Why National Conference?

My journey from sidelines to rhetoric to reality 

Why did I – one of the most vocal and vociferous critics of the ruling dispensation –join the National Conference? Why did I quit the Peoples’ Conference? The most simple and honest answer to both questions would be – “I was wrong”. However this merits a more nuanced explanation.

In a lot of ways I’m an ordinary, common Kashmiri boy who was born in Srinagar and went to the Burn Hall School. I completed the final years of my schooling at the Bishop Cotton School in Shimla and then, through my family, migrated to the United States, where I received my college education.

I had always planned on moving back. I scorned upon those who criticized the system without making any effort to change it from within. So, months after I became eligible for an American citizenship in 2009 and while I was working as a Financial Analyst with the Government of Michigan, I moved back to Kashmir and decided to put my money where my mouth was.

While in the US, I would often come back from perfect weekend road trips and then write evocative, pontificating blogs about the need for change and revolution in Kashmir, about a righteous and just battle against oppression in Kashmir, against the ‘collaborators’ – all from the bliss of my normal life in Michigan. That is what Kashmiris like me, from my sort of a background do. We talk about sacrifice, struggle and Azadi while ensuring that the turmoil doesn’t alter any aspect of our own lives. For the dying part of the revolution – well there is always the poor man’s son.  

Meanwhile in the run up to the elections of 2008, Mr. Omar Abdullah had started an informal blog on the NC website. This was unprecedented. No political leader in Kashmir had ever tried to engage with commoners with such honesty. For how riled up and obnoxious we can become on social media, this was a very brave decision. And obviously there were endless back and forth discussions on these blogs. I was the regular “angry” virtual victim who, in feedback debates on these blogs, pontificated from the moral high ground.

In responding to the fiercest and at times most ruthless criticism, I found Omar Abdullah to be an extraordinarily humble and honest individual. Embarrassed due to the discordant tonality of my earlier posts, I humbled down and started introspecting – coming to terms with the glaring mismatch between my life and my political posturing.

Meanwhile back home, the Assembly Elections of 2008 saw Mr. Omar Abdullah become the Chief Minister of a disgruntled J&K that was ripe for a generational shift in leadership. I soon mentioned my plans of moving back and joining politics to Mr. Abdullah – who had by now become a good, dear friend. I clearly remember how he unequivocally cautioned me about the uncertainty and risks such a step would bring with it – the biggest being the possibility of a phase of financial hardship – an inability to maintain the life standard I had now gotten used to in the United States. I did face all those challenges. And today for having faced them and still sticking my neck out and not giving up and not running back to the safety and stability of an expatriate life, I am an entirely new person with a much thicker layer of skin.

In the autumn of 2009, I resigned from my job as a Financial Analyst with the Government in the US and moved back to Kashmir. Unfortunately, partly due to circumstances and partly due to the fact that a phase of darkness and uncertainty at this crucial age comes with an almost organic sort of bitterness and disgruntlement that feeds on itself, around a year after returning from the United States and after grueling months of uncertainty and having nothing to do – I took up Mr. Sajad Lone’s invitation to join the Peoples’ Conference – a small yet old political party that didn’t have a single elected representative in the system and was at that time quite uncertain about its own future course of action. After three years with the Peoples’ Conference and with due respect to Mr. Lone, I eventually decided to not stay in a party which has to function on the whims of one single man. And I wish him the best.

I still have the same belief in the need for ‘Change’ and still treasure the idealism within me. I however have had this evolved first-hand realization that ‘Change’ can only come from institutions and not forums and fan-clubs that revolve around an individual. I also believe that true change will come from a style of realistic, humble and sober politics; not from flowery, unending and ambiguous rhetoric about the academic/philosophical concepts of change and reform.

The more important and completely separate question now – Why did I join the National Conference?

National Conference is the pioneer of reform and ‘change’ in Kashmiri Politics. In politics, history gives glory and baggage in almost equal proportions and more often than not the “moral high ground” is a luxury that only the pontificating spectator or the newcomer can afford. National Conference has a glorious history – one that our forefathers have been a part a parcel of. A history of enduring decades of persecution for the cause of liberation. My grandfather, Khwaja Ghulam Ahmad Ashai, was one of the four founding secretaries of National Conference. It was Ashai Sahib who read out the first inaugural address of the party in 1932. He occupied various important positions in the government such as the Chief Whip of the Legislative Assembly, Inspector General of Muslim Education, the representative of Kashmiri Muslims in the Glancy Commission and finally the first Acting Vice Chancellor of the Kashmir University. History bears witness to his selfless association with Sheikh Sahib, despite a phase of political differences. In 1953 he was incarcerated along with Sheikh Sahib.

As I mentioned in my first speech at Nawa-e-Subh and something I keep reiterating – history doesn’t start in 1989. Kashmir’s contemporary political history starts in the 1920s when a handful of educated young Kashmiris returned home to fight for the rights of their people – to equality, to dignity and to prosperity. National Conference was born from this sacred fire of Kashmiri renaissance in the quaint little “Reading Room” in Fateh Kadal where seven educated young Kashmiris would meet and discuss the changing world, the feudal oppression of the Dogra Rulers and the dream of a ‘Naya Kashmir’. How this group of educated young patriots rallied around Sheikh Sahib took us out from a feudal existence and ushered us into an era of equality, education and institutional reform.

I’m not a historian who can dissect and pass judgments on what was done and not done six decades ago and then attach moral attributes to such decisions. However, I have been a keen student of Kashmiri history. A fundamental problem with a retrospective analysis of history is that in cases like that of Kashmir, we don’t depict the past in objective, historical contexts but instead view and judge history through the lens of contemporary developments, passing phases, current political incidents, accidents and beliefs.

Even for the most biased critics of the party, it’s hard to deny that the role of National Conference in the history of Kashmir has been pivotal and historic. And history is important especially in the politics of a place like Kashmir – provided our analysis of history is contextual, objective and realistic. And in the Kashmir of today, one that is being divided on the basis of regions, religions, towns and villages, be that by the PDP or the BJP or even the Congress – such lessons and legacies of history are invaluable.

In an era of gamesmanship, Machiavellianism and proxy-ism, an era of third and fourth fronts and covert alliances – it is important that we connect our history to our present and carry it on with us into our future. That we stick together and stay strong as a united, secular Jammu & Kashmir.

In Mr. Omar Abdullah we have a perceptive, humble and honest statesman with an impeccable leadership character. He is the last man on earth who would allow a compromise on our special status, our identity and our dignity for personal interests. He never lies. His articulation is earnest and his style of politics is quiet and selfless. How can we afford to not be on his side?

Today, days after I joined the National Conference, I walked into the Nawa-e-Subh central hall and randomly looked up straight ahead of me and saw two life size portraits of my grandfather hung on the wall straight ahead. I cannot explain that spontaneous feeling in words – both of belonging and of repentance. But one thing I know – that I will do justice to that feeling, to our identity and to the sacrifices we have rendered as Kashmiris, including those rendered by thousands of NC workers and supporters.

(Views expressed are personal and not of the party I belong to. For feedback - junaid.msu@gmail.com)