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.