Civic polls in Jammu and Kashmir offer chance to rebuild state's polity, help Valley re-imagine ties with India

His cigarette-lighter looked like it had been born from a nightmare in Guangzhou or Ningbo, a gold-plated box that spat out light in a dozen improbable colours, and a tinny rendition of You Light Up My Life.

Javed Shah, police constable-turned jihadist-turned pro-India militia commander-turned prospective Member of Parliament, twirled the lighter obsessively. The pious had their prayer beads; the rich the brands out of Dubai’s malls: this was Shah’s own coat of arms.

It was 1996 and India was a holding a Lok Sabha election in Jammu and Kashmir after nine war-torn years. Levels of violence were high: 967 civilians, 785 terrorists, and 164 security force personnel had been killed the previous year in Kashmir, orders of magnitude higher than today. The National Conference, Jammu and Kashmir’s largest political party, had refused to contest.

Empty polling stations and streets silenced by curfews marked elections to Kashmir’s municipalities and councils on Monday — a strange simulacrum of democracy that seemed designed to illustrate how little more than a decade of democracy has achieved.

But the elections are part of New Delhi’s long game in Kashmir — and could have fateful consequences. If that game works, this might come to be remembered as the time Kashmir’s fractured polity began to rebuild itself.

Few thought, in 1996, that elections would achieve anything. In some places, the security forces had to corral terrified voters to polling stations, using force to beat-back the impact of jihadist violence. Notably, however, voter turnout was low in some areas where intense coercion was alleged, like Anantnag and Sopore. It was, conversely, high in others where there appeared to be no sign of state pressure to participate in the elections.

Politicians read the signs correctly: after years of direct central rule, a large mass of people within Jammu and Kashmir wanted a representative political order sensitive to their everyday concerns.

Later that year, elections to the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly brought a National Conference government, led by Farooq Abdullah. The National Conference picked up 37.98 per cent of the popular vote in the seats it contested, and 57 of 81 seats.

New Delhi promptly threw figures like Shah — the detritus of its brutal counter-insurgency programme — under the bus, and backed the old political establishment.

From 1999, former spymaster Amarjit Dulat set about reviving the political system. His most notable achievement was the creation the People’s Democratic Party—a new iteration of the Opposition Muslim United Front, which once included secessionists like Abdul Gani Lone and the Jama’at-e-Islami. Helped along by the Research and Analysis Wing, the PDP emerged as a major force, eating into the jihadist constituency.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government, hoping to draw back the secessionists into the political space they occupied until 1987, also held a series of secret meetings with secessionist leaders like Yasin Malik and Sajjad Lone. Twinned with this, diplomats Satinder Lambah and Tariq Aziz engaged in a covert dialogue aimed at hammering out a final-status deal on Kashmir.

“I think the agenda is pretty much set,” secessionist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq said in April 2007. “It is September 2007”, he went on, “that India and Pakistan are looking at, in terms of announcing something on Kashmir.”

Jammu and Kashmir was back to where it had been in 1987. The new order, New Delhi hoped, would be able to reconstruct the systems of patronage and influence which had sustained mainstream politics in the state prior to 1988–1989.

It worked: but that, it has turned out, wasn’t a good thing.

For one, many of the leaders who emerged on Kashmir’s landscape—from former chief ministers Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti to Sajjad Lone or the Mirwaiz—were in politics mainly because they were children of prominent pre-1987 figures. Few had built an independent political constituency or cadre during the years that had passed.

Perhaps more important, the leadership showed little ability to move beyond handing out of government contracts and jobs to their faithful. This pre-1987 politics offered nothing to a youth cohort that had grown up amid violence and despair.

Like people in many parts of India, Kashmir’s youth found democracy did not mean access to the networks needed for entrepreneurship; that large family spending in education did not guarantee an income at an age their parents had families.

From 2006, a new generation of Islamist leaders—Masarat Alam Bhat, his colleague Asiya Andrabi, and their jailed mentor Ashiq Hussain Faktoo—succeeded in capitalising on the anger. The New Islamists cast the political order as agents of a malign, Hindu-chauvinist entity determined to destroy Kashmir’s religious and cultural identity. In its place, they promised a utopia based on Islam.

Engulfed by the rage which erupted after the killing of jihadist leader Burhan Wani, mobs burnt down a state-of-the-art dwarf apple orchard owned by well-connected entrepreneur Khurram Mir, cars and homes. The targets tell us something important about the social tensions that underlie youth rage in Kashmir.

The New Islamists gave voice to this rage—under the benign watch of the political establishment which hoped to buttress its religious credentials.

In 2008, the tensions exploded after the government’s grant of land-use rights to the Amarnath shrine board, a crisis that broke the People’s Democratic Party-Congress alliance government, and cracked apart the effort to rebuild a cosy political order. The violence has continued since, with both the National Conference and PDP failing to contain it.

For politics to heal Kashmir’s wounds, it must give the people of the region new ways to imagine their relationship with themselves, and with India. That, however, requires a leadership which has earned legitimacy by transforming the lives of citizens.

The village and town-level politicians who emerge from that process might just prove to be the building blocks of that new order.