Fear About Jammu Backlash Hangs Over Kashmir Autonomy

Political leaders of the Jammu region are strongly opposed to any increase in autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir and expect a backlash from the Jammu and Ladakh regions if the state government comes up with a radical autonomy package. Some of them say they would prefer the trifurcation of the state to the erosion of its ties with India.

This is evidently one of the reasons why former Governor Karan Singh recently resigned as chairman of the committee which the state government has appointed to recommend an autonomy package for the state. Singh has won elections to the Lok Sabha from the Udhampur seat and considers the Jammu region as his political base.

 

Singh refuses to say why he resigned but politicians who know his mind say he had been uneasy with the task he had been given for some months. He waited to resign in the hope that he would be nominated for the vice-presidents post at the end of July, so that he could have cited that as his reason for resigning.

He apparently did not want to rock the boat for Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, whom he considers the only credible political option in the valley and a chief minister who is trying to do his best in difficult circumstances.

Singh was the only Dogra member of the committee. All the other six members were Kashmiris and ministers in the Abdullah government. Singh apparently got the impression that Abdullah wanted a maximilist report, recommending the sort of autonomy the state had in 1952.

The chief minister was then called prime minister of the state and the state governor was known as the `Sadr-e-Riyasat (a title Singh once had). Few central laws applied in the state and the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, the Election Commission and the Comprtroller and Auditor General did not extend to the state.

Abdullah could have used this report recommending a return to this situation, signed by a person whom nobody in New Delhi would call secessionist, to negotiate as much autonomy as he could get. Singh is said to believe that this sort of report would have caused an explosive response in Jammu and Ladakh.

Singhs view, his associates say, is that the state does not comprise a political or historical whole and only exists as a unit because of his familys imperialism. Singh is the scion of the house of Maharaja Gulab Singh, whose armies annexed Ladakh from Tibet in 1857.

Dogra leaders like Singh fear that greater autonomy to the state as it is now constituted would increase the Kashmiris power over Jammu and Ladakh. Having ruled the valley before independence, they chaff at the thought of the valley now being the primary centre of power and look to the centre as a countervailing force.

If the committee, now headed by Minister Mohiddin Shah, recommends the sort of autonomy package for the state that Abdullah had promised before winning the September 1996 elections, some Jammu-based leaders could raise a demand for a separate state, and the demand that Ladakh become a union territory could get a fillip.