Farooq Khan was instrumental in establishing the Jammu and Kashmir Police’s counterinsurgency wing, now known as the special operations group, during the peak of the militancy in the early 1990s. But his career was attended by controversy. In 2000, when five men were killed in an alleged fake encounter in Pathribal in Anantnag district, he was the senior superintendent in charge. In April 2003, he was suspended by the state government for two and a half years. In September 2005, he was exonerated by the Central Bureau of Investigation.
At present, Farooq Khan handles food, civil supplies and consumer affairs, social welfare, tribal affairs, labour and employment, youth services and sports, among other departments.
The only person from outside Jammu and Kashmir to be part of the advisory council is Rajeev Rai Bhatnagar, who retired as director general of the Central Reserve Police Force. Bhatnagar is in charge of health and medical education, public works, irrigation and flood control, transport and animal husbandry in the union territory administration.
The most recent entrant to the advisory council is Baseer Ahmad Khan, appointed in March. This was soon after the Jammu and Kashmir High Court had expressed concern about the “inordinate delay” in framing charges in the Gulmarg land scam. Khan is one of the accused.
Baseer Khan was due to retire from the Indian Administrative Service on June 30, 2019. But as the government secretly geared up for sweeping changes to the state, it gave him a one-year extension, calling it a “special case”. When Jammu and Kashmir lost statehood, he was divisional commissioner of Kashmir. As advisor, Khan handles power development, rural development & panchayati raj, disaster management, culture, tourism and floriculture.
Also aiding the council is chief secretary BVR Subrahmanyam, a 1987-batch IAS officer of the Chhattisgarh cadre. He hails from Andhra Pradesh.
The chain of command
Kashmiri officers have vanished further down the chain of command as well. There were 58 Indian Administrative Officers in the state cadre of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir – the cadre has now been merged into the Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram-Union Territories cadre. Of those 58, only seven were Kashmiri Muslim. That included Shah Faesal, the star bureaucrat who went on to form his own political party. After August 5, he was among the scores of political leaders detained under the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, a preventive detention law. He remains under house arrest.
Key departments like home, finance, health, environment are headed by officers from outside Jammu and Kashmir. The only officer from the Kashmir Valley running an important department is Asgar Hassan Samoon, principal secretary for school education.
While Jammu division is headed by Sanjeev Verma, a local resident, Kashmir’s divisional commissioner, Pandurang Kondbarao Pole, hails from Maharashtra. In the 10 districts of the Valley, only four district commissioners are Kashmiri.
Meanwhile, the Jammu and Kashmir Police force is headed by Dilbag Singh from Punjab. Mukesh Singh from Delhi heads the police in the Jammu division and Vijay Kumar from Bihar is the inspector general of Kashmir. None of the five deputy inspector generals is from Kashmir. In the 13 police districts of the Kashmir Valley, only two are under the charge of Kashmiri superintendents.
Kashmiri judges are a minority in the Jammu and Kashmir High Court, too. Of the 11 sitting judges, only two are Kashmiri Muslim while two are Kashmiri Pandit.
A logjam
The August 5 decision also brought about a crucial change in the bureaucratic structure. While Jammu and Kashmir had special status, only 50% of its All India Service officers were direct recruits chosen through examinations held by the Union Public Service Commission. The other came from Kashmir service officers who were promoted into All India Services. In other states, 67% of the officers are direct recruits while only 33% are officers inducted from the state services. When Jammu and Kashmir lost special status, it also became subject to the 67:33 rule.
Central changes apart, internal wrangles have meant promotions are stalled in both the Kashmir Police Service and the Kashmir Administrative Service.
“You can blame the failure to induct local KPS officers into the Indian Police Service on three reasons,” said a senior police officer in the Valley, speaking off the record. “The seniority disputes between officers, litigation and the failure of state governments in the past. There’s no word on when it’s going to happen.”
Since 2009, no Kashmir Police Service officer has been promoted into the Indian Police Service. At present, all 66 Indian Police Services officers in the Jammu and Kashmir cadre are those who were recruited directly through examinations held by the Union Public Service Commission. The total strength of the Jammu and Kashmir Police’s IPS cadre is 147, out of which 80 posts are for direct recruits and 67 slots are reserved for those promoted from the state service. A majority of the posts now lie vacant.
There is a similar logjam with inductions from the Kashmir Administrative Service into the Indian Administrative Service. “There has been no induction into the IAS for more than 10-11 years because of the dispute over the seniority list of the 1999 KAS batch,” said a Kashmir Administrative Service officer who did not want to be named. “There have been petitions, counter petitions and all those discussions but so far the logjam hasn’t been broken.”
Had the dispute been solved in time, the officer calculated, 50 to 55 Kashmir Administrative Service officers would have been inducted into the Central service over the last decade.
A poor track record
Even within the state services, observers have noted that recruitments have been skewed against Kashmiris for years. Historian and former civil servant Khalid Bashir Ahmad notes that between 1995 and 2014, over 65% of the state services were made up of recruits from Jammu and about 32.7% by recruits from Kashmir. This despite the Kashmir division being the most populous region of the former state.
As for Kashmiri representation in the police, Ahmad traces a long history of marginalisation that goes back to Dogra times. “During the last 102 years for which record is available, out of 34 police chiefs in the Muslim majority Jammu and Kashmir, only 2 were Muslims,” he writes. “In Ghulam Jeelani Pandit, the state had its last Muslim police chief as back as in 1989.”
The former minister who was imprisoned after August 5 was unsurprised by this track record. “This is nothing new,” he shrugged. “But what’s happening now is the culmination of ultimate design of Hindutva which is the decimation of Kashmiri Muslims.”