NEW DELHI, 13 October — The declared result of an election is not always the real result. You have to peel off a layer from fact in order to reach the meaning. Two elections have produced two outcomes in the second week of October, one in Jammu and Kashmir and the other in Pakistan. They had one thing in common. There was little immediate clarity about who won these elections. But there was great clarity about who had lost them. There were two principal losers in Jammu and Kashmir. One was Dr. Farooq Abdullah. The other was President-General Pervez Musharraf.
In Pakistan also there were two clear losers. The first was America. The second was the doubly unfortunate Pervez Musharraf.
Farooq Abdullah’s defeat is as understandable as is his unwillingness to accept it. No one in power ever believes that he is going to lose. No one who has lost ever thinks it is anything but a conspiracy that has defeated him. Farooq’s defeat came 15 years too late, in fact. He should have lost in 1987, when the popular mood in the Valley had turned completely against the National Conference-Congress party alliance. He was saved that year by rigging, just as he had been helped before by electoral manipulation. Arun Nehru, who was a critical player in Kashmir affairs from the years of Indira Gandhi, through most of the Rajiv Gandhi prime ministership and then into V.P. Singh’s tenure, confirms this.
It was Arun Nehru’s influence that played a substantial part in the first of the series of political mistakes that created this tragedy: The arbitrary dismissal of Farooq’s government in that catastrophic year of 1984 when Mrs. Gandhi accelerated both the crises that bedeviled India for more than a decade, in Punjab and in Kashmir. Rajiv tried to repair the damage of 1984 by an alliance with Farooq for the 1987 elections. It failed even before it had started. When Rajiv and Farooq discovered that they were losing the elections, out came the familiar solution. Ballot boxes from selected constituencies were stuffed with votes that had never been cast, and Farooq was declared a winner. He can hardly be blamed if he is a little rusty now about fair elections. His son Omar may have a few questions hidden inside his legacy, but that is only one of the problems that he will have to deal with.
President Musharraf need not have ended up with so much raw egg on his face. He has the reputation of being a risk-taker. This is one occasion on which he may have felt he was not taking a risk, when he chose his speech on Pakistan’s Independence Day to dismiss the autumn elections in Jammu and Kashmir as a farce. This was probably the assessment he was given by the ISI and the Pakistan Embassy in Delhi.
Dictatorship has this problem: You are told what you want to hear. Moreover, obsequiousness can be a courtier’s revenge. But advice is not a decision. It was Musharraf’s call to make this a centerpiece of his message to Pakistan and then, rather unnecessarily, overdo the theme in his United Nations speech in New York in September. I suppose it is obligatory on the part of a Pakistan leader to raise Kashmir at the United Nations, but it is not obligatory to be nasty.
Musharraf placed his government’s credibility on his assessment of the Jammu and Kashmir election. That credibility lies in tatters before an international community that has endorsed the legitimacy of these polls. Musharraf may have driven Pakistan into a corner at a sensitive juncture.
Life in a corner has its dangers, mostly to others. There will be some temptation to blast apart the obvious satisfaction of Delhi in having lived up to its commitment and conducted free and fair elections, with credible participation by the people. The voter turnout matters less than the fact that the government was turned out. There was a visible rise in violence after the first round of polls disproved fears of virtual boycott. The democratic process held its nerve, with the candidates showing particular fortitude as conviction grew that this election would mean regime change.
Now that the “farce” has proved to be a serious exercise in democracy, what might be the response from some elements across the Line of Control? A dramatic militant attack that will shatter the optimism in Srinagar, tauten nerves in Delhi and drive India and Pakistan back to the brink of war?
The only hope against adventurism in Srinagar is confusion in Islamabad. The Pakistan election began on a strange note and kept getting weirder. This was not an election about change of power. The army was in power, and ensured, by amending the constitution 23 times, that it would remain in power. It was a royal election, for the post of general manager rather than chief executive. The turnout was low, and the counting slow. There is little need to explain what that adds up to under a military regime.
It would have been what it was meant to be, a cosmetic exercise, but for a startling message from the provinces bordering Afghanistan. A coalition of six religious parties, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, campaigning with Osama Bin Laden’s face on their posters, won 51 seats from the Frontier and Balochistan. The first implication is obvious. There is strong resentment against the American presence in Afghanistan. The second is oblique. If this is an indication of the mood in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan then America has already created a pool of anger within the country it hoped to liberate from the supporters of Osama Bin Laden. The consequences of this anger will become apparent in the coming year. It is a fact that Washington will have to deal with as it continues its war on terrorism and seeks to expand this rationale to take on Iraq. In a royal election there has to be a King’s Party. The Pakistan Muslim League (Q) duly emerged as the largest single party in the House, with 76 of the 269 seats declared at the time of writing. But this was more than one apple short of a picnic.
The fact is that nearly two thirds of those elected to the Pakistan National Assembly even in a controlled election where there was no hope of any change, are opposed to President Musharraf either because of his domestic policy or his foreign policy.
In fact, he could find the religious leaders from the Frontier and Balochistan more of a worry than either or both of the exiles, Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif.
Fundamentalists have always tried to hit above their weight in Pakistan’s politics, but they have never quite traveled beyond the fringe. Musharraf’s support for America’s war against Osama (to be fair, he had no real option) has brought the religious groups onto center stage.
This will impact not only Pakistan but the whole region, because they are the keepers of a cause that believes in jihad against America, India and, piquantly, the apostate in the middle, Pervez Musharraf. (This is the real reason for the second defeat of Musharraf.) Common sense suggests the need for a common response. Experience suggests that it will not be forthcoming.
For reasons that may or may not have anything to do with one another, these have been hinge elections. What happens after them will be more crucial than the elections themselves. A great deal will depend on how Islamabad deals with the rise of the religious groups, whether it chooses to buy them, appease them or confront them. Policy, and events, will emerge out of this decision.
Delhi is more focused. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee pursued his commitment to free and fair elections even at the cost of his own party. The BJP would certainly have done better in a rigged poll. Vajpayee knew the outcome, which might explain why he did not go to the state to campaign for his party.
Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani took a significant step forward when, on the eve of the results, he announced that Delhi was prepared for talks with both the elected representatives of the Kashmiri people as well as those who had not participated in the elections.
One hopes that similar sensitivity to ground reality, rather than an arid commitment to arithmetic will determine who will be the chief minister of the state after the formation of the alliance between the Congress and the party of the ex-Congressman, Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, the PDP. The Congress may have won 20 seats against the PDP’s 16. The more important fact is that the Congress defeated the BJP in Jammu, while it was the PDP that stopped the National Conference in Kashmir. The state has to be led by the person who represents the Valley rather than the plains. The problem is in Kashmir, not in Jammu.
It is rare when an election becomes a basis for hope. Such an election has taken place in Jammu and Kashmir. If that hope were to be belied, we would lose another generation to the gun.
