Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), a land-locked expanse north of India, has had an impossibly rough year.
On paper, the region is a union territory of India, but in practice, its realities are much more tenuous. Parts of J&K have historically been under dispute, both by China from the northeast and by Pakistan from the west. Over the last couple of decades, this three-way tug-of-war has fallen into a deadlock, and the region has settled into an uneasy, tentative quiet.
Near the end of 2019, on August 5, the Indian government revoked J&K’s semi-autonomous status. In the immediate aftermath, local J&K authorities were stripped of their limited power and several leading politicians were put under the custody of the Indian government.
Communication lines in the region were also cut, effectively silencing objections and protestations. To the casual on-looker, it would seem that J&K just silently sat there, accepting of the decree. Months later, as news of the pandemic swept through the globe, hogging airtime and word counts, J&K would fade farther into the static, virtually disappearing between case counts and quarantine orders.
Pressure-cooker politics
But things in the region were anything but silent.
This report from Slate offers some details of what happened soon after: “The legal measures followed a weekend of crackdowns by the Indian government in Muslim-majority Kashmir, already the world’s most militarized area. Without explanation, tourists were ordered to vacate, phone service was suspended, regional leaders were placed under house arrest, and general movement was restricted.”
The revocation of J&K’s special status would mark the start of a tumultuous year for the region, which would culminate in a direct contest between the alliance of political parties opposing the abrogation versus the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The battlefield would be the local polls.
Formerly rivals, the National Conference (NC), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), People’s Conference, Communist Party of India (CPI), Communist Party of India (Marxist), Awami National Conference, and Jammu Kashmir People’s Movement would ally with each other , sharing the common goal of restoring J&K’s special status. They would come to call themselves the People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration (PAGD).
Rather than seeking votes over achievements in light of the promised benefits of revoking J&K’s special status, the BJP instead chose to play dirty. It invoked emotive issues to demonize the alliance of opposition parties and put several of its leaders under house arrest.
As many as 20 political leaders from opposition parties were reportedly placed in preventive custody, leading PDP president and former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti to accuse the BJP of planning to manipulate the election results.
Despite their cheap tricks, and even though it was the single largest party in the local polls, the BJP could only muster a limp performance in the recent elections, earning only a 16-percent vote share, down some seven percentage points from their 2014 showing.
Paradoxically, the BJP described the outcome of historic polls as a “referendum on abrogation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir” whereas the PAGD, which got the highest number of seats, earning 110 out of 240, called it a mandate against the Modi government’s “unconstitutional decision to abrogate Article 370.”
Despite all the hoopla around the polls, the Lt. Governor Manoj Sinha government has yet to create the required infrastructure and allocate human resource for the local governing bodies. Many Kashmir observers feel that the government would have strengthened these local bodies and decentralised power had the BJP swept the polls. But the chances of the local bodies getting fully operational as per the provisions enshrined in the Indian Panchayat Raj Act look bleak, according to them.
Losing land
The worsening local political situation left the door wide open for forces, both external and internal, to threaten the very land of the J&K.
Since the truce came into effect in 2003, 2020 witnessed the highest number of ceasefire violations along the 740-km de facto border between India and Pakistan, called the Line of Control. According to media reports , there were over 4,000 firing incidents, averaging10 to 12 flare-ups per day.
On the opposite side of the J&K, India and China would get caught up in the first and bloodiest clash in 45 years. The conflict would leave 20 dead on the Indian side, and an escalation of Chinse troops at Pangong Lake in Ladakh. The easing of tensions along the India-China border seems unlikely in the near future.
Inside the region, violence likewise continues to rise, despite the Modi government’s promise of peace as grounds for the revocation of J&K’s status. In 2020, as many as 309 people were killed in militancy-related incidents in J&K, up from 283 people the year prior, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal .
The region has also been mired in internal conflicts over land. In October last year, The J&K High Court Ruled that the Roshni Act of 2001 was “illegal, unconstitutional, and unsustainable.”
The Act was initially slated to generate resources for hydroelectric power projects (Roshni means light) by granting ownership of state land to illegal encroachers in exchange for payment.
Soon, however, it would become clear that the legislation was prone to abuse and, indeed, had been exploited to the benefit of the already powerful: Prices were cut arbitrarily, influential people who would not have otherwise qualified were given land under the Act, and top bureaucrats gave land away to private parties.
Its recent scrapping should have come as great news, but it would ultimately prove to be toothless as attempts at land grabbing continued. Some seemed innocuous on the surface, such as the passage of new laws in October 2020, which allows any Indian citizen to buy land in the region without the previous requirement of a domicile certificate.
Other moves were more brazen. In December 2020 , the J&K Committee on Forest Encroachments published a list of encroachers, claiming that “more than 63,000 people are illegally occupying 15,000 hectares of forest land.” On this list were indigenous people—also called Scheduled Tribes—who, for generations upon generations, have called the forest their home and have lived in harmony with it.
In some areas, mud and wood dwellings of the traditional forest inhabitants were demolished and in others, Muslim tribal communities, the third largest ethnic group in the region, were served eviction notices.
Ostensibly, one of the benefits of abrogating the J&K’s special status was that central laws, including the Forest Rights Act of 2006 , which protects these forest-dwellers and recognizes their rights over their land, would extend to the region. But more than 16 months after the revocation, these benefits remain elusive.
Securing silence
To keep the abuses and exploitations as far away from the public eye as possible, authorities have also effectively gagged the press in the region. In June 2020, the J&K administration released a media policy new that practically gives the government supreme control over the news that gets published in the region.
The new guidelines also place journalists or outlets under the direct threat of legal action if they publish materials that the administration deems “fake news.”
During the District Development Council elections , for example, reporters were obstructed from covering the polls, officials refused to give official quotes to media that they did not like, and some journalists were even physically assaulted and detained by the police.
Since the revocation of its special status in August 2019, the J&K region has fallen more and more into the hands of authoritarian rule. So far, any hope of self-determination lies in the small but determined opposition of local politicians. They may have emerged victorious in the recent elections, but the foe remains powerful. The road ahead is long and fraught.
In the meantime, J&K will remain steeped in internal strife, straddled with crippling economic distress, threatened by outside enemies, and ailed by a pandemic that refuses to be cowed. True peace and quiet in 2021 seems like a long shot. ●
Akshay Azad is an award-winning journalist based in Jammu and Kashmir. He writes about conflict, politics, migration, and human rights.
