Politicians have a knack for saying one thing and doing something else. They master the skills of claiming one position while actually occupying another. This difference of their positions becomes more pronounced when seen and analyzed in context of space and time. For instance, recall what all the Peoples Democratic Party used to say and do when it was struggling to establish itself as a regional political alternative and then compare it to what it used to say when it was in power until few months, and then compare the same yet again with what it is saying today when it is no longer in command of the things here. One could also refer to the political positions and pronouncements of this party just prior to the 2014 Assembly elections and thereafter. Or for that matter as a principal opposition party during the 2010 civil unrest and then during 2016 unrest when this party itself was in power.
National Conference too has been no different. There is actually not much difference between the two regional majors in terms of their interaction with their principal support base – the people of Kashmir. Out of power they speak one language; in power, a different one! And these days both these groups are at their rhetorical best, trying to win back their respective support bases whim they have squandered squarely when they were in power.
Indeed a cursory look at the world politics also churns out countless such examples. When Barak Obama was campaigning for the Democrat nomination for president in 2008, he differentiated between himself and fellow candidate Hillary Clinton by criticizing her plan to use a mandate — by which government forces citizens to buy healthcare — as an “enforcement mechanism” to “charge people who don’t have healthcare”. He claimed the use of a mandate for those purposes was something he couldn’t go along with, something that demonstrated a “genuine difference” between himself and Clinton. However, in April 2012, Obama, by now comfortably settled as the US President, urged the Supreme Court not to rule against the mandate in ‘ObamaCare’ because his healthcare reforms cannot survive “in the absence of an individual mandate”.
Such flip-flops and duplicitous positions of the political leaders are endemic as politics has, world-over, more or less same set of rules and everybody active in the political arena goes by them almost identically. “You can say what you have to say to get over the hump, but once you’re over the hump, you do whatever you want to do.” In other words, it’s okay to present yourself as someone siding with the have-nots, those who have been and are being wronged – the ordinary people – for the purposes of securing power, and once you’ve secured that power it is perfectly acceptable to revert to who (and what) you really are – the keeper of the haves, the powerful!
This is also demonstrated in an example of Vladimir Lenin in pre-communist Russia. Lenin said that “the government has the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns it will be through the bullet.” And so it was. Isn’t it true for the politics between New Delhi and Srinagar, as well as in the politics conducted from two mansions in Gupkar for and with rest of the Valley?
As is clear from Lenin’s example, our politicians talk one way while out of power in order to get into power. And once they wrest power, they use every force available to them — violence included — to maintain that power and privilege. Our politicians may denounce Lenin for his ideology and beliefs, but in practice they follow him with utmost religious reverence!
