On June 24, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet political leaders from Jammu and Kashmir. In all, 14 leaders have been asked to be in Delhi for the meeting. It is an All Party Meeting (APM) as leaders of the National Conference, the Peoples Democratic Party, the CPM, the Jammu and Kashmir Apni Party, the CPM and a couple of others have been invited. From the Jammu region, people like Kavinder Gupta and Nirmal Singh of the BJP, and Bhim Singh of the Panthers Party have been asked to attend the meeting.
Of course, Ghulam Nabi Azad of the Congress has also been called. This means all four former chief ministers of J&K, who could have attended, have been asked to be there. Besides Azad, the other former CMs invited for the meeting included Farooq Abdullah and Omar Abdullah, besides Mehbooba Mufti. It will perhaps be first time after three years that Mehbooba and Modi may come face to face after the BJP walked out of the PDP-BJP coalition in June 2018, bringing her government down. The PDP has maintained a steady southwards course since then losing leaders as also workers. Down, further down and more to go has been the story of PDP all these 36 months.
The meeting has excited wild speculation in both J&K, as also Delhi, with commentators and analysts going into overdrive with diametrically opposite viewpoints emerging. Some say Modi is about to fritter away all the gains made since August 5, 2019, when Article 35-A was scrapped. By inviting these so-called mainstream leaders, he was giving unnecessary credibility to these spent forces. The other view to emerge was that something drastic was about to happen and Modi had developed cold feet now on J&K.
Some rather enthusiastic people in Kashmir started saying that the meeting was a precursor to the restoration of Article 35-A, and reversal of changes made in 370! Jitnay munh, utni baatein …. That about sums up what all was being said about the meeting. Some people in Jammu were genuinely worried that since the meeting was full of Kashmiri leaders, Jammu’s interests would be bartered away as there was no strong voice to present its point of view.
How important and earthshaking the meeting is going to be? Let’s try to add one more point of view, even if it can only add to the confusion. Our reading of the situation is that it is going to be a major non-event! Perhaps the indication is available in the invitation being extended to Bhim Singh, a political lightweight now in every sense of the word. Someone who was thrown out of the party he had founded at one time by one faction. The party had no legislator after the 2014 assembly elections and is surviving on past glories. Once upon a time, we had four MLAs, in 2002, type stories. Bhim Singh will be among Kashmiri political heavyweights but the question that we need to ponder is this. Does it enhance his value, or does it bring down the Kashmiri leaders to his level?
Incidentally, we won’t mind calling it Modi’s Menagerie. According to one dictionary meaning, a menagerie is a strange or diverse collection of people or things. That is what it seems.
Well, perhaps we will have an answer in next week’s column. It hardly seems worthwhile to speculate about delimitation and statehood, two topics that may figure in the meeting.
