On June 4, India’s 18th Lok Sabha election concluded its term. The new government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi was sworn in along with several ministers on June 9. For the first time in a decade, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) missed the majority mark of 272 seats and secured only 240 seats, which is significantly lower than in the previous elections of 2019 and 2014. Still, Modi formed the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition government along with smaller parties.
In India’s general election, the Baramulla parliamentary seat in the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir was of particular interest. Baramulla saw a heated contest between three prominent candidates: Sheikh Rashid Ahmad, widely known as Engineer Rashid, of the Awami Ittehad Party; Sajid Ghani Lone of the People’s Conference; and former Chief Minister and leader of the National Conference Omar Abdullah. The results, announced on June 4, were both predictable and surprising simultaneously: Rashid won the Baramulla seat with 472,481 votes, almost double the number of votes polled by Abdullah and Lone combined.
The results were predictable for some locals, especially the youth who voluntarily joined in hordes to support Rashid’s campaign. However, the tally shocked Abdullah. Despite running a systematic and power-packed campaign, the National Conference leader only secured 268,339 votes. The National Conference had not anticipated that its stalwart would lose from the constituency to Rashid, who joined the election campaign quite late and ran a campaign that was short on funds and less systematic. Yet the jailed AIP leader managed to win, and that too with a huge margin.
Earlier, Abdullah had been a bit sympathetic toward Rashid’s campaign, which was led by his two young college-going sons. He even congratulated Rashid on his win. But soon, Abdullah found himself unable to swallow his defeat and posted on X (formerly Twitter): “Rashid’s victory, without doubt, will empower secessionists and give Kashmir’s defeated Islamist movement a renewed sense of hope.”
Abdullah was quoting from Praveen Swami’s article titled “Engineer Rashid’s election victory shows Kashmiri secessionism is far from spent.” Swami, the national security editor at The Print, argued that Rashid’s win will embolden Kashmir’s separatists and that past efforts to draw secessionism into electoral politics have badly failed.
There is ample reason to disagree with Swami, and Abdullah, who clearly seems to endorse Swami’s view.
Rashid’s active involvement in politics goes back to his teenage days. In 1978, he joined the People’s Conference, which was then led by Abdul Ghani Lone, the father of Sajid Lone. It’s important to note that by then, the People’s Conference was part of the separatist political camp and had fought assembly elections as part of the Muslim United Front (Muttahida Mahaz) in 1987. However, Rashid later shunned separatist politics and joined the government service as a civil engineer.
His formal entry into mainstream politics began in 2008 when he won assembly elections from the Langate constituency of Kupwara district. He won again in the 2014 assembly elections and subsequently established his own Awami Ittehad Party, which is not recognized as a political party by the Election Commission of India (ECI). In the 2019 parliamentary elections, Rashid unsuccessfully tried his luck at a seat from the same Baramulla constituency.
Ever since his involvement in mainstream politics, Rashid has carried a simple commoner image and raised people’s common and genuine issues much beyond his own electoral constituency. While doing so, he often clashed with the authorities and enraged them. This only boosted Rashid’s image among the masses, helping him truly emerge as a people’s leader. In the traditionally limited democratic spaces available to the people of Kashmir, Rashid single-handedly became the voice of opposition against misgovernance.
Rashid’s mass popularity and people-friendly image could well be gauged by the enthusiasm and excitement with which common people recently joined and funded his election campaign. The recorded turnout in the Baramulla constituency was 59.10 percent, which is slightly higher than the Jammu and Kashmir average and the highest in the valley. The credit for this remarkable voter turnout goes to Rashid’s politics and the young people of North Kashmir.
The AIP leader, who has a separatist past, is currently in Delhi’s Tihar jail under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) of 1967, facing terror funding charges. That said, Rashid has never advocated violence but encouraged people, especially the youth, to take part in democratic processes to fight for their rights. He is a model for Kashmiris, especially young people, to fight their battles through ballots and not bullets.
Demands of all sorts, including extreme positions such as secessionism, have been part and parcel of the Indian democratic process. From Dravidistan in the South to violent secessionist insurgencies in the Northeast to Naxalism in different parts of the country, Indian democracy has seen it all. While the Indian state has successfully crushed many violent secessionist and extremist movements, sometimes using very coercive strategies, the beauty of the democratic process is such that many of these violent movements later became mainstream and fought elections in India’s diverse and multifaceted electoral politics.
For example, in southern India the demand for a separate Dravidistan is dead, and parties have long since gone mainstream. Today, the “Dravidian Model” of welfare governance is now most discussed in India’s fast-expanding neoliberal economics. Dozens of separatist and insurgent movements from the Northeast, including Nagaland, Assam, and Manipur, have signed peace accords with the state and union governments, shunned the path of violence, and now joined mainstream politics.
Naxalism, also called “Left-Wing Extremism,” is on the decline and is being fought by the state and central governments with a double-pronged strategy of socioeconomic development and anti-insurgency operations. Some offshoots of the Naxalite movements are now doing quite well in electoral politics. For instance, after a period of decline, the Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist, Liberation (CPI-MLL) secured 12 assembly seats in the Bihar assembly elections in 2020. The party also has a lone member in the Jharkhand state assembly and recently sent two MPs to the Lok Sabha from Bihar. The CPI-MLL no longer advocates armed struggle but has adopted constitutional and democratic methods to fight for its cause and ideological goals.
Over and over, India’s electoral politics have tamed radical ideologies or extremism.
Compared to India’s other secessionist movements, however, the case of Kashmiri secessionism is peculiar on important counts. First, the secessionist movement in Kashmir is linked to the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 based on religion and, subsequently, the signing of the “Instrument of Accession” by the late Maharaja Hari Singh in October 1947 under circumstances created by the invasion of tribal guerrillas from the Pakistani side. Because of this, Kashmiri secessionism and armed insurgency is organically linked to Pakistan, which has been actively fueling political violence in Jammu and Kashmir at different intervals in the past seven decades as it claims the Muslim majority region as its own.
There is another important feature of Kashmiri secessionism, or what many people would like to call the movement for the right to self-determination. This soft form of secessionist sentiment has been part of mainstream politics at different times. This was more visible and prominent in the 1950s and 1960s, during which the late Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah and his close aide Mirza Afzal Beg led the “Plebiscite Front,” which championed the cause of a plebiscite during those early decades post-partition.
However, Sheikh Abdullah had to disband the Plebiscite Front and disassociate with it in the mid-1970s for the sake of political expediency amid pressures from New Delhi, which resulted in the signing of the famous Indira-Sheikh Accord of 1975.
Again, in the 1980s, an Islamic-oriented coalition of political parties and individuals known as the Muslim United Front emerged and fought in the assembly elections of 1987. It’s widely believed that the 1987 elections were rigged in favor of the National Conference, then led by Dr Farooq Abdullah, which sparked massive discontent among the local population.
Had the elections not been rigged, it’s possible the armed insurgency that claimed thousands of innocent people would have died in its infancy. Kashmiri pandits, who faced mass displacement, might still have been living in peace alongside their Kashmiri Muslim brethren. In retrospect, it could well be argued that the alleged rigging of the 1987 assembly elections was the biggest mistake made by New Delhi in the last four decades of Kashmir policy.
This political miscalculation has continued festering in the politics of Jammu and Kashmir. There would have been no Syed Salahuddin (head of the Jihad Council in Pakistan-administered Kashmir), Bitta Karate, or Burhan Wani had New Delhi not committed blunders, or had the local mainstream politics not failed the common masses.
Engineer Rashid is exactly the product of this troubled politics. This is important context for the ideological underpinnings of Rashid’s anti-establishment sentiment.
As we have seen in the past several decades, entry into (and exit from) the electoral politics of political parties, especially those that are anti-establishment or hold pro-secessionist views, has been a constant feature of politics in the Kashmir Valley. Who could have imagined that Sajid Lone and his party, founded by his late father Abdul Ghani Lone, would join the mainstream and become an important bulwark against separatist politics?
Jamaat-e-Islami is a prime example of this trend. Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), though a peaceful and democratic organization, has been the ideological core of the pro-Pakistan and secessionist ecosystem in Jammu and Kashmir and is currently banned under UAPA. If reports are to be believed, the JI has once again expressed its willingness to join mainstream electoral politics and play by the rules. If the organization is allowed formal entry into the system, its extremism and radical political stances would definitely boil down. Taking a hardline stance against parties like JI has worked for Delhi only in exceptional cases. The doors of electoral politics and participation in the formal system in Jammu and Kashmir should be kept wide open for forces like these.
This policy should also be applied to cases outside of Jammu and Kashmir as well.
Two weeks ago, a radical Sikh preacher and the founder of Waris Punjab De, Amritpal Singh, won the Lok Sabha elections in Khadoor Sahib in Punjab. Another surprising Lok Sabha win was registered by Sarabjeet Singh Khalsa, the son of one of the assassins of Indira Gandhi. If Swami’s approach to Rashid is taken seriously and to its logical end, it would imply that the wins of these two Lok Sabha candidates will encourage Khalistanis or Khalistani sentiments in Punjab.
What if all Khalistani separatists one day fight elections and join India’s Parliament or the Punjab state assembly? Will they advocate for a separate Khalistan? Not at all. Instead, India’s history shows that they would be compelled to play by the rules, adopt parliamentary language, and be duty-bound to defend India’s constitution, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.
By the same token, if anything, Rashid’s win will encourage separatists in Kashmir to join mainstream politics. His electoral success, despite his fiery anti-establishment language, might bring back some trust in the formal system that was lost in 1987.
It should be noted that separatism in the valley is actually on the decline, and parties like the JI are willing to join the electoral fray. This is a positive trend, and Delhi must capitalize on it. The doors of electoral politics should not be closed for political forces like these. Electoral politics should be an arena for taming separatists or radical political ideologies. Separatists should be incentivized and encouraged to join formal politics and not kept away from it. Only then will separatism be dead one day.
As an elected member of Lok Sabha, Rashid doesn’t represent separatist sentiments. He is a democratic voice in a system that he sees as oppressive, and he seeks to change it for good from within. If anything, Rashid is the voice of the voiceless, disgruntled, and frustrated people of Kashmir, especially the youth who haven’t seen anyone representing them in the state assembly or parliament in the past several years. That’s the constituency of people Rashid represents: He is the voice of the common majority of Kashmiris today. They immediately and enthusiastically seek participation and representation in the democratic processes of the country. It would be extremely unwise to deny them.