The former IAS officer said the main reason for not contesting the polls was to focus more on the mass contact programme.Shah Faesal, who resigned from the Indian Administrative Service earlier this year to join mainstream politics in Jammu and Kashmir, has said that New Delhi’s decision to scrap special status and bifurcate the state is “a slap by the Indian state on the face of all those people of J&K who sought a resolution to the (Kashmir) conflict within the parameters of the Indian Constitution”.
“I see it as a catastrophic turn in our collective history, a day when everybody is feeling that it is a death knell to our identity, our history, our right to our land, our right to our existence. A new age of indignation has begun from August 5,” he told The Indian Express.
Faesal, the first Kashmiri to top the IAS in 2009, resigned in January and set up J&K People’s Movement with an aim to join electoral politics.
“Putting 8 million people under incarceration, unprecedented curbs on their lives, shutting down the entire communication system, a brazen show of might of the state and giving out a message that we are ready to kill thousands of youth for the sake of this assimilation is extremely worrisome,” he said, referring to the lockdown in Kashmir.
“Political mainstream had the argument that we are going to protect the special status, that there are still ways of maintaining our cultural identity, our political being within the Indian union. This government has demolished that argument because the J&K state has been demolished, those constitutional guarantees have been demolished,” he said. “It is the extremist side that will get traction now — those people who always believed that the Indian state would never be honest and sincere with the people of Kashmir. It is their win today.”
Faesal said that the “real consequences of this step will be known when the curfew is lifted… I am scared that Kashmir might enter a new phase of conflict, which we have never imagined.”
Stressing the “need to mount a people’s resistance against this government’s decision”, Faesal said, “It is going to be a protracted resistance to recover what has been stolen from us in broad daylight.” About Article 370, he said it had been “hollowed to some extent in the last 70 years and become some comforting fiction”.
“But this shell still protected a Muslim-majority state that had acceded to India in 1947 based on a few conditions completely against the spirit of the Partition… We believed the Government of India had learnt from past mistakes….”
He said the scrapping of special status and bifurcation of J&K has been termed “Operation Kashmir”, adding, “It is being seen as an act of conquest, and you talk to anyone in Kashmir today, they are saying this is the real face of subjugation. The Indian state has finally shown its real face to the people of Kashmir. Everybody in Kashmir believes this is forced integration, which is never going to work.”
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Faesal said the government’s targets in Kashmir today are those who believe Kashmir’s future is in India. “The worst part of this Operation Kashmir has been incarceration of mainstream leaders and discrediting of mainstream leaders — firstly by building a narrative of corruption around the political mainstream… At the same time, there has been a wilful demolition of democratic institutions in the state. It was done first by delaying elections and now by revoking statehood and removing special status. It reflects a totally bleak future, a new dark time for the state.”
The treatment of J&K should worry the entire country, he said. “If it is with us today, it can happen to any other state tomorrow. There has already been a hue and cry in the Northeast… This idea of turning India into a monolith, eliminating all protections to people who have been provided those protections by the founding fathers of this Constitution, is going to be detrimental to India.”
