A historical and political perspective of the issue
Jammu, the land of Dogras, remained at the helm of affairs between March 1846 and October 1947. In March 1846, the Raja of Jammu, Gulab Singh, founded Jammu and Kashmir State with Kashmir becoming part of the Dogra Kingdom, and not the vice-versa. In October 1947, the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, Hari Singh, acceded his princely state to the Indian Dominion as per the constitutional law on the subject like other 560-odd princely states.
It was hoped that the accession with the Indian Dominion would help the Dogras enjoy the political status they legitimately deserved within the country and lead a secure and dignified life. But it turned out to be a false hope. In fact, while the rest of the country attained political emancipation on August 15, 1947, when London transferred power to the Congress which it itself had founded in December 1885 at Bombay (presently Mumbai) to puncture and defeat the then ongoing freedom struggle in British India and further destroy Bharat socially, culturally, religiously, economically and politically, the Dogras lost their freedom for all practical purposes and Kashmir attained the status in the State which London enjoyed in British India.
The fundamental reason: The Congress and the then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, conspired against the Dogras. They not only transferred political power from Jammu to Kashmir but also snatched the capital status from Jammu which it enjoyed for a full 101 years and threw in the lot of the Dogras with rabidly anti-Jammu and radical Sheikh Abdullah/ Kashmiri Muslim leadership. The other reason was the grant of absolute and unbridled powers to Sheikh Abdullah to nominate four members to the Indian Constituent Assembly. Yet another reason was the grant of special status to the State through separatist Article 370 on the ground that it was a Muslim-majority region. Jawaharlal Nehru and his government did all this to pamper and appease Sheikh Abdullah and his National Conference, who left no stone unturned to drive the State away from the country’s mainstream. To be more precise, Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress government at the Centre never really considered Jammu and Kashmir as an integral part of the nation as other states; they created another republic within the Indian republic.
The result was that the Dogras and the Ladakhi Buddhists suffered huge losses at all levels and in all spheres. They were rigorously excluded from all walks of life. They were converted into second-grade citizens with the full backing of the Congress and South and North Blocks. Nay, they were considered Kashmir’s subjects whose life was not one of political and economic aspirations.
In 1952, the situation climaxed to the point that the Dogras under the Jana Sangh leadership revolted against the Kashmiri leadership. They launched Ek Nissan, Ek Vidhan, and Ek Pradhan movements and their stated objectives were two: Full integration of the State into the country and a dispensation that dispensed justice to the people of Jammu province or that freed them from the clutches of the Kashmiri leadership. Though the agitation, the party politics within the National Conference, and the open revolt of Sheikh Abdullah against the nation led to the fall of Sheikh Abdullah in 1953, the plight of the Dogras remained unchanged. As a result, Jammu witnessed agitation after agitation.
The agitations Jammu witnessed after 1952 in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2008, 2010-2011, and 2015 were all the people’s agitations. All these agitations were massive affairs and all were a grand success. Of course, in the process, many young Dogras lost their precious lives. The enactment of the Jammu and Kashmir Universities Act of 1969, and the establishment of Jammu University, Mata Vaishno Devi University, Agriculture University, Central University, and All-India Institute of Medical Sciences were some of the Dogras’ outstanding achievements.
However, their age-old demand that Jammu province be fully empowered or it must enjoy equal status with Kashmir at all levels remained unfulfilled. The reason was that Jammu’s political class sided with the Kashmiri leadership for the sake of personal power and profit. Even the BJP and its earlier incarnation Jana Sangh, which supported the Jammu cause and fought for the national cause in the State, disappointed the Dogras, particularly after 2014. For example, the BJP abandoned its ideology in March 2015 and joined hands with the essentially radical and separatist People’s Democratic Party to enjoy some loaves and fishes of office. The marriage between the two remained intact till June 2018, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi acted taking into consideration the fast-deteriorating situation in the State, and made the BJP withdraw its support to the Mehbooba Mufti-led coalition government.
The BJP, which till 2008 was a marginal political party as far as its presence in the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly was concerned and which created a history of sorts in 2014 by winning 25 Assembly seats (all in Jammu), had to pay a heavy price in terms of vote-share became evident in the 2024 general elections. Another factor that culminated in the decline of its vote share was the utter failure of the Narendra Modi government on August 5, 2019, to separate Jammu province from Ladakh and grant it full state status or status of Union territory, or its failure to treat the discriminated against and looked down upon Jammu province like Ladakh. Yet another reason responsible for the erosion of its support base was the continuation of the appease-Kashmir policy even after the introduction of historic reforms in the erstwhile State.
The BJP suffered a huge loss in Jammu province in terms of vote share despite the no-holds-barred campaign unleashed by the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the Defence Minister, the UP Chief Minister, and other senior BJP leaders against the dynastic politics and in favour of abrogation of Article 370, Ayodhya, Varanasi, Mathura, etc could be seen from the fact that its vote-share came down from 46.7 percent in 2019 to 24.4 percent in 2024– a decline of 22.3 percent. Of course, the BJP created a history of sorts by winning both the Jammu and Udhampur seats for the third time in a row. Courtesy: The Dogras of Jammu who voted for national integration.
That the Dogras were discriminated against even after 2019 under the BJP rule itself could be seen from what former Director of the Institute of Central Asian Studies, K N Pandita, said on July 22, 2024, in his political essay “Assembly elections and BJP’s public outreach” (Daily Excelsior, July 22, 2024). He, inter-alia, wrote: “…hindsight will reveal that the Jammu region has become an unnecessary victim of the Centre’s valley-centric policy during its second stint in office in particular. The NDA government arranged a session in Srinagar and sold its valley development mission very eloquently to the Indian nation. Jammu region did not figure anywhere in this calculus. What is the tally of tourists visiting the valley and tourists visiting tourist spots in Jammu? What does the Jammu tourist development dossier with the government tell us about Jammu tourism? Can it enumerate the developmental projects paralleling the valley projects during the last decade? It is a sordid story of discrimination and abandonment. The fundamental grouse of the Jammu population is why the Jammu Division was not separated from Kashmir when the chemistry of the Reorganisation of J&K State was being churned on the 5th of August 2019. Did the BJP ever venture to assuage the hurt feelings of the Jammu region by compensating it with a mega-development; a monumental plan that would have contributed to a big change in the Jammu region’s economy, health, and youth employment features?… Finally, our sincere exhortation to the policy planners of BJP would be to chalk out a comprehensive plan for Jammu with two main components (a) grant the fullest measure of autonomy to Jammu, and (b) a comprehensive development plan that touches on all aspects of life — a 10-year plan of 20 billion rupees to give a new shape and figure to rural as well as urban Jammu.”
Significantly, only on November 2, 2019, K N Pandita suggested that the permanent capital of Jammu and Kashmir must be in Kashmir, and not in Jammu and that Jammu must make “sacrifice its interests” so that the Civil Secretariat, seat of the government of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, could be established in Kashmir permanently. K N Pandita has been living as a refugee in Jammu city since his migration on January 19, 1990.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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