In an Independence Day-eve bonanza, Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah announced that his government will recruit 50,000 youths in the next few months, and pitched for restoration of autonomy to the state to bridge the “trust deficit” between the people and the Centre.

The Chief Minister proclaimed that people in Jammu & Kashmir have cynicism about the promises made by the Centre in the past, and there is a need for the Central Government to initiate action to remove all doubts from the minds of the people and bridge the gap that has emerged over the last six decades. “I think by restoring the autonomy, this trust deficit will be removed. I request the government of India to take urgent measures in this regard,” he said. The CM said no economic or employment packages can heal the wounds.

It was widely speculated in the Valley that the Prime Minister, in his Independence Day Address to the Nation, would make some pronouncement to this effect. Some Kashmir observers believed that this would assuage the Azadi-wallas of all shades – NC’s Autonomy, PDP’s Self-Rule, Omar Farooq’s Referendum, and Geelani’s Self-determination. Some lobbyists in Delhi had exercised considerable pressure on him. So what stopped him? 

When Omar Abdullah spoke so vehemently about a trust deficit, the minds of the people, and bridging the gap, what was in his mind and who were the people he was talking about? Definitely he was not speaking about Jammu, Ladakh, or the segment of Kashmiri society which had been expelled from its homeland. He thus excluded more than half the population and more than two-thirds of the state’s area from his perspective. He created mistrust or a trust deficit with all these people, outside his immediate constituency. At the same time, his trust within Kashmir has become quite questionable.

The acts of omission and commission of the Kashmiri leadership have been glaringly blatant since 1947 and are responsible for building mistrust among the people of the state at one hand, and between the Indian people and Kashmiri leaders on the other. Take for example the situation in 1953, when the tallest leader of Kashmir, Sheikh Mohd. Abdullah, had to be arrested.

In 1978, when the Henderson Papers were made public, it appeared that in September 1950 the United States Ambassador to India, Loy Henderson, had secretly visited Sheikh Abdullah. The Sheikh had told Henderson that the majority of Kashmir leaders favoured an Independent state and that some Azad Kashmir leaders also supported the idea. Then, in May 1953, Sheikh spoke to American Democratic leader Stevenson in Srinagar on similar lines. The Sheikh not only betrayed Nehru’s trust, he created a chasm between New Delhi and Kashmir.

Even before that, when in 1951 preparations for the elections to the Constituent Assembly began, the parties and candidates seeking election to the Assembly in opposition to the official candidates of the National Conference complained of intimidation and interference. They charged the NC of using force and pressure to drive them out of the fray by preventing them from filing their nomination papers. For the 41 of the 43 constituencies in Kashmir Province, not a single nomination paper was filed by opposition candidates. In the two remaining constituencies of Habbakadal in the city of Srinagar and of Baramulla Township, nomination papers were filed by Pandit Shiv Narayan Fotedar and Sardar Sant Singh Tegh, an Akali Sikh leader of the State. However, the two leaders did not remain in the fray for long and both withdrew in protest. Sant Singh Tegh complained of official interference in the elections and alleged that the colour of his ballot boxes was changed in his absence and his voters prevented from attending his election meetings by unfair and foul means.

In Jammu province, Praja Parishad nominated candidates for 27 constituencies of the province, generally filing nomination papers of more than one candidate for each constituency. Forty-one of the forty-six nominations filed by the Parishad were rejected in 27 constituencies, leaving the Parishad to contest elections in only three constituencies. On 22 September 1951, the Working Committee of the Parishad adopted a resolution condemning the rejection of the nomination papers of Parishad candidates and gave an ultimatum to the Government to reverse the rejections, failing which the Parishad threatened to boycott the elections. The President of the Praja Parishad, Pandit Prem Nath Dogra, issued a press statement in Delhi on 6 October 1951, alleging that:

-        The elections in the two provinces of Jammu and Kashmir were scheduled to be held on different dates to provide the National Conference an advantage over the other parties;

-        The delimitation of constituencies was undertaken in a manner which used gerrymandering to turn many Hindu-majority constituencies into Muslim-majority constituencies;

-        Forty-one of the 46 nomination papers filed by the Praja Parishad candidates were rejected on false and flimsy grounds;

-        Official interference in the elections was widespread and the entire official machinery was geared to help the National Conference.

Trust is a container concept used in a broad variety of disciplines. Trust and suspicions are often well-founded. In potentially uncertain, dangerous and risky environments, we need to know who we can and who we cannot trust, and in which circumstances we can do what. The essence of trust management is not to trust, but to decide to what extent we can trust and how to develop and create trust relationships. Building trust has a special meaning.

Did the Kashmiri leadership ever care to create and nurture the trust which Omar Abdullah bemoans has been eroded. On the Amarnath Land row, he deliberately created mistrust when he described the Agitation in the Valley as an expression of “Kashmiri Nationalism”. In the national Parliament, he categorically asserted, “this was an issue of our land; and we fought for our land; and shall fight to the last”. His communal bias was at the forefront and the entire nation stood shocked over his fulminations.  

On October 2, 1988, Mahatma Gandhi’s statue was to be installed in the new High Court complex in Srinagar and the Chief Justice of India was to inaugurate it. A few anti-India lawyers objected and threatened to disrupt the function. The Chief Minister gave in and it was none other than an active member of the National Conference who created this trouble. Was Gandhi an alien in Kashmir or a symbol of imperialist India? But who cared to explain, and hence the Trust Deficit.

There are numerous such instances. Why did J&K Assembly pass the controversial Resettlement Bill which was never approved by the Centre? The Bill proposed that Muslims of J&K who had fled to Pakistan or PoK during Partition be allowed back in Indian Kashmir and resettled here with honour and dignity. The land they had left behind was to be restored to them. At the same time, the State Government did nothing with regard to the settlement of Hindu Refugees of 1947 from West Pakistan who came to J&K.

In 1987, Farooq Abdullah announced cancellation of Darbar Move to the winter capital of the state, Jammu, a century-old practice. A month long agitation in Jammu was required to annul the anti-Jammu decision of the CM. Was Farooq aiming to build trust?

 
After 1996, when Dr. Farooq Abdullah reclaimed power after six years of violent operations and Governor’s Rule, he proclaimed that peace had returned. He pronounced return plans for displaced Hindus. These proposals were coercive in nature; and he went to the extent of threatening to stop relief in Jammu. The Displaced Diaspora and Employees Unions, besides staging hartals and demonstrations, were forced to seek court intervention. Farooq Abdullah’s Government opposed the case of exiled Kashmiris for grant of IDP status before the NHRC. And even after the Displaced Employees won the case against the Government for grant of House Rent Allowance in the High Court, and now in the Supreme Court of India, the state government is procrastinating in implementation of the same.

The attrition on exiles has assumed the legal form guided by the perpetrators and collaborators of genocide within the government and the political establishment. The phenomenon is manifest glaringly in the Return Policy of the government. The policy is being used to force the victim to conform and submit, or face the spectre of abject destitution and perish. The recruitment drive for ‘Kashmiri Migrants’ is basically a process to strip them of their right to live with dignity and honour.

What the government is doing is brazen, its methods diabolic. Joseph Goebbels once talked about his methods in a confidential meeting with German Journalists, “Up to now we have succeeded in leaving the enemy in the dark concerning Germany’s real goals... just 1932 our domestic foes never saw where we were going or that our oath of legality was just a trick… we wanted to come to power legally, but we did not use power legally… they could have suppressed us... They could have arrested a couple of us in 1925 and that would have been that, the end. No they let us through the danger zone… They let us alone and let us slip through the risky zone and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs.” Kashmiri Hindus are being subjected to a new phase of genocidal attrition by an enemy (read J&K Government) who is thinking it has crossed the ‘danger zone’ and can now wage the war with more confidence.

On March 8, 2010, PDP legislator Murtaza Khan introduced a Private Member’s Bill in the State Legislative Council, seeking to deprive the daughters of J&K of their natural right to marry persons of their choice outside the state, and thereby snatch their right to own immovable property or inherit ancestral property in J&K, or obtain jobs with the State Government in case they marry persons other than State Subjects. The Bill sought to restore the pre-October 7, 2002 position that had been challenged in J&K High Court and reversed on the Court’s Orders. The State Government should not have allowed introduction of the Bill in view of the storm that the similar official Bill had created across the country in 2004. But the Kashmir-centric Government hardly cared for the alienation of Jammu or else and hence the suspicion and lack of trust.

As it is well known how the State Assembly passed the Greater Autonomy Bill, we shall spare discussion on the subject in this article. But it is proper to mention that the State Legislative representation is skewed and heavily in favour of Kashmiris, that too, a particular section of the Valley due to gerrymandering and biased delimitation. Again, National Conference through deceit and chicanery obtained a highly biased Justice Saghir Ahmad Report on Centre-State Relations. The Justice Saghir Ahmad Committee was constituted by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as part of his Round-Table initiative. I refer to these two instances since Jammu and Ladakh have time and again rejected these proposals outright and want full integration of J&K with the Indian Union. Did the State government care? It went ahead and alienated these two regions further and hence the trust deficit.