This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines by Dutt Barkha

Author:Dutt, Barkha [Dutt, Barkha]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2015-12-03T16:00:00+00:00

History was condemned to repeat itself in far too many ways in the Kashmir Valley. Just like his father’s elected government had been dismissed when Nehru was prime minister, in 1983 Nehru’s daughter Indira backed a split in the National Conference that brought down Farooq’s government. Farooq had told friends he thought the years Indira brought his government down to be the worst years of his life—even worse than the challenges of militancy. He would tell his friends the story of how he landed in Saudi Arabia for the Umrah soon after his government fell—to find that his luggage was missing. Indira, he suspected, had ordered the intelligence to spy on him and rummage through his bags. The man who engineered the coup would end up being the second pillar in Kashmir politics, along with his fiery daughter Mehbooba. But at the time Mufti Mohammad Sayeed was only the president of the Jammu and Kashmir Congress. Farooq would never forgive him because the split in the party was not just political, it was also personal—the man Mufti had propped up to lead the breakaway faction was none other than G. M. Shah, Farooq’s brother-in-law.

Eventually, Mufti would become a Cabinet minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s government, part ways with the Congress to join the V. P. Singh uprising, become India’s first Muslim union home minister, return briefly to the Congress during the Narasimha Rao years, and then leave it all behind to form his own party in 1999. Once considered New Delhi’s voice in the Valley, Mufti now leads the PDP, widely regarded as borderline separatist in its politics. In 1989, while he was union home minister, his daughter Rubaiya was kidnapped by militants. Despite that, as well as several attempts on his life by separatists, Mufti was soft on insurgents, insisting that his government’s ‘healing touch’ would extend to all—separatists and families of militants included.

Mufti’s other daughter Mehbooba, a law graduate from Kashmir University, is the only member of the second generation of the Sayeed family to become a force in politics. She described herself as someone who had come to politics by accident and contested her first election in 1996 upon her father’s advice. Soon, it was Mehbooba who travelled door to door, village to village, braving threats, wading into crowds to build a connection with people, especially women. Outside the Valley, she became controversial for her frequent visits to the families of militants who had been killed. ‘They are dead now,’ she would tell me, ‘why should their children be punished?’ In a conservative society, she became the first woman to head a political party and emerged as a popular campaigner for civil rights. She was sometimes regarded with wariness in Delhi because of the shrill political positions they thought she took. But I must say that I found her gumption and guts admirable. A divorced single mother to two daughters, she forged her own path and through sheer energy and focus was able to build a mass base for a relatively new party that, unlike the Abdullahs, had no advantages of dynasty or legacy.

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