As polling begins in Kashmir today in a five-phase election for the Jammu & Kashmir state assembly, we present an edited excerpt from Sanjay Kak’s “Ballot Bullet Stone,” which appeared in the September 2014 issue of The Caravan.
In the unnamed capital of an unnamed country, on a day of voting lashed mercilessly by rain, the ballot papers are counted. Almost three-quarters of them turn out to be unmarked. A re-poll is ordered for a week later. This time around, the weather is perfect, but the results are worse: 83 percent of voters have left their ballots blank. There are no protests—just the clarity of the ballots. Enraged by this silence, this blankness, the ruling party declares a state of emergency. Secret police are let loose to spy on the citizenry, interrogations are ordered, and a siege ensues. When that yields no answers, the prime minister decides to pull the government out of the capital, leaving people to fend for themselves. A servile media predicts chaos and collapse, but the assumption is belied. Life remains peaceful and orderly. In José Saramago’s native Portuguese, this novel is titled Ensaio sobre a Lucidez, An Essay on Lucidity.
The valley has its own parables. “How many people in Kashmir are with you, Bakshi sahib?” starts a well-known anecdote from the 1950s about Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, then the prime minister of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. “Forty lakhs,” Bakshi replies without hesitation. Four million—about the entire population of Kashmir at the time.
“Then how many are with Sheikh sahib?” “Forty lakhs,” is the prompt answer. This was Sheikh Abdullah, Kashmir’s most towering leader, who was “deposed” by the Indian government with Bakshi’s help and thrown into jail, a year after being elected the state’s prime minister, in 1951. “So then how many in Kashmir are with Sadiq?” GM Sadiq was Bakshi’s main rival for the affections of the Indian government. “Forty lakhs,” Bakshi steadily returns.
When told to visitors, this story usually ends with a smile, an open-ended gesture towards the chimeric loyalties of the Kashmiri people. Here everyone goes along with everything, it implies, people submit to whomever seems most powerful. This droll account of servile acquiescence sits uncomfortably with the political struggles that have been waged in Kashmir for more than sixty years—and especially with the last quarter century, which has witnessed an armed resistance and the death of almost seventy thousand Kashmiris.
The experience of democracy in Kashmir had a disappointing start. In the first election, in 1951, the National Conference, under the dominating presence of Sheikh Abdullah, stepped in to help India “retain” Kashmir. Only two of the state’s 75 legislative assembly seats were actually contested. In the rest, opposition parties were simply not allowed to file nominations. This happened with the concurrence of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru; with the world looking over his shoulder, he desperately needed to demonstrate the legitimacy of India’s control over Kashmir. Sheikh Abdullah, at that time a personal friend of Nehru, took over as the prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir.
With little trace of self-consciousness, Nehru defended these events because, as he said, politics in Kashmir revolved around personalities. “There is no material for democracy there,” he once said. His views were self-fulfilling: in less than a year, he was already unnerved by Sheikh Abdullah’s occasional public considerations of full independence as an option for Kashmir. Sheikh Abdullah was promptly arrested, and incarcerated for the better part of the next twenty years.
When the next elections came, in 1957, Nehru is said to have written to Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, Sheikh Abdullah’s successor, suggesting that he generously lose a few seats, so that the image of the world’s largest democracy would not be tarnished. But such niceties cut little ice with the National Conference. It was unstoppable, and won 68 seats. Half of these were uncontested. In 1962, it repeated this strategy, and won seventy seats. Again half were uncontested. By the time the elections of 1967 came by, Nehru was dead, and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, was now the prime minister of India. Things had changed, but not enough. This time it was Bakshi who suddenly found himself out of favour, and in jail. His successor, GM Sadiq, eager to prove his loyalty to Delhi, decided to bury the National Conference as a party, and hurriedly merged its membership with that of Indira Gandhi’s Congress. Tolerating an opposition continued to be little more than a formality. In the 1967 elections, it was now the Congress that won 61 seats. Twenty-two of these were uncontested.
Until 1967, in many constituencies considered politically sensitive today—Anantnag, Ganderbal, Kangan, Karnah, Lolab, Pulwama—the electorate didn’t get a chance to actually vote at all. Some had to wait till the elections of 1977. Voter turnout during this quarter century was consistently low, never more than 25 percent. The lack of enthusiasm was hardly surprising. Whether you voted or not, the conclusions were usually foregone. For all forty lakh Kashmiris.
In the past 25 years, Kashmiris have seen every single substantive attribute of democracy come under assault: freedom from violence, harassment and unlawful detention; protection of the right to free speech, assembly and travel; and, more insidiously, control over public spaces, water and land. Rigging and malfeasance in the 1987 polls deepened disenchantment with India, and created the immediate conditions for the decades of armed struggle that followed.
The rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, the pre-eminence of civilian leadership—as each protection dissolved, it was left to elections to fitfully paper over the cracks. The last assembly elections were in December 2008. (Jammu and Kashmir typically elects its assembly on an unusual six-year cycle.) They came at the end of a watershed year that saw a huge popular upsurge, much of it centred on Srinagar, where massive demonstrations, often of several hundred thousand people, had marched through the city. What started with a handful of innocuous protests quickly morphed into a critical moment in Kashmir’s contemporary history. But when the ballots were counted at the end of December, the turnout in the valley was an unexpected 45.68 percent. That isolated number became the flagpole upon which Indian television networks hoisted their hyperbole. “A victory for democracy,” one anchor pronounced. Another said, more paradoxically: “A victory for the people of India.” The dark times are over, a third declared—this was the “end of separatism.”
An extract from ‘Ballot, Bullet, Stone,’ published in The Caravan’s September 2014 issue. Read the story in full here.