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Kashmir elections: Macabre
scorecard
By Praveen Swami
SRINAGAR - Cynics contend that all that
politicians want is to make a quick buck. If that's
true, those contesting the ongoing Jammu & Kashmir
(J&K) elections might do well to consider that there
are easier and safer ways of making a living. What
journalists wryly call the "scoreboard" - the register
of fatalities in terrorist violence - has continued to
grow each day. Many of the targets have been
high-profile candidates.
On Wednesday, militants
stepped up their attacks, killing at least 10 and
injuring 21 others. A bus was blown up in Jammu, five
border security personnel were killed in Pulwama and a
National Conference (NC) activist and two others were
shot dead in Kupwara.
In return, Indian troops
killed four men on Wednesday as they crossed into Indian
Kashmir carrying a large quantity of ammunition, a
defense official said. He said that the men were caught
in the district of Poonch while trying to sneak into
J&K across the Line of Control, the military
ceasefire line dividing the Indian and Pakistani parts
of the disputed Himalayan region.
On September
28, the Lashkar-e-Toiba attempted to assassinate the
Nationalist Congress Party candidate from Devsar, in
southern Kashmir. She, along with her brother, was
critically injured; her father and three others died in
the explosion. The day before that, her party colleague
Abdul Gani Veeri was attacked at Bijbehara. And the day
before that, another NC candidate, Ayesha Nishat, was
fired on at Wachi. The previous day, terrorists fired on
the Congress' Mohammad Shafi Banday and the NC's Sheikh
Rafiq, both standing from Shopian.
No major
attacks took place on September 22, apart from the
murder of an inconsequential NC activist, Ghulam
Mohammad Parrey in Beerwah. No surprise that terrorist
groups felt the need for a little peace and quiet, since
September 21 had been a particularly busy day: Minister
of State for Tourism, Sakina Itoo, escaped a fourth
attempt on her life near Meerhama, in Kulgam. A
22-year-old villager, Maimoona Akhtar, who had come out
to support Itoo was killed, along with a police
constable. Before dawn the same morning, two Communist
Party of India (Marxist) cadres were also killed by
terrorists, along with a two-person truck crew from
Punjab who had nothing whatsoever to do with the
elections.
With the total number of political
people killed in acts of terror specifically directed
against the ongoing election process now stands at over
90, few people in their right minds ought to have any
reason to vote. And yet, some 41 percent of voters chose
to do so in the second phase of polling, conducted on
September 24 in districts of Jammu and Srinagar (over 47
percent had voted earlier, in the first phase). While
fewer voters came out in the core urban segments of
Srinagar, which gave birth to the rebellion of
1988-1992, participation was high in the surrounding
countryside. Abdul Gani Bhat, the chairperson of the
secessionist coalition, the All Parties Hurriyat
Conference (APHC), attributed the levels of voting to
coercion by security forces in some areas and to the
existence of a "personality cult" in others.
Both arguments are fairly easy to debunk. Bhat's
"cult" reference was directed at the Shia religious
leader Aga Rohullah, whose father Aga Syed Mehdi was
assassinated by terrorists last year. But Shia voters
were also protesting against Sunni chauvinism of the
kind symbolized by the assassination and, indeed, by
Bhat's remarks. More important, Rohullah supports the
National Conference, and many Shia communities,
traditional Congress voters who are often relatively
less affluent than their Sunni counterparts, hope that
the new political alignment will yield tangible
developmental benefits.
Debunking the notion of
state coercion of voters to exercise their franchise is
a problem even easier to address. First, there were few
credible accounts of such coercion having taken place,
and no reporters' eyewitness accounts whatsoever.
Second, it is hard to understand why, if the Indian army
exercised such coercive pressure, turnout was still so
low in some areas where such pressure is alleged to have
been exerted. The only explanation would be that
residents of the Kashmir Valley are, in some
neighborhoods, inherently more terrified of the state
than in adjoining areas - a dubious explanation at best.
Even more curious, individuals allegedly "coerced" by
soldiers to vote nevertheless felt free to hold
demonstrations against the elections and even chant
anti-India slogans in front of those very soldiers.
Finally, proponents of the thesis need to consider one
simple issue: if the Indian army was able to so easily
terrify an entire population on September 24, it would
have long ago succeeded in crushing the insurgency now
under way for over 13 years.
Sadly, the media
have paid little attention to the very real terrorist
coercion evident through J&K to prevent
participation in the voting: threats rendered credible
by the fact that, while not one member of anti-election
political groups has been shot at, killings of
pro-election individuals and leaders have been
widespread. This fact is likely to be crucial to voter
turnout in the third phase of elections in the hard-hit
areas of southern Kashmir.
It has passed largely
unnoticed that these elections have attracted a rich
spectrum of ideological interests. While secessionist
groups such as the People's Conference and Kashmir
Revival Movement have elements formally participating, a
large number of pro-independence figures, pro-Pakistan
figures, one-time terrorists and individuals with
current links to terrorist groups have entered the
election theater through the medium of mainstream
opposition parties.
Southern Kashmir, in
particular, has seen a good deal of behind-the-scenes
deal making with local terrorist groups, particularly
the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen. This is, without dispute, the
most politically inclusive election that J&K has
seen in decades. Terrorist violence and intimidation is,
sadly, depriving the people of the state of the
opportunity to have an election that is as inclusive in
terms of grassroots participation as well.
Praveen Swami is the Chief of Bureau,
Mumbai, Frontline
Published with permission
from the South Asia Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal
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