To ban or not to ban. That is the question the Home Ministry is mulling, its sights trained on both factions of Kashmir’s Hurriyat Conference. Media reports of the ban possibility have set tongues wagging in Srinagar’s press corps since Monday.
Of course, leading lights of the Hurriyat, too, are concerned, but the issue is no big deal for the man on the street. For, the Hurriyat is already a has-been in Kashmir’s power games. As I pointed out in The Generation of Rage in Kashmir, the youth of Kashmir turned away from the Hurriyat after 2008.
Those of its leaders who are still at home have mainly been in a shell ever since a number of their colleagues were arrested by the NIA in July 2017.
Then Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti had addressed a conference on Kashmir in the week after those arrests, stating that nobody would even carry the bier of the Indian flag in Kashmir if the special constitutional provisions for the state were ended. For the moment, the flag continues to fly, but Mehbooba has emerged in recent weeks as more or less the lone voice for rights.
She has asked the government to talk to Pakistan and announced that she would not contest Assembly elections until statehood is restored for Jammu and Kashmir. However, these stances do not amount to a rejection of the status quo, as those of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, leader of one of the Hurriyat factions, once did.