Whatever Prime Minister Narendra Modi may say, there appears little resemblance between his understanding of the issues concerning Kashmir and that of former Prime Minister Vajpayee. This was evident when Mr Modi was in J&K last week.
While the PM’s appreciation of the Kashmir question and related matters will be clearer by and by, for now it seems he wishes to get by through the evocation of Mr Vajpayee. But the people of the state can see through this. Merely paying lip-service to the BJP’s only PM before him cannot be a substitute for policy, especially since Mr Vajpayee approached the Kashmir imbroglio through an entirely different prism.
On his first visit as PM to J&K whose politics and political geography are different from the rest of India, and with Pakistan doing what it can to work for Kashmir’s eventual dismemberment, Mr Modi may have been expected to make observations of a political nature — appeal to the people of the state (like earlier PMs did) while suitably informing Islamabad that stoking secession wouldn’t pay dividends.
But the newly-elected Prime Minister lost that opportunity. He opted for a routine, workmanlike approach. He inaugurated a new railway line that links to the famous Hindu shrine of Vaishno Devi, and a power project. In Srinagar, he held a security review meeting with the Army brass from which, oddly, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah was excluded although the CM is institutionally the chairman of the Unified Command that includes the leadership of the paramilitary forces and the state police, besides the Army.
In effect, in Kashmir Mr Modi became the opening batsman who is at sea with the first five balls of an over and steals a single through a leg-bye on the last, but yet proceeds to exult. Mr Vajpayee had begun very differently, and there were no high-fives even when there was an opening over six. He had raised hopes in the state government and also among the Opposition parties and the secessionists when he proclaimed that he would look at Kashmir through “insaniyat ka daera” (the “humanity” approach).
As a follow-up, his government began talks with Abdul Majeed Dar, a top-level commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen, Kashmir’s largest and most dangerous armed group whose leadership still resides in Pakistan. Dar was eliminated by elements of his own organisation, but the Indian leader continued to be lauded in the Valley for his initiative.
It was interesting to see that the Prime Minister skipped policy references although only a day earlier Islamabad had raked up the question of Kashmir being a “disputed” territory, and not an integral part of India.
