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| Government formation: Message from Fairview to BJP | | | Prof Hari Om
"I will not rush in haste. You (members of core group) have given me the mandate to take a final call. I will take my time. I have no doubt on decision of Mufti Sahib (to forge an alliance with BJP). But I have to assess and see whether in the changed circumstances, I can get his vision implemented. I will take my time and take my call appropriately. Mufti Sahib's vision was to change the history of Jammu and Kashmir. I have to see if I could fulfill his most-cherished dream".
This was what Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) president and daughter of late Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, emotionally surcharged Mehbooba Mufti, inter-alia, said on January 17 while concluding the five-hour-long deliberations in the core group meet on government formation in Jammu and Kashmir at her Fairview residence, Srinagar. These were politically very significant statements.
A few minutes later, close associate of Mehbooba Mufti and PDP spokesperson, Naeem Akhtar, briefed the anxiously-waiting media persons about the outcome of the marathon and much-talked meeting of the core group. He told media persons that the core group of the party had "authorized" Mehbooba Mufti to take final call on government formation with or without the BJP. He repeated what his president had said: "She (Mehbooba) will take her own call and own time. There is no time line. The focus is on agenda (Agenda of Alliance) which has been Mufti Sahib's vision and we want to implement that vision and Mehbooba Mufti will take call how best to do it".
During his brief interaction with media persons, Naeem Akhtar referred to Pakistan, India-Pakistan relations, Agenda of Alliance, the Mufti Sayeed's vision at least 10 times. He termed the Agenda of Alliance as a sacred document for the party and described the Prime Minister Narendra Modi's sudden visit to Lahore on December 25 as the finest moment in the life of Mufti Sayeed.
"The most important point in the vision of Mufti Sahib was reconciliation between India and Pakistan…PDP welcomed the Prime Minister's Lahore visit last month. PDP leaders were happy about the maturity shown by the country's leadership in the wake of the Pathankot terror attack and its decision to continue talks and improve relations with Pakistan…We must move forward on this path and that will be the biggest tribute to Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. It was his (Mufti's) belief that India-Pakistan friendship is necessary for Jammu and Kashmir…The finest and last moment in Mufti Sahib's life was when he was monitoring the situation from his death bed (in the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi) and saw the Prime Minister of our country visit Lahore," Akhtar said.
The message from Fairview to the BJP was loud and clear. The message was that for the PDP, the Mufti's vision was more sacrosanct than the office of the Chief Minister and that if the BJP really wished to do any business with the PDP, it had to make a solemn commitment that it will allow the PDP implement the Agenda of Alliance in its letter and spirit.
The PDP leadership took this stand despite the fact that Union Surface and Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari and BJP national general secretary and in-charge Jammu and Kashmir Ram Madhav, who was one of the chief draftsmen of the highly controversial Agenda of Alliance, had reassured Mehbooba Mufti three days after the demise of Mufti Sayeed on January 7 that the BJP was committed to "fulfilling all the dreams of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed" and it "respects his vision for Jammu and Kashmir". Nitin Gadkari made the statement to that effect in Srinagar and Ram Madhav in New Delhi, but with no result.
That Mehbooba Mufti chose not to go by these assurances and decided to take her own time to form government in Jammu and Kashmir only indicated the path she wants to tread in case she finally takes the plunge and assumes the office of Chief Minister. But more than that, it also indicated that there was much that still remained unresolved between the PDP and the BJP. She would play a hard ball and extract as many concessions from the BJP as possible before she takes over as the Chief Minister of the most sensitive State.
That Mehbooba Mufti would not open her cards in haste was not altogether unexpected. For, she knew that things for her party in the Kashmir Valley, the PDP's core constituency, had not been so inspiring and promising. The party during the ten months (March-December, 2015), when Mufti Sayeed was at the helm, had lost most of its sheen and appeal. And what Kashmir witnessed on January 8, the day Mufti Sayeed was cremated in his own hometown, Bijbehara, cleared all the doubts and established that the Mufti family didn't command the kind of respect it commanded before it entered into an alliance with the BJP to form coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir.
There was little participation of people in the funeral procession of Mufti Sayeed. Only about 3,000 people assembled at the cremation ground. Even the people of his own hometown didn't close down their business establishments as a mark of respect. Obviously, the thin attendance stunned Mehbooba Mufti and her associates. It's no wonder that she adopted the line on government formation she adopted on January 7, which left everyone guessing and confused.
Another factor that played an important role was the internal factor: Bitter opposition within the PDP to the BJP. There is a powerful group in the PDP consisting of founder members like Muzaffar Hussain Beigh and Tariq Hameed Karra, who never appreciated the alliance of the PDP with the BJP and always held the view that the alliance between the two had hurt the PDP the most in the Kashmir Valley. Even a day after the core group meeting, Karra said that he will "very soon meet Mehbooba Mufti to express his fears and apprehensions on continuing relations with RSS-backed BJP". Presently, Beigh (former Deputy Chief Minister) and Karra (former Finance Minister) are members of the Lok Sabha. They are quite popular.
Apart from the fast-dwindling popularity of her party and the party politics within the PDP, Mehbooba Mufti has to reckon with the National Conference (NC) leaders, especially the very vocal working president of the party and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah. Omar Abdullah has been fishing in the troubled waters ever since the demise of Mufti Sayeed. His whole objective is to lower the image of the PDP in the Valley by creating an impression that Mehbooba Mufti is interested more in power and pelf than in the vision of her father and recapture the political space his party lost to the PDP in the 2014 Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. In fact, he and his father Farooq Abdullah have been leaving no stone unturned to give the gullible Kashmiri Muslims to understand that the PDP abandoned its self-rule agenda (read limited accession of Jammu and Kashmir with India) to fulfill its list for power and facilitated the entry of BJP-RSS into the Valley to harm the "Kashmiri cause". The constituency of the PDP and the NC is Kashmir Valley. They have little support-base in Jammu province and the Trans-Himalayan Ladakh.
The delay on the part of Mehbooba Mufti to form government in Jammu and Kashmir and her insistence that the Agenda of Alliance on the basis of which Mufti Sayeed formed coalition government with the BJP has to be implemented in its entirety need to be viewed in this context. She wants to reassure her Kashmir constituency that she will not compromise the party's ideology for the shake of power.
What is this the Agenda of Alliance all about? What does it envisage? It envisages a regime that would not only preserve the special status of Jammu and Kashmir as it enjoys under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution but also helps the PDP to go beyond it and empowers the Jammu and Kashmir Government to facilitate a dialogue between India and Pakistan and also initiate discussions with Kashmiri separatists to resolve what the PDP terms as the "political problem". In fact, the Agenda of Alliances wants for the Jammu and Kashmir Government plenipotentiary powers.
Besides, the Agenda of Alliance provides for the return of the NHPC-managed and controlled power projects in the state to Jammu and Kashmir Government, vacation of the pieces of land used by the Army for defence and training purposes, demilitarisation of the state in phases and withdrawal of such Acts as the Armed Forces Special powers Act and the Public safety Act.
Not just this, the Agenda of Alliance also seeks to divide Jammu province into three regions purely on religious and ethnic lines and undermine the distinct identity of this historical region, bar delimitation of the Assembly constituencies at least till 2035 to scuttle the age-old demand in Jammu for proper representation in the Assembly and absorb the internally-displaced Kashmiri Hindus into the existing "Kashmiri milieu".
The point is that the Agenda of Alliance says many things and, if implemented in its original form, it will unsettle everything in the State leading to massive protests in Jammu province, Ladakh region and refugee camps in Jammu, which house several lakh victims of the politics of separatism, extreme form of communalism and radicalisation. The people of these two regions, unlike the PDP, do not consider the Agenda of Alliance an elixir to their life; they consider it a deadly poison and term it as a "dangerous document, "agenda of subversion", "agenda of capitulation", "a new charter of bondage", "another rivet in the chain of their slavery" and so on.
The problem of the BJP is that it does want an alliance with the PDP but it is the hostile environment in Jammu and Ladakh which has made its task very difficult. If it accepts all the terms and conditions of the PDP to become part of the government, it will further erode its support-base in the already rather alienated Jammu and Ladakh and if it doesn't under pressure from below, then it will have to sit in the opposition.
The BJP leadership is aware of the evil consequences which would follow after it accepts the PDP's pre-conditions. That's the reason Ram Madhav on January 18 invoked late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and urged Mehbooba Mufti to "initiate the constitutional process" and "respect Mufti Sayeed" without setting pre-conditions for the formation of government. |
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