THE first signs of trouble surfaced soon after Lt Gen S.K. Sinha took over as the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir in 2003, succeeding Girish Chandra Saxena, an apolitical and non-controversial governor. The state had seen a major political upheaval with the defeat of National Conference in the 2002 assembly polls and the new coalition government led by the PDP’s Mufti Mohammad Sayeed was at the peak of its enthusiasm. Sinha decided to be a proactive Governor, despite the controversies he created during his stint in Assam, where political parties had similar complaints against him.
In Jammu and Kashmir, Sinha began intervening, first with the counter-insurgency security grid. A retired general, his association with Kashmir had begun in October 1947, when as a young lieutenant he had fought against Pakistan. It seemed Sinha’s entire discourse on Kashmir was caught in the trenches of the 1947 war in which he lost his close friend, Major Som Nath Sharma. He enjoyed a lot of clout in the Army, and at times officers would listen to him more than to the elected leadership of the state.
The Mufti government was upset when Sinha started seeking reports from deputy commissioners and superintendents of police. These steps of the Governor led to much bitterness. At one point of time, the acrimony reached such levels that Sayeed boycotted a Unified Command Headquarters meeting called by visiting Union Home Minister Shivraj Patel. The Chief Minister is the chairman of the Unified Command Headquarters, the counter-insurgency grid of the state that includes the Army, paramilitary, police and the intelligence agencies.
The rivalry between Sinha and the ruling PDP took an ugly turn when the Amarnath Shrine Board, of which Sinha was chairman, unilaterally extended the duration of the yatra to two months. Traditionally, the yatra was a 15-days affair, which had been extended to a month. Sayeed rejected the extension, pleading both the additional burden on the security forces and the administration as well as concerns about the weather. Sinha, however, took a confrontational route and soon four Congress ministers from Jammu resigned over the issue. The Congress party had come under severe pressure to part ways with PDP on the matter. The crisis subsided after the intervention of the Congress high command but the animosity grew.
Sinha steadily pushed his own ideas. His Principal Secretary, Arun Kumar, directly wrote to the then Forest Secretary, Sonali Kumar—who was also his wife—and managed to get around 4,000 kanals of forestland transferred to the Shrine Board. This order was immediately struck down by the Government and a show-cause notice slapped on Sonali Kumar for making the transfer without following procedures, especially the compulsory cabinet approval.
However, when Ghulam Nabi Azad of the Congress took over as chief minister, the relations with Raj Bhavan improved. But Sinha harboured a larger idea of his own “solution to Kashmir problem”. He followed his agenda till the day he left Srinagar. Sinha came up with several measures, thinking that promotion of the Hindu past of Kashmir would help increase pro-India sentiment in the Valley. He wanted to create avenues and institutions for a “patriotic” version of research into Kashmir’s history, politics and conflict in the Kashmir and Jammu universities.
He also came up with the idea of Operation Sadbhavna in which the Army would help renovate Kashmir’s Sufi shrines and mosques. Sinha, however, found himself in a controversy as the people started saying the step was aimed at creating a sectarian divide in Kashmir.
A few months ago, Sinha directly wrote to J-K Deputy Chief minister Muzaffar Hussain Beig seeking forest land in Nunwan, Pahalgam and Baltal and the setting up of an independent development authority run by Raj Bhavan. The Government didn’t agree to the proposal for an independent development authority but did simultaneously diverted 800 kanals of forestland to the Shrine Board in May.

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