The opening remarks of Lok Sabha member Abdul Rashid, better known as Engineer Rashid soon after his release from Tihar jail in Delhi on Wednesday were a verbal assault on Prime Minister Modi’s vison of new Kashmir, were not just an outburst of anger of politician who had spent more than five years in prison on charges of terror funding. There was something more to it that will unfold in the coming days in Jammu and Kashmir where Assembly elections are underway after a long gap of 10 years, and his party Awami Iteehad Party is a big stakeholder, especially after his victory in the parliamentary elections this year. He had romped home defeating his nearest rival former chief minister and scion of the Abdullah family, Omar Abdullah by a margin of nearly two lakh votes from the Baramulla constituency in north Kashmir.
Ordinarily, these remarks are an echo of what other political leaders, ranging from Farooq Abdullah, to Mehbooba Mufti are saying. They have emerged as loud voices challenging PM, Home Minister and the rest of the BJP leaders’ narrative of a big change in Kashmir, particularly in the past five years after the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019. But Engineer Rashid after his Lok Sabha poll victory from Baramulla, while he was in jail, has become a new phenomenon in Valley politics which cannot be deciphered easily. There are wheels within wheels at work, and the latest fashion is to dub the rivals as potential or secret allies of the BJP to secure maximum number of votes.
This is a great shift since the days when the National Conference and Congress were allies in 1987 fighting the Muslim United Front, a conglomerate of Muslim organizations which wanted to set up “Nizam-e-Mustafa” or Islamic rule in Kashmir. Today, BJP has become a big factor in the political discourse of Kashmir. Cursing BJP helps political stakeholders, traditional or the new groups in Kashmir where the saffron party is blamed for snatching their special status and exclusive privileges, and in turn such fulminations deliver for BJP in the rest of the country. At this point in time when J&K busy in its tryst with Assembly polls, such anti-PM Modi rants, are bound to deliver vote dividend to the party in Hindu-dominated Jammu region which will send 43 out of 90 seats to the new Assembly-first in the Union Territory of J&K, and these words will echo in other states going to polls- Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra.
Engineer Rashid’s remarks, ”I take a pledge to fight Modi’s narrative of Naya Kashmir which has failed miserably, the people of J&K have rejected it. My victory (from Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency in north Kashmir) was a referendum against Modi’s policies on Kashmir and what he did to J&K on August 5, 2019.,” were lapped up by his critics both within BJP and traditional political groups in Kashmir, National Conference and PDP.
Ram Madhav took it upon himself to take on Engineer Rashid, whom he called rank separatist who was in the ilk of Omar, Mehbooba and ( Sajad Gani) Lone. The BJP leader who was deputed as election in charge of Jammu and Kashmir has his own style of saying things to drive home his point -that Engineer Rashid was a “ rank separatist” and clubbed him in the club of Omar, Mehbooba and Lone, underscoring that all of them were political siblings.
He accepted the challenge thrown by Rashid and declared that the march of “ Naya Kashmir” will continue and no one can dare to put obstacles to it. This response from the saffron party’s point of view was needed on two counts – Engineer Rashid was the latest voice to the chorus of restoration of Article 370 which according to BJP leadership is a thing of the past. This new voice coming out of jail after five years and his victory in parliamentary polls had to be countered because his words resonated with the young voters who had voted heavily for him in Lok Sabha polls. Second, the party wanted to dispel an impression that Engineer Rashid was a proxy of the BJP, as alleged by NC, PDP, and others who read in his interim bail for electioneering as a design to divide Kashmiri Muslim votes.
Things will not stop here. Engineer Rashid, two-time MLA, and now an MP, speaks loudly and invites controversies, but this time it seems there is a method in his utterances. The politicians may dub him a separatist or BJP proxy, but his presence in the Kashmir polls cannot be taken lightly. He has emerged as a figure who can tilt the balance, read with Jammat-i-Islami fielding its candidates in the polls after a long gap of 37 years, Kashmir election is headed toward more unpredictabilities than anticipated earlier.
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