Neha
JAMMU, Mar 19: Proud and chivalrous Dogras ruled over Kashmir, which was merged with the great Jammu Kingdom on March 16, 1846 under the Treaty of Amritsar, signed between Raja of Jammu, Gulab Singh, and British Government, for 101 years and handed down to the people a Government which was benign, fair, efficient,
tolerant and all-inclusive, notwithstanding some aberrations here and there considering the nature of the times.
Even a casual student of history of Jammu and Kashmir pre and post-1947 will at once come to the conclusion that while the Dogras evolved and implemented policies aimed at benefiting all the regions and all sections of society, Kashmiri leaders, who have been ruling the State after October 1947, when Maharaja of the State acceded Jammu and Kashmir to India under the Indian Independence Act of 1947, have been maltreating the people of Jammu and Ladakh, exploiting them and their natural resources and systematically excluding them from all walks of life. (The Dogra rulers, like today's New Delhi, in fact, accorded a special treatment to Kashmir.)
The Kashmiri ruling elite, which believes in the obnoxious two-nation theory, pursues an exclusivist ideology and which has been poisoning the minds of the Kashmiri Muslims (in this case members of a particular religious sect that has established its stranglehold over the State's polity, economy and social institutions) against India, has created a situation that has compelled the people of Jammu province and Ladakh region to demand permanent separation from Kashmir. Not only the people of Jammu and Ladakh, but even the Kashmiri Hindus, who were forced to quit their original habitat in early 1990, have been demanding separate homeland in the Valley saying they cannot co-exist with those who evicted them from their homes and hearths to establish a particular type of system in the Kashmir valley.
If the ruling elite, in collaboration with New Delhi whom it otherwise hates, has been destroying Jammu and Ladakh socially, culturally, economically and politically and grabbing the Government and forest land in Jammu and changing its demographic profile (courtesy: Jammu leadership), the biased, fake and fundamentalist students of Jammu and Kashmir history are busy in castigating the Treaty of Amritsar and abusing and insulting the proud Dogras, who have from time to time after October 1947 defeated the Kashmiri leadership and punctured its anti-India crusade. The people of Jammu and Ladakh continue to do even now.)
Last week, two fake Kashmiri students of history, one who calls himself a secular historian and the other who teaches history, came out with two highly nasty political essays on the Treaty of Amritsar and the Dogras of Jammu, including the Dogra Maharajas. These were, in fact, not essays on the Treaty under which Jammu and Kashmir State came into being; these were provocative essays written for abusing and insulting the Dogra Maharajas. These extremists condemned the Treaty of Amritsar and Dogras, but nowhere demanded separation of Kashmir from Jammu and Ladakh. One anti-Dogra essay ("Revisiting the treaty of Amritsar") appeared on March 14 and the other ("Sale of Kashmir: A day we want to forget") appeared on March 16.
What did they write in the out-and-out anti-Dogra essays? The essay that appeared on March 14, among other nasty things, said: "An adequate understanding of historical events especially those that have largely been responsible for adversities of a nation (read Kashmiri Muslims) is even more vital for beneath them lays the real cause of its humiliation. The Treaty of Amritsar which is completing its 167th year today, the 16th of March 2013, is one such baleful event. It is this Treaty that is at the core of the problem Kashmir is so desperately grappling with for the last so many decades and the public grasp of which is at the lowest ebb...If there has ever been a catastrophe to hit Kashmir politically, devastate it economically, ruin it socially and bash it psychologically, it is this Treaty. Bruising the Kashmiri pride massively the Treaty of Amritsar; nay the Treaty of Melancholy, was negotiated to thrust upon Kashmir by those born in alien territories and brought up in an unfamiliar ethos: the British and their cohorts (read Dogras) who with their sharply divergent civilizational moorings and racial stocks were neither related to nor acquainted with the hapless victims; its inhabitants (read Kashmiri Muslims). These disparate people combined together at a very critical juncture of history and conspired to bring Kashmir to their heels; perpetrating, thereby, a heinous crime the parallel of which is hardly ascertainable in the history of any nation in the universe…The plot they (read the British, the Sikh and the Dogras) hatched was outrageously so scandalous, so immoral, so wicked, so treacherous and so disgraceful that it continues infuriating people of all shades of opinion and ideology in Kashmir even after the elapsing of 167 years since its inception…the Treaty of Melancholy inflicted on the unfortunate people through the feudal route of Hindu autocracy that it brought in its wake to throttle the indigenous institutions of repute and the healthy economy beyond redemption…The most terrorizing trickery of this size ever experimented in history was too haughty to recognize the people anything beyond chattel worthy of nothing but to be sold in the open souk for such a little amount as 2 rupees per head. Opened up in the vicinity of Amritsar far away from their home turf the British market managers tried almost everything to entice buyers for their newly acquired possession, Kashmir, and finally picked, among a multitude of prospective buyers, only one Gulab Singh as their client as he alone had volunteered to pay them what the dilapidated resources and growing bankruptcy of the Lahore Darbar and its feudal lords had declined…It was a good bargain for both the parties; the vendor received a booty and suzerainty in exchange and the bargain hunter got a sizeable chunk of fertile lands, for a paltry sum of 7500000 Nanak Shahi rupees, he had not dreamt of even in his wildest imagination. With a nominal price fixed on each soul sold along with an assortment of belongings: hutments, land, animals and even water and air, as famously lamented by Poet Iqbal, it was really the most profitable business ever indulged in by any oriental king, prince or raja…This is how a whole nation of simple and trouble-free people was sacrificed at the altar of a new paradigm of political merchandize…Cunningness, wickedness and immorality these were all brought together to enact this drama brazenly and negotiate 'the Sale Deed' to weave the mesh of Kashmir's unending subjugation and servitude…" (To be concluded) |
