the removal of autonomy and the scrapping of its companion Article 35-A (which mirrored the 1927 State Subjects law of the Maharaja), which had brought Jammu and Kashmir’s original inhabitants unrestricted benefits in the fields of education, governmental employment and purchase of property, began to hurt the people of the former state.

Outsiders began to barge in for land and property and compete for jobs in the Union Territory. The brunt of the change was felt in the Jammu region.

A Hindu Chief Minister

If the BJP still performed exceptionally well in Jammu in the recent polls, it is on account of the hope generated that Modi would deliver Jammu and Kashmir a Hindu chief minister for the first time.

This communal sentiment overcame the disappointment with the abrogation of Article 370 and the ending of Article 35-A.

But since the expectation of a Hindu chief minister hyped by the Prime Minister failed to materialise, the earlier grievances are kicking right back in. Whatever BJP leaders may say for the record, the cadres on the ground have few answers to give the people.

Thus, the Assembly resolution seeking the restoration of Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy answers a strong practical need in Jammu and a deeply felt emotional need of the people of the Kashmir Valley, where people desire their notional autonomy although they know this existed merely as a formality.

Autonomy on paper

The impugned Article 370 had not come in the way of the acceptance of any Central law by the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, a condition for the application of any national law in the former state.

This was a barometer of the political and social change in Kashmir since October 26, 1947, when the Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession. And yet, the BJP’s canon could not stomach Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy, which for all practical purposes remained only on paper.

In August 2019, the Centre transcended widely recognised constitutional values and limits and abrogated Article 370 without a reference to the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly and then raced through mumbo-jumbo procedures in Parliament, using its brute strength.

This amounted to giving effect to a diktat. Never before has a state in India been thus downgraded and humiliated.

A historic moment

What the November 6 resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly has done is to answer back, question the government of India, and demand its rights under the Constitution. That makes it truly historic in character.

Under the diktat, for the first time, the country’s northern frontier in its entirety was brought under the Centre’s unmitigated control, superintendence and sway. The former Jammu and Kashmir state was turned into a huge prison camp.

Everything became kosher in the name of security. Schools, colleges and markets were shut. The internet and mobile phone connections were cut. Public transport stood withdrawn. Ordinary business and trade came to a standstill.

The newspapers were brought under harsh censorship. Journalists were detained, roughed up, interrogated and arrested. Hundreds of political leaders and workers, and thousands of innocent civilians, including 10-year old children, were detained.

Terror in Kashmir

Section 144 IPC — prohibitory orders banning the gathering of more than five persons at a place — was promulgated in each town and village square.

Hospital visits in a medical emergency involved running the gauntlet with heavily armed soldiers at checkpoints at close intervals, day or night.

Positions of real authority and trust in the civil service and administration were now filled with people from outside Jammu and Kashmir, especially outside the predominantly Muslim Kashmir Valley, people who had no idea of the state and its society and history.

About two months after these scary, fantastic events, this writer drove some 120 km from Baramulla in north Kashmir to Shopian in the south and saw a soldier armed with an automatic weapon practically every 100 metres although the people remained indoors as civic life had shut down.

Such things had not been seen even at the height of terrorist violence in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when this writer was a regular visitor to Kashmir as a journalist.

Angry, upset Kashmiris

When the curtains were drawn down on everyday life, a young lad in a village near Baramulla said sharply in Hindustani, not holding back, “Aap hum se Pakistan ka badla le rahe hain (You are taking revenge on us for Pakistan)!"

This would shake anyone, and it shook me.

The direct reference to the religious divide — frequently the only point of reference for the present regime — came as a whiplash. The word had got out. It was etched even in the Kashmir sky that the Centre was now run by those who would go at the people of Kashmir because of the way they prayed.

This turned out to be the natural corollary of the mauling of Article 370. When the devil cites scriptures, only the gullible are taken in — such as the innocent and the uninformed people of rest of India wholly unfamiliar with the history or the geography or the politics of Kashmir.

No gains on Kashmir front

In reality, the Modi government’s report card on Kashmir is thin on gains, and it bulges on human rights and civil liberties violations.

Terrorism is at the highest peak in a long time, unemployment the worst ever. Few can locate any burgeoning signs of trade and investment.

(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the article are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal.)