Speaking Up: Engineer Rashid raising slogans at a 2018 protest against military excesses in Srinagar Photo: Getty Images Speaking Up: Engineer Rashid raising slogans at a 2018 protest against military excesses in Srinagar Photo: Getty Images 
This story was published as part of Outlook Magazine's 'Future Tense' issueditowins, dated October 11, 2024. To read more stories from the Issue, click here.
The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) election rallies in J&K invariably started with loudspeakers exhorting attendees to shout the familiar slogans of "Bharat Mata ki Jai, Vande Mataram", and “Jahaan hue balidaan Mookerjee, woh Kashmir humaara hai”.
While the first two are commonly invoked across India, the last is heard more often in J&K, particularly in the Dogri-speaking belt of the Jammu region. The slogan harks back to the death of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of the Bhartiya Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the BJP, in detention in 1953 after being arrested for entering J&K without the required permit to do so. Crossing the border was meant to symbolise the rejection of the special status that had been granted to J&K in the Indian Constitution. Mookerjee’s death, due to a heart attack, became a rallying cry of the Jan Sangh and its later avatar, the BJP, which saw in it a conspiracy. He was considered a martyr to the cause of what continued to be the central ideological plank of the party—the abrogation of Article 370, and consequent attainment of ‘ek vidhan (oneConstitution), ek pradhan (one PM), ek nishan (one flag)’.
For the BJP, thus, August 5, 2019 was the culmination of a long struggle to which Mookerjee’s death had given a moral strength and core. It claimed that with the passing of the Constitutional amendment that read down Article 370 (and removed Article 35A), and the passing of the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019, Mookerjee’s dream had been realised. Now J&K was, at last, a part of the Indian nation.
So, if that is indeed the case, why, five years hence, in 2024, does the BJP still feel the need to raise the slogan invoking Mookerjee? Did the BJP government’s actions of August 2019 not lead to the solution of the ‘Kashmir problem’ of integration with the Indian union, as the party argued they would? Why is Kashmir still not ‘humara’? Who exactly is the ‘humara’ in the slogan? Is it India, Indians, the Jana Sangh/BJP, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)? When it says “Jo Kashmir humara hai, woh saara ka saara hai", what does it exactly mean?
To be clear, it is not as if the party is not harping on the removal of Article 370 as an achievement. This is particularly true at the national level, where it has been able to deftly instrumentalise J&K towards its political and ideological ends. Indeed, one could argue that if the ‘Kashmir problem’ did not exist, the party would have had to create one for it to enjoy the unprecedented successes of the last ten years. The balance between different visions of nationalisms, that have persisted since the idea of nation emerged in the subcontinent, has decidedly tilted towards the BJP, in no small measure due to the quagmire created in J&K by the last seventy-plus years of ill-thought-out policies of different governments, particularly at the Centre, but also at the local level. The claim that it has managed to weed out the separatist sentiment and political violence in the erstwhile state by removing the key provisions of Article 370 and by undertaking a hard masculinist-militarist stance might actually be belied on the ground, but has found considerable currency in the country, helping the party reap significant political benefits nationally.
However, the fact that the BJP invokes a slogan which posits Kashmir as a separate entity, either from the nation as the party visualises it, or from itself, indicates that notwithstanding its national-level political success, something is amiss. The slogan itself creates a distance, an 'Other', that has to be owned. After all, you would not be making loud claims of possession of something which is already yours. There is a sense of unsurety, a lack of confidence that such an emotion reveals.
This under-confidence empirically has been visible in the Kashmir Valley in the party’s decision to not put up candidates for the parliamentary elections and fielding only nineteen candidates for the Legislative Assembly elections. The narrative of a successful incorporation of the saara Kashmir into BJP’s vision of the Indian nation has been directly challenged by what some political commentators have called the 'sentiment' vote cast in favour of Engineer Rashid, a terror-funding accused jailed politician, in the parliamentary elections leading to his win with a large margin. Local mainstream parties like the National Conference and the Peoples’ Democratic Party have alleged that Rashid’s election was facilitated by the BJP, so as to divide the vote in the Valley and defeat them. The fact that there are nearly 300-plus independent candidates, including a few Jamaat-e-Islami members, standing for the assembly elections has been attributed to this strategy. Some BJP local leaders themselves have argued that this is the case. If the BJP is indeed using this as an electoral plan, it betrays its correct reading of the ground level discontent in the Valley with the current state affairs that are a direct result of its policies. It knows that it would not be able to form a government on its own by winning just in its traditional stronghold of the Hindu-dominated areas of Jammu, if the mainstream parties fare well in the Valley. If the latter were to lose, the ability of the BJP to stitch together a coalition with a disparate group of independents and be the leading partner in the government for the first time in J&K would increase considerably. Assuming this is the case, then one wonders whether the long-term consequences of such a strategy (a la 1970s Punjab, if not Kashmir itself) have been factored in.
Even if that is not the case, the very fact that the BJP recognises that it is not popular enough in Kashmir for it to win votes on the strength of its loud protestations of having brought shanti (peace), stirtha (stability) aur vikas (and development) to J&K speaks for itself. Indeed, these claims that it has been making in its election advertisements are being challenged in its core constituency, the Hindu-dominated areas of Jammu. It was in this region that the 1950s Praja Parishad agitation against Article 370, which informed the BJP agenda over the years, emerged. Praja Parishad was an RSS-affiliated Jammu-based political party that later on merged with the Jan Sangh in 1963. The sentiment against Article 370 found favour in Jammu in no small measure due to the skewed political balance tilted towards Kashmir. Closer ‘integration’ with the Indian Union by the removal of the State’s special status under the Indian Constitution was seen as a precursor to the attainment of power that the region had been deprived of. It was seen as a promise of a better future, of development, and peace. Five years after getting rid of the Article’s provisions, however, this promise remains unfulfilled with the region now grappling with the powerlessness of being governed by Delhi-appointed bureaucracy (and resurgent terrorist activity). Kashmir is not controlling the wheels of power, but neither is Jammu. In fact, in the last five years, even the local BJP leadership has felt divorced from the levers of power. The fear of loss of land and jobs to outsiders is palpable.
Yet, this visible disaffection might not translate into votes against the party, because of the same problem that has plagued the opposition in the rest of the country—lack of an enthused political opposition that is willing to put up a spirited fight. And because it is not Kashmir. The decades-long sense of deprivation and of powerlessness vis-a-vis the Valley runs too deep for it to disappear in the face of this increased loss of control. Just like the resentment against the policies of the Centre (BJP-led or not) has been felt for too long in the Valley for it to wither away in the face of the most egregious of all actions that Kashmiris could ever imagine Delhi would undertake—the removal of special provisions for J&K under Article 370. Both the sentiments which have defined the contested nature of politics of the erstwhile State have, in reality, been accentuated as a result of the BJP government’s policies. They might change with the restoration of the democratic process and full statehood. Whether that happens remains to be seen. The fact is that the BJP’s hand was forced by the Supreme Court to hold these assembly elections. Elections in themselves do not necessarily mean that people will feel heard and empowered enough if power continues to be in hands of the Delhi-appointed Lieutenant Governor and his bureaucrats. How soon statehood is going to be restored is, at the moment, just a point of conjecture. And what kind of statehood would be, in itself, is something that no one is sure of.
What is evident is that the BJP has checked one of its ideological boxes of the abrogation of Article 370. That is an achievement in itself. But whether it has accomplished what it argued such an action would achieve is questionable. It recognises this reality and, hence, continues to make vociferous protestations of '‘woh Kashmir humaara hai’'.
(Ellora Puri is a Political Scientist and Honorary Director of Institute of J&K Affairs) ditowins