It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma — this business of releasing the Kashmir separatist spearhead Masarat Alam. Truth is a clear victim in the public controversy centring around his release. Neither the Jammu and Kashmir Government of Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, nor the central government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to have levelled with the people about the circumstances attendant upon his release. Unless there is a deeper design behind keeping these facts from the public, it can be a simple case of gross ineptitude on the part of the two governments. For, on the surface, facts are so simple that they should have been told at the very beginning, if for nothing else than to ensure that no controversy was caused by Alam’s release. Alam could no longer be held by the government due to the repeated failure of the prosecution to convince the relevant courts, which granted him bail on all cases that had been slapped against him. In as many as 27 separate cases, he had secured bail as many times, with the prosecution failing each time to make a case to detain him. Again, under the Public Security Act, a district magistrate can detain a suspect for up to two years without trial. Failure to follow up with charges would inevitably lead to the detainee’s release. Alam, a hardcore separatist who has been in and out of prison since the early 1990s, was detained a second time under PSA after the stone-throwing protests of 2010-11. The review board, comprising retired high court judges, quashed his detention and ordered his release. Now, it turns out that weeks before the formation of the PDP-BJP Government, when the state was still under governor’s rule, the state home department wrote to the centre about Alam’s detention, saying that there was no valid reason to hold him any longer, after his detention had been quashed by a magistrate. Three days after Sayeed assumed office of the Chief Minister, orders were finally issued to release him. So, the question is why these facts were not revealed to the people in the first place. Were these facts hidden in order to take some of the sting out of the PDP’s extraordinary decision to form the government with its long-time ideological foe, the BJP? Did Sayeed seek to pull wool over his supporters in the Valley by suggesting that he, in defiance of the BJP, had released the hardcore separatist? In other words, the PDP leadership was keen to make political capital out of the release of Alam, which had become unavoidable anyway, following a series of strong court orders in favour of the hardline Kashmir leader. However, Sayeed can be excused for wanting to exploit the court-mandated release of Alam to score brownie points from his own hardcore constituency in the Valley, but what about the central government? Did Home Minister Rajnath Singh handle the issue with due tact and political wisdom? The answer is a firm no. For, if the letter from the J&K Home Secretary to the relevant official in the Union Home Ministry informing about the judicial difficulty of holding Alam came in early this February, Singh ought to have been in a position to nip the public controversy in the bud by informing Parliament about that simple fact. No one would have taken it amiss if Alam was being let out of prison due to a court order. Even the highest court in the land has frowned upon indefinite detention of people without any valid charges being filed during a prescribed period of time.
Indeed, better communication between the Sayeed and the Modi Governments would have saved both the blushes. Home Minister Singh did not quite marshal the facts of the case, which, if disclosed, would have effectively stilled any chance of a controversy, and, instead, he went off on a tangent, saying he was against the release and that he would get the facts from the state government. The truth is that Singh’s ministry had all the facts with it. These could have silenced the critics of the court-ordered release of Alam. But the Union Home Minister, as is his wont on such occasions, broke into highfalutin rhetoric, in the style of an AIR news reader, and created a highly avoidable controversy. Telling the truth, especially when it fully exonerates you of any charge of wrongdoing, ought to have been the home minister’s best, and first defence. But then you require leadership skills and political savvy to blunt the Opposition in Parliament. Rajnath Singh woefully lacks both those qualities.
