At the peak of a recent standoff, a senior Congress leader in New Delhi candidly admitted that the government cannot go too far with the People's Democratic Party (PDP), its local partner that is currently running the government in Jammu & Kashmir. His point was that the Congress could hardly go along with PDP demands such as self-rule and increased powers to the Srinagar government, nor openly highlight the human rights abuses by the security forces in Kashmir. This was because, said the Congress leader, the vast number of voters in India could not be ignored. After all, there are only six seats in the national Parliament from Jammu & Kashmir, and "we cannot sacrifice 500 seats in the rest of India for the sake of just six seats".
In June, when the India-Pakistan peace process was yet to be derailed by the Bombay blasts, it is said that Manmohan Singh himself had raised the issue of this popular attitude towards Kashmir during one of the regular Friday meetings of the Congress party's core governing group. He is said to have complained that Congress stalwarts had not worked hard enough to build public opinion in support of the peace process and the solutions he had envisaged.
Over the years, bald-faced lies have been told about Jammu & Kashmir, but the Indian public shows little concern over the misinformation and manipulation. While public outrage over the rigging of polls in Haryana in 1989 could force Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala to resign, the same public took the massive rigging of the 1987 assembly polls in Kashmir as a necessity born of 'national interest'.
J & K has always been treated differently by New Delhi – not by the gifting of political concessions but by the throttling of democratic voices and the restricting of political space of Kashmiris in the name of national security. The legacy of those brave politicians and citizens who faced the 1975 Emergency head-on has been soured by the maintenance of what is nothing less than a criminal silence on the happenings in Kashmir.