NEW DELHI: Mufti Mohammed Sayeed has been accused of many things since he took charge as the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir on Sunday. Hurriyat apparatchiks have called him an Indian stooge. Indians of different political denominations have questioned his loyalty to the country’s constitution.

Pakistan, unsurprisingly, sees him as Delhi’s ploy to undermine its own influence in the disputed region. The Pakistan high commission in Delhi refused a visa to a spokesman for the Mufti’s Peoples Democratic Party. He was going to present his party’s post-election perspective to a Track-II meeting in Islamabad. Pakistanis didn’t want that.

The Urdu verse seems to fit the man nicely: Zaahid-i-tang nazar ne mujhe kaafir jaana/ Aur kaafir ye samajhta hai Musalmaa’n hoo’n mai’n. (The narrow-minded mullah believes I am a Hindu. The Hindu sees me as a devout Muslim.)

Know more: PDP-BJP alliance could be a ‘paradigm shift’ in Kashmir’s history: Mufti

After a fractured verdict in the elections to the Srinagar assembly, a more honest assessment of the 79-year-old leader might show he had done for Kashmir something that was as unthinkable as it was ever before.

The Mufti has single-handedly and very quietly got the ultra-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to its knees. His cabinet, including BJP MLAs, took the oath of office swearing allegiance to the constitution of Jammu and Kashmir, not India. This is the oath that his predecessors too had taken, but this was also the very oath that the BJP had sworn to abolish.

What else did the Mufti do that day? He made Prime Minister Narendra Modi sit at a swearing-in ceremony at which there were two sovereign flags — the Indian tricolour and the Kashmiri flag with its characteristic plough. The plough represents land reforms carried out under the leadership of Sheikh Abdullah, Indian Kashmir’s first post-independence leader of significance. It is said even India’s Left Front could not implement such far-reaching and equitable reforms as took place in Kashmir’s early days under Abdullah’s stewardship.

Though of a younger crop and with different political roots, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed has evolved in the mould of the Kashmiri stalwart, except that he came into the frame at the start of an unprecedented political turbulence in the state. The orgy of separatist violence and Indian occupation may have abated, but it has not yet been tamed completely.

It is perhaps a way of masking this major point of departure in the Kashmiri discourse that his detractors have focused on the Mufti’s praise for the Hurriyat and the militants and implicitly for Pakistan for letting peaceful elections take place two months ago.

A more attentive observer would have found an opposite nuance too in the chief minister’s comments about Pakistan. Though conciliatory in their essence, the comments were equally a backhanded compliment. An implication, as anyone could see, was that Islamabad was not only capable of interfering in the politics of the Indian administered part of Kashmir, but it was an active party to the subversion of peace.

That said, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed is a man of perseverance with an astute sense honed by decades of experience in Kashmir politics. This has stood him in good stead in crafting a fragile coalition with the BJP to return as chief minister for the second time.

He also has the distinction of being the only Muslim to have become India’s home minister. That is where the King Lear imagery comes into play. Like Shakespeare’s tragic hero, his eldest daughter Mehbooba Mufti, like Cordelia in the play, has largely shaped Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s political journey. And like King Lear one of his other two daughters, Rubaiya Saeed, nearly brought his political career to an abrupt end.

The Mufti had taken the oath as home minister in Delhi on Dec 2, 1989. Six days later Rubaiya was kidnapped. The Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, a pro-independence militant outfit, claimed responsibility for it through telephone calls. Their ransom: the release of five jailed colleagues.

The V.P. Singh government — then in power only for six days — hurriedly constituted a cabinet subcommittee including Inder Kumar Gujral. In Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir chief secretary Moosa Raza formed a special cell to tackle the crisis.

On Dec 10, the JKLF reiterated its demand: release the militants by 1900 hours or “Rubaiya’s body will be thrown within Srinagar city”. Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah was opposed to giving in, but Delhi had decided to free the militants.

Dec 13 saw Gujral landing in Srinagar with the prime minister’s orders to release Abdul Hamid Sheikh, Sher Khan, Noor Mohammad Kalwal, Altaf Ahemed and Javed Ahemed Jargar.

A couple of hours later Rubaiya was back with her family. The father reportedly exulted how Allah had saved his daughter but the security apparatus of which he was head frowned on the deal. Since then Mehbooba Mufti has been visiting the home of every Kashmiri Muslim martyr and displaced Hindu victim. She has been winning political credit and sympathy, using it to shore up her father’s political fortunes.

Everything in the common minimum programme of the BJP-PDP is really the Mufti’s agenda, including a frequently stalled move to make borders irrelevant between the two sides of the tragedy-prone region. The question remains: what did the BJP get from it?

Published in Dawn, March 5th, 2015

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