A Quisling too many

Among the many reasons why we study history, one is the wisdom we are supposed to gain, so that errors committed in the past do not get repeated.

This belief seems little grounded on facts when we see people indulging in those precise behaviors which facilitated occurrences of tragedies in the yore.

At one level, we have a situation where profligate governance and red tapism has brought the country back to the economic brink of 1991. Then, as we see now, the leadership was engaged in platitudes and character assassination of political opponents rather than on governance, all while being deeply committed the failed & discredited socialist model of economy.

While the economic ills plaguing the nation are certainly debilitating, concerted policy and decision making can still salvage the situation. What is more serious and will certainly have a much longer terms implication are political acts, at times committed by the righteous but most of the time, guided by those intending to serve narrow self interest.
 

Our Nation has had more than its fair share of quislings. If the Nation saw Ambhi helping the Greeks over 2400 years back, a more devastating help was offered by Jaichand of Kannuaj in the second millennium. If Chittor was laid to dust by the covert helping of Raghav Chetan to Alauddin, Ranthambhore was sacked not by the Sultan, but by the mechanisms of Bhoj Deva. And anyway, it was Shah Waliullah, who had invited the Emir of Afghanistan to restore India to its pristine Islamic glory! If one were to think that such seditious acts were limited to people looking for personal political glory, one would be mistaken. KM Munshi chronicles in his work, Jai Somnath, the travails of Shivrashi, an ordained Shaivaite priest, who guided Mahmud Ghazni to the weak defences to the temple city, helping him wreak devastation on the Hindu psyche. Shivrashi was not guided by personal glory. He believed that the head priest and the king had lost moral authority to officiate and hence wanted them removed to restore Dharma!

Sadly for our Nation, the long, very long list of people who helped invaders and bloodthirsty maniacs is still getting added to. At a more organizational level, first we had the Communists and now the Maoists who look to USSR/China as the model state and wish to turn India into a vassal again. We have continued to have organized groups of separatists operating from foreign sanctuaries, seeking to help destroy India with foreign help. To cap it all, we have always had motley individuals; self declared one-person nations, who in their insatiable hunger for attention, go around making incredulous claims against the Indian people.

What has changed over the last few years is that sustained Institutional support to such individuals/institutions is now being offered by the Indian state itself. The spectacle of ‘activists’ holding seminars and conferences on foreign lands, holding seminars in India but getting people with pronounced anti India/anti Hindu leanings to harangue on their pet hates and petitioning foreign bodies with a long list of imagined grievances, is to put it mildly, dangerous. What can the attempt to get foreign judicial bodies intervene in Indian issues be called, if not seditious? Unless legal credulity is stretched to the extremes, how can acts committed by foreign individuals, in foreign lands and on foreign people be tried in some other country?

There are groups which are trying to get indictments against sundry Sikh politicians and of course, the pet hate of the so called liberal sects of India in the UK, USA and Canada. Just imagine a situation where some court does proclaim some Indian leader a proclaimed offender and issues warrants for his/her arrests? Will police of that Nation land up in India (with permission of the Indian Government) or will that Nation conduct an Abbottabad like expedition. In case the said Nation desist from taking up such ambitious acts, will it proceed to issue a red corner Interpol notices against the ‘offender’?

For those who would be ecstatic with glee at such an event befalling their pet ogre, let that glee be tempered with the awareness that at the receiving end, may not be their hates alone. Only a couple of years back, a US Court upheld the rights of Narain Kataria and a few others to continue their libelous and distasteful campaign against Sonia Gandhi in the USA. What if some people file a case in some court, either in USA or UK or even in Nepal or Mauritius against some worthies on grounds of massive corruption or on restriction of right to practice and propagate their Hindu religion? If this sounds fanciful, what about a scenario where some Mirpuri files a case against the Indian Defence established on some ground of Human Rights violation in Kashmir. While some ‘liberals’ may find such event warming cockles of their hearts, will the Indian establishment respond with equal glee?

How will that impact India? Extension of legal jurisdiction to India would automatically mean that India is not Sovereign Nation. Without much ado, our Nation would have lost a short lived independence and come back under foreign yoke.

Political faultlines run deep in the most advanced of democracies. The visceral hatred of the Democrats against George Bush did not result in senior Democrats berating Bush in foreign lands, condemning him in Op-Eds in foreign publications, even as exalted as the Times of India or pontificating on NDTV/IBN Live on why Bush was evil personified.

For all the pretence of a disdain for the West, our people still fall over each other to gain acceptance as a ‘progressive’ in the western sense. While the so called liberal otherwise sees the USA is as an emblem of the worst model of a capitalist and hegemonic state, a singular act of this country denying visa to their pet hate, makes the ‘liberal’ become a ‘visa-denial-thumper’.

Just what were those 65 MPs (incidentally 64 as MA Jinnah has signed both as a Lok Sabha and a Rajya Sabha member) trying to achieve? A curtain raiser to their lurking request to ‘righteous’ Nations to march into India, if horrors of horrors, their pet hate does becomes the Prime Minister of India?

The Road Much Travelled

It is not very often that communal riots, particularly which see the number of dead running into single digits, get raised in the parliament. At the same time, it is also not often that a local skirmish in a single village sparks off chain events in nine adjoining districts of the region. While it is sad that Jammu had to yet again undergo the cataclysm of riots, the only very thin silver lining in this otherwise dark cloud is a hitherto unseen appreciation of the fact that communal fault-lines in Jammu are strong enough to tear the region asunder.

For a very long time, the general public have been made to believe by the Government and the media that the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir is a non sectarian land and that a common thread of Kashmiriyat, seeded and nurtured by generations of Sufism, had made those citizens truly secular. So far as the secessionist movement is concerned, it has been painted as the result of disillusionment of the youth, a feeling which was completely independent of the religious identity of people demanding azadi.

If the contemptuous assertions that the Kashmiri Pandit migrated en masse of his free will and in connivance with the evil Jagmohan were not enough, we have been fed stories on how the Amarnath Yatra and the Kheer Bhavani fairs are supported by the local Muslims, the economic benefits being purely an irrelevant afterthought.

While the above tales were probably meant to control Hindu retaliation elsewhere, the general belief in the rarefield public decision making offices, which is supposed to be aware of ground realities, that the entire secessionist movement was restricted to the Kashmir Valley alone and that the general population of Jammu and Ladakh were absolutely pro-India, belies credulity.

This commentator may be accused of generalizing stray observations and presenting it as applicable for the entire region. However, when that generalization is seemingly proved by sequential events and evidence to the contrary seems absent, the hypothesis stands validated. Those interested in more details may refer to the post ‘Oh Kashmir’

It was only a few weeks back that Ramban was hit by skirmishes, instigated by a local Imam maliciously claiming that a copy of the Quran had been desecrated. The initial disturbances were only a precursor to riotous mobs chanting Azadi slogans taking over the town. Now, we have the spectacle of Azadi demanding mobs taking over Kishtwar and other Muslim majority areas of Jammu.

The reality was and still remains that other than the two and a half undivided districts of the Jammu region and the Leh district of Ladakh, the rest of the state of Jammu & Kashmir identifies itself as a body united in its desire for Azadi. This independence is not independence for political ends. Few even in J&K are unaware that residents of Pakistani occupied portions of the State have received a much worse deal compared to them. Hence, the demand for azadi is merely the yearning to fulfill the unfinished agenda of partition, which is securing a land of the pure, made even more pristine by the absence of those who do not follow the doctrine of the ‘pure’.

Communal riots in J&K are not a new phenomenon. The 1931 skirmish which resulted in cold blooded killing of 31 Muslims by the Dogra troops resulted in an uprising which immediately morphed into large scale attacks on Hindu lives and properties across all regions of the State. In 1947-48, it was not the Pakistani troops and Tribal invaders alone who targeted the Hindu population across areas which are called POK today. Perhaps only a few care to remember that not only did the towns of Mirpur, Muzaffarabad, Gilgit and Skardu have large Hindu populations, the countryside, right upto Gilgit had significant pockets of Hindu presence. Just a few weeks of mayhem and the entire POK was cleansed of non-Muslim presence.

The more informed amongst us, particularly of the liberal variety, justifiably condemn the disgraceful conduct of Dogra troops when they, by their inaction, became party to massacre of Muslims in some Hindu majority areas of Jammu. However, what many forget is that overall; the conduct of the Muslim Police in Jammu was all the more reprehensible as it was an active participant in the massacre of Hindus, particularly in areas of mixed population. Unlike what many would now like us to believe, the mayhem in Indian areas of Jammu were plain communal riots in which there were a large number of casualties from both the communities.

The events of 1947-48 were not isolated in nature. Riots have recurred with nauseating frequency in the districts of Ramban, Doda and Kishtwar. True, the casualties were never as high as those in many other parts of the country but unlike those riots, the design behind communal unrest in J&K has always been more sinister. On a very statistical level, the absence of a large number of dead does not necessarily denote that the riots were minor, particularly when the number of dead is juxtaposed against the small populations of these districts. The Kashmiri Pandit community too faced around a thousand direct killings in the last few years leading to their forced exodus. The relatively small number against the supposed much larger number of Muslim casualties are sought to be presented as proofs that the terrorist movement in J&K is non-sectarian in nature. However, this half truth cleverly glosses over the fact that the thousand odd dead belonged to a small minority of some three lakhs, who overall comprised only some five percent of the Valley’s population. In effect it meant that almost each extended family was directly impacted by the terrorist activity – in form of a dead cousin, uncle, nephew or in-laws.

The forced exile of Kashmiri Pandits was not an overnight event. Disempowered and discriminated against by the rulers, target of frequent riots, the targeted brutal public killings of 1989, threat letters and public warnings from mosques, the Kashmiri Hindu took recourse to the only option he had. He left, perhaps never to return, the land of his forefathers with only his life and barest of necessities as his possessions. The residual Hindu community, holed up in villages continued to be the target of both the terrorists and the locals alike and today, barely three thousand Hindus survive, if it can be called such, in the Valley.

In this land of the pure, Anantnag and Verinag of 1986 are history and will never be repeated. After all, one needs an adversary to riot against. Still, the Valley is not tranquil. Each summer, the Valley denizens manage to find some issue to rally around and vent their hatred for India. Be it Shopian, Amarnath Land Transfer, Summer of 2010, hanging of Afzal Guru or simply alleged army high-handedness, each demonstration becomes the excuse for vandalizing of a few more temples and beating up of the residual Hindus and migrant labour population in the Valley.

Some amongst us might remember that the in the immediate afterglow of success of their ethnic cleansing strategy in Kashmir, the terrorists had tried to replicate the same formulae of targeted killings and public warnings in the undivided Doda district of Jammu. A series of massacres, specifically targeting the minority Hindu community, raised the specter of yet another forced exodus in the State. Fortunately for the country, at helm was a Prime Minister, who believed in securing his countrymen. It was PV Narasimha Rao who was instrumental in creating the Village Defence Committees, which managed to secure the Doda district against the nefarious designs of the terrorists.

This bulwark against the secessionist movement and indeed the safeguard against yet another forced exile of the Hindu minority is obviously not palatable to the secessionist forces of the State. While the likes of Geelani and Yasin Malik have long called for disbanding of these committees, now the Chief Minister of the State has joined their ranks. That this demand does not arise from some intellectual conviction is starkly obvious when we realize that this worthy does not appear to know that February in a non-leap year has only 28 days! Be it the demand for revocation of the AFSPA or the pre-1953 autonomy for the state, there appears little difference in between the political and secessionist belief systems in the Valley. With a Central Government indifferent to their plight, it will not be long before the hapless Hindu minority of the Muslim majority districts of Jammu gets overwhelmed and is forced to share the fate of their co-religionists from across the Pir Panjal.

Not only should the Village Defence Committees not be disbanded, for the very simple reason that the secessionist movement is still on, it is imperative that the artificial state of Jammu & Kashmir, an agglomeration of disparate people and geographical entities, brought together only by the expansionist zeal of the Dogra Kings, be restored to its natural boundaries. Not only will a trifurcation of the State on geographical lines secure the Hindu and Buddhist minorities of Jammu and Ladakh, drawing of new borders and a new political establishment will ensure that secessionist sympathies in the new states are crushed comprehensively.

It is likely that any move to trifurcate the state will face resistance from the secessionists as the dominant view in those circles seem to center around allowing only the heavily Hindu majority districts of Udhampur, Reasi and Kathua to separate from the State. The National Conference, it its controversial report on Regional Autonomy, which suspiciously mirrored the recommendations of the ISI backed Kashmir Study Group, has sought division of the Jammu & Ladakh regions on communal lines. The Muslim majority districts of Jammu and Ladakh have been positioned as the Pir Panjal & Chenab and the Kargil divisions respectively.  Such arguments cannot be accepted as none of the Indian States with mixed majorities saw such granular partition. Had that been the case, Thar Parkar and Umerkote districts of Sindh and Chittagong from East Bengal would have been ceded to India. The trifurcation of J&K has to be on geographical lines alone, to protect the land and its people from an otherwise certain descent into chaos. The need of the hour is not some high sounding politically correct pontification but firm actions to secure large sections of our Nation from its adversaries.