My job is to install an elected chief minister in Srinagar,” Paddy told us on an August evening in 1996. Elections to the Jammu and Kashmir assembly, the first after the outbreak of insurgency in the late 1980s, had been called. He had called some of us on the defence beat to his Lodhi Estate home for a farewell drink, before leaving for Udhampur to take charge as the northern army commander.
We took it with large gulps and a pinch of salt. Elections to the J&K assembly had been called and called off several times, once from Ouagadougou. No joke! Narasimha Rao had announced J&K polls on a 1995 midnight from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Now, in 1996, prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda had called for polls again, and was sending Lt.-Gen. S. Padmanabhan to sanitise the valley. Sceptical scribes, we thought either the polls would soon be called off citing rising violence, or that Paddy, then the army’s spymaster (journalese for director-general, military intelligence) would do a 1987.
1987, if you don’t know, was when J&K had had its last polls, which was rigged to the core. A winning Syed Salahuddin got so pissed off on being declared loser that he crossed over to PoK, graduated from the academies of terror, obtained a Master’s in remote-bombing, and returned to set up his Hizbul Mujahideen.
Illustration: Deni Lal
But Paddy was too military-straight to rig polls. He had earlier tackled insurgency as a corps commander, and knew how to keep the badmashes—his word for militants—in check from interfering with the polls. To cut a long poll campaign short, Paddy’s dashing presence in the strife-torn state gave a free hand to the Election Commission to hold free and fair polls with few guns or grenades going off. Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference, which had boycotted the earlier-held Lok Sabha polls, joined the fray after the PM promised “maximum autonomy”. More than half the voters voted; Farooq was installed CM.
Today, if Jammu and Kashmir has come a long way from the ‘insurrecting’ 1990s, Padmanabhan had a stellar role in effecting the transformation. The very fact that the current round of polls has been announced, along with Haryana’s, by the three commissioners at a routine press meet in Delhi, shows that the valley of fear has turned into a valley of hope.
Indeed! In one master-stroke of the pen five years ago, the Narendra Modi regime cut the Gordian knot of Article 370 that had been tied around the constitutional neck of the republic. The state has since been cut into two, and its statehood taken away. Other things remaining equal and Jammu getting to normal, the Ladakhless J&K will join Delhi and Puducherry as the third Union territory with an elected assembly in October. And statehood, one hopes, is a short hop away.
A word more about Paddy. He retired as chief in 2002, after mobilising the army for Op Parakram in the wake of the attack on Parliament. The boys stood mobilised for 10 months till the 2002 assembly polls, the last feather to adorn Paddy’s cap.
The Vajpayee regime offered him the Assam Raj Bhavan, but Paddy chose to retire and write books. A bad decision—for, the hand that had wielded the sword of honour so well was no good with the pen. I found his first book so badly edited that I wrote a nasty review in THE WEEK. “You did to my book what a dog would do to a lamp-post,” he told me in mock anger when we met next. “But I like your professionalism. You didn’t allow our friendship to colour your judgment.”
Cheers, general! You had a golden heart! Rest in peace, sir; Kashmir will remember you fondly.
prasannan@theweek.in