J&K: Mass transfers day before ECI announces polling dates

There is disquiet among political parties in Jammu and Kashmir over transfer of several hundred bureaucrats on Independence Day, 15 August. Officials were reportedly summoned from home on the national holiday to issue transfer orders which were delivered by the evening or on Friday morning, the day the Election Commission announced the staggered election in the union territory after a gap of 10 years. The National Conference urged the Election Commission to look into such massive transfers just the day before elections were announced on 16 August.

"Why has a massive reshuffle been ordered in the police and administration since last evening, and today morning, seemingly to pre-empt the Election Commission’s announcement? It appears to have been orchestrated by a BJP-appointed LG to benefit his party and its allies. This move seems clearly intended to undermine the integrity of the electoral process, which restricts such transfers to prevent the ruling party from gaining an undue administrative advantage over the opposition. The LG government has strategically shaken up the entire administrative setup compromising the principles of free and fair elections,” fumed the National Conference in a statement.

In any case the election will not be the same as before. There will be no representative from Ladakh in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly when people elect a new House in September after 10 years. The new House, pointed out commentators, has been reduced to the status of a glorified municipality by the union home ministry (MHA) which amended the business rules on 12 July this year. The executive notification expanded the powers of the Lieutenant Governor (LG) substantially, effectively reducing the status of the union territory to Puducherry, which too is a UT with an assembly.

The LG now is the final authority on all matters related to All India Services, in other words all senior civil and police officers serving in the UT. Several departments and agencies have been placed directly under the LG including the Anti-Corruption Bureau, the Directorate of Public Prosecutions, Prisons and the Jammu and Kashmir Forensic Science Laboratory. The LG will also have the final say in appointing the Advocate General and other law officers. His sanction will also be mandatory for the next government to obtain before granting or refusing prosecution sanctions or filing appeals in higher courts.

“J&K is now just a Union Territory, a centrally administered piece of real estate where all the key decisions about the region’s economy, ecology, land use and security will be taken by unelected officials acting on the instructions of the Union Home Minister and his representative, the Lieutenant Governor,” commented Siddharth Varadarajan in the Indian Cable. The union government had assured the Supreme Court that ‘statehood’ of some kind would be restored to J&K but had refused to give a timeframe.

The election, the first after the state was bifurcated into two UTs in August, 2019, also follows a hasty delimitation exercised widely criticised as designed to help the BJP. The drastically reshaped electoral map, described as gerrymandering (manipulation of electoral boundaries and seats to give undue advantange to one party), provided six extra seats to Jammu and one to the Valley, with the total number of seats remaining the same.

Yet, the announcement has been welcomed in Jammu and Kashmir because in the absence of elected representatives, ordinary people were facing difficulties in approaching bureaucrats, many of them from outside, for redressals and even routine work. “After our semi-autonomous status was revoked, the people of Jammu and Kashmir belonging to all walks of life have been suffering. We are witnessing babudom where people are thrust on us from above and function like viceroys. They have no political accountability,” Iltija Mufti, daughter and media advisor to former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti posted on X. For the ordinary people on the streets the elections have offered some hope that their lives might change for the better.

A newspaper report quoted the principal of a school saying, “I don’t have a count of how many times we were asked to line up for government functions where we had to wake up in the middle of the night, leave home before dawn to listen to top dignitaries speak or hoist the Tricolour.”  Education, he said, was the worst casualty during the past few years. The region is now racked by not just militant attacks but also a growing drug menace, prompting wisecracks that a film needed to be made on “Udta Kashmir”.

Before their statehood and special status under the Constitution were done away with in 2019, Kashmiris elected legislators to represent them every six years. The scrapping of Article 370 in August 2019 was supposed to ‘fully integrate’ J&K into the Indian Union – where assembly elections are held every five years.

Following the last election held in 2014 the BJP had tied up with the PDP led by Mehbooba Mufti to give the then state an unlikely coalition government; however, BJP had withdrawn support to the government in 2018 leading to the imposition of President’s Rule.