Voter's Dilemma, Ruler's Design

In the long list of candidates for each constituency, who should one vote for? Party loyalties and petty gains apart, 2024 Assembly elections have put a common voter to test.  People, who wanted to vote this time, for the reasons of politics alone, stand bewildered. Had there been a real cohesive alliance of the major Kashmir based political forces – across ideological differences – casting a vote was just a physical trouble on the day of elections. But now it has become a mental agony.

After all, these days, it looks like, even the dead may be resurrected to contest elections? No surprises if some arcane political belief is invoked and someone like Geelani is posthumously declared as a candidate from Sopore. Even Orwell falls short of capturing this bizarre.

But it is not bizarre. It is a solid chunk of politics. When power plays politics, it is a different game altogether. This is what we, street-fed people, could not understand all those decades we declared electoral politics as treason, as apostasy, as Delhi's ploy. Now, when our world turned upside down, we saw the image upside up. We thought this was finally the time to vote and save whatever little could be, after a massive and momentous destruction. But the Master played a stroke.  All those in the fray are accusing each other as being the agent of the Master.

There is always a contest between People and Power, even if the two belong to the same pedigree of politics; sometimes pronounced, mostly subtle. And if it is a case of the two being in eternal dissonance, the contest is inimical; sometimes subtle, mostly pronounced. Any political party in Kashmir, if it wishes to safeguard the collective political interests of Kashmir has to be doubly wise and  exceptionally upright. Unfortunately, we have a huge deficit on both counts.

Kashmir's politics has definite limitations. It works within the larger gravitational filed called Delhi. Till ours is a world of Nation-States and national interests, there is no chance of our politics escaping this gravitational field. But within this limitation there must be the possibility of doing politics with grace, without compromising the very being of Kashmir. This is what the parties like NC and PDP couldn't do, and this is what the people on the other side of the spectrum couldn't realise.

When the major Kashmir based electoral parties ask us to vote for them, it hurts and it haunts, as we recollect their acts of omission and commission where they compromised the very politics of Kashmir. But here comes a time in our collective life that a recent memory supersedes all the earlier memories, and we are left with just one option: vote. And try to arrest the downward slide.  But before people could vote, the two major political parties, NC and PDP, shamefully failed to forge an alliance.

They even didn't have that minimum sense of guilt to publicly apologise for murdering the political strength of Kashmir multiple times. Their political rhetoric is same, their paths are divergent, what can be more hurting for Kashmir's politics? These two parties now accuse others of dividing the Kashmiri vote. But the list of accused starts with them only.

The independents in the fray multiplied the division. This is not an accusation, it is a mathematical certainty. This 'emotional-constituency' earlier belonged to those who were violently against electoral politics. When we look back, this part of our society didn't harm Kashmir's inherent politics any less than those who are in the electoral politics for decades now.  The crime may be different in nature, but in magnitude and impact it is not much different.

By investing everything–rhetoric, argument, violence, and emotion-into deriding, and denouncing electoral politics, there was no room for anyone from that constituency to even think of remotely associating with the electoral politics.

In all this the test for Kashmiris' political maturity is here. Given what Kashmir has done to itself – its politics, its society and all its collective spaces – for more than half a century, it is time to buy no accusations. No matter who, let's believe none is an agent.

This business of labelling people and parties as agents has done us tons of damage. We can evaluate someone's act of joining the electoral fray on the merits of the game. We can calculate the damage it can do to the prospect of Kashmir's political power consolidating at one place, rationally. All that is a matter of discretion and wisdom, but labelling someone as an agent is falling into the trap. Earlier 'Mainstream' was waged against 'Resistance', now it is reverse; 'Resistance' waged against 'Mainstream'. But neither then, nor now, was it right to label anyone as an agent. All streams actually carry our own water.

Given the options, one may not vote to bring a particular party to power. This time the act of voting is to  secure the vote to be of any use in future. It is like putting the stuff in a deep freezer so that it lasts long enough to be used, when needed.  The journey to political rehabilitation can only be in the offing. Right now it is time to vote; just that. But before casting the vote, do some mathematics. There are limited number of seats. We cannot afford that the numbers put us against a disadvantage.