Governor Malik And The Kashmir Muddle

Installed as a political yes-man, Satya Pal Malik’s unpredictable utterances and erratic decisions have won him few friends—even in the BJP.

- Asit Jolly & Moazum Mohammad

The comparison is inevitable between N.N. Vohra’s quietly efficient manner and the incumbent Jammu & Kashmir governor Satya Pal Malik’s recurrently outspoken ways that invariably keep him in the thick of controversy. On November 21, he ordered the dissolution of the 87-member state assembly even as the BJP’s rivals—the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), National Conference (NC) and Congress— closed ranks to stake a claim to form the government. As expected, Malik’s inexplicable move provoked a political snowstorm that refuses to blow over.

Some of this is because the governor smugly sat through several weeks of parleys between the People’s Conference (PC) chief Sajjad Lone, the BJP and a group of rebels from the PDP and NC, who were desperately trying to cobble the numbers together to form the government. It was in telling contrast to the alacrity he showed later when former chief ministers Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah, and the Congress, began talking of a coalition. This, in the wake of broad hints from PDP founder and Baramullah MP Muzaffar Hussain Baig about joining ranks with Lone.

Malik later tried to justify himself by citing the “impossibility of forming a stable government by the coming together of political parties with opposing ideologies” and the “fragile security scenario in the state”. Speaking out in support of the governor’s decision to dissolve the assembly, which had been kept in suspended animation since the fall of the Mehbooba Mufti government, a section within the saffron leadership argued that the proposed PDP-NC-Congress alliance would have been “non-representative and detrimental to the interests of the Jammu region”. Besides blocking a government minus the BJP, by pre-empting the PDP-NC-Congress alliance, he also effectively scuttled what could have halted the attrition within the PDP’s ranks.