Rekha Chowdhary (Professor, Political Science, Jammu University) in an
article in May 8, 2010 issue of EPW, discusses the intersection of the regional and communal identity of politics that characterizes the two Bills introduced in the recently concluded budget session of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Legislature. She writes that both the Permanent Resident (Disqualification) Bill, 2010 that seeks to disqualify the J&K women from their permanent residential status if they marry outside the state and the Inter-District Recruitment Bill, which aims to ban the inter-district recruitment, are not simplistic or homogeneous issues with singular nature. The debate on both issues, instead of revolving around the effect of such change on the substantive rights of the parties that come under their purview, has been hijacked by the competitive politics of regional/religious identity, which has come to define the J&K political discourse.
The PR Disqualification bill has received support in Kashmir cutting across party lines, both from the mainstream politicians as well as separatists. The opposition has come from Jammu where it has been opposed not as being discriminatory in general but as ‘anti- Jammu’ and ‘anti-Hindu’. The debate, riding on emotive examples, has been on ‘dangerous regional and communal lines’ and has completely sidelined the ‘rights of women’. Similarly, the discourse on the Inter-District Recruitment Bill has centred on communal and regional identities where Kashmir has been pitted against Jammu. The demand was initially raised to preserve the interests of the backward districts of the state to ban ‘outsiders’ from usurping employment opportunities, but got pitted against the backward communities who have the benefit of reservation. The political parties in Kashmir, displaying regional favouritism, went on to demand the withdrawal of reservation for Dalits as Kashmir being predominantly Muslim does not have any Scheduled Case (SC) population. On the other hand, the Jammu based parties who were initially at the forefront, demanding a Bill banning the inter-district recruitment started called it ‘anti- Jammu’ and against Hindus.
The author puts these two issues in the backdrop of the increasingly ‘regional polarized response’, even from Kashmir. Unlike Jammu, this is uncharacteristic of Kashmiri politics, where the response to public issues has historically been articulated with the Kashmir’s reference to India. But now a regional aspect of ‘discrimination vis-à-vis Jammu has also been added to the earlier dimension. She attributes this high-pitched, regionally and communally polarized politics as a ‘fallout of the increasing relevance of the politics of governance and the intensity of competition’; and with parties ‘competing for the same political space, they tend to radicalize the politics and in the process increase sensitivities about identity’.
Taking an even more vicious turn, the region-based politics has not remained exclusively limited to the cries of ‘discrimination or ‘dangers of demographic change’ that diverts ‘all political energies to divisive positions and reduces substantial issues to simplistic notions of regional discrimination’ , but has also acquired communal overtones where the regional identity is often used interchangeably with religious connotations. Kashmir gets equated with Muslims and Jammu with Hindus. The arguments about the regional discrimination transcend to religion and are employed by the politicians to ‘stoke barely camouflaged communal sentiments.’ The outcome is that identity politics starts getting defined on the basis of the religious character and hence the ‘need to preserve it’.
The intersection and seamless transition of the divisive nature of the indentity politics based on regional and religious divisiveness from one form to another on any issue not only diverts attention from concerns of good governance, but also undermines the unity and integrity of the state, and does great harm to cherished cultural, plural and secular values, one example being Amarnath agitation of 2008. To quote Chowdhary, “For a socially and culturally diverse state like J&K, there is a fundamental danger in the deepening of identity politics polarized along regional and communal lines. It will not merely weaken the secular basis and plural ethos of the state, but also endanger the very integrity of the state by fracturing the relations between its constitutive regions and communities.”
