Srinagar: Before August 5, 2019, Kashmir’s ‘mainstream’ political leaders had never felt the fear of losing their special status. Such was their faith that even when the Government of India started moving additional troops to the valley and the streets of Kashmir were full of talk of abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A, former chief minister Omar Abdullah was assuring people that “it was not about the revocation of the articles.” He, along with his father Farooq Abdullah who has worked for four decades with various governments in New Delhi, and party MP Hasnain Masoodi had met Prime Minister Narendra Modi just a few days before at the PM’s office in New Delhi. None of them could read what the PM’s party was up to.
“Because we believed in the rules of the game,” Hasnain Masoodi, who is still a sitting Member of Parliament, told Kashmir Reader on the eve of the first anniversary of the scrapping of Articles 370 and 35A. “It was done by the BJP government in a way that was unconstitutional, unethical, and immoral.”
Masoodi, a former high court judge, was referring to the clause in Article 370 which allows it to go only after the approval of the erstwhile JK assembly. The BJP government moved its bill of abrogation in Parliament when there was President’s rule in J&K and thus no assembly in place. It was done in presence of Hasnain Masoodi in Parliament.
Neither Omar Abdullah nor his father, nor Mehbooba Mufti and Ghulam Nabi Azad, who have all been chief ministers of JK, could do anything to challenge the BJP government. Three of them had already been put under detention before August 5, while all communication channels were snapped, massive forces deployed on the streets, curfew imposed, and hundreds of political activists put in jail.
In the year that has followed, the GoI has allowed outsiders to become domiciles of Jammu and Kashmir, a move that has raised apprehensions among people of a change in the regions’ demography. There is no elected government in place for more than two years now. New Delhi has appointed administrators to run the Union Territory. All this has happened in open mockery of the helpless politicians who banked upon the guarantees enshrined in the Indian Constitution.
Political leaders are now placing their hopes on the Supreme Court of India, which for one year has not given a judgement on several pleas challenging the abrogation of the state’s special status and its downgrading into two Union Territories.
“Whatever has happened has happened. It is futile to expect that anything can be reversed in the present structure of the government at the centre,” said Dr Aijaz Ashraf, assistant professor of political science at Kashmir University. “Why would the BJP undo it if it has been consistent about the revocation of the articles? They have been saying it all these years. They did it when their time came.”
According to Ashraf, the helplessness of the regional parties, including the Congress, is due to their “lack of effort” in securing the position of Jammu and Kashmir during times when their stock was higher in New Delhi.
Ashraf referred to several instances in the post-1947 history of Jammu and Kashmir to make his point. He mentioned the response of the NC to the betrayal of India’s PM Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru who got his friend Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, the architect of Article 370, arrested and imprisoned. The Sheikh’s return to power in 1975 as Chief Minister was made without any substantial bargain. Similar was the case with his son, Farooq Abdullah, who resigned as CM in 1987 but returned in 1996 without getting anything, once again.
“Such compromises paved the way for what finally happened on August 5, 2019. In the preceding seventy years, a lot that was taken away from J&K’s autonomy was done when there were elected Kashmiri chief ministers in place,” Ashraf said.
Ashraf also mentioned the Goods and Services Act that was brought into J&K in 2017. It took away the powers of taxation from the JK Government to the GoI. Kashmir’s regional party, PDP, was then in coalition with the BJP government. A few years before, the NC-Congress coalition government had allowed the JK Bank to lose its autonomy to the Reserve Bank of India.
“So, they (regional parties) did not act when they were supposed to. The last straw should have been in 1999, when their autonomy resolution was rejected by the centre. What did they do after that? Nothing. They sat on the problems which were created in front of them, or they became party to them,” Ashraf said.
Both the PDP and NC had been vociferously telling people that relations between Kashmir and India will come to an end if Article 35A was even touched. A year before the abrogation, Mehbooba Mufti, during a rally, had warned GoI that “tampering” with Articles 35A and 370 would be like “detonating a bomb”. After her arrest on August 4, senior leaders in her party resigned for not being allowed to lead an anti-abrogation rally. NC’s three MPs are still in Parliament.
Masoodi said that the abrogation of Article 370 has widened the gulf between Kashmir and Delhi. “But it does not mean we should call it quits, because it gives us cause to tell them that they have committed a wrong,” he said.
He said he was still in Parliament because he had to represent the people irrespective of what the government in New Delhi does.

Junaid Nabi Bazaz