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| Jaitley-Sabbarbal misleading people on WG report | | |
BY RUSTAM
JAMMU, JAN 11: The RSS-sponsored Jammu and Kashmir People’s Forum (JKPF) organized a meeting At Jammu Club on January 10. Seven members of the Working Group on Centre-State Relations (WGCSR) participated in the meeting, which was attended mostly by the BJP leaders and Sangh Parivar activists. The members of WGCSR who attended the meeting included BJP leader and Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley, MLAs Ashwini Sharma and Harsh Dev Singh, Ladakh Union Territory Front (LUTF) leader and former Member of Parliament Thupstan Chhewang, Panun Kashmir chairman Dr Ajay Chrungoo, Samajwadi Party president Sheikh Abdul Rehman and advocate Surrinder Singh.
The meeting was organized specifically to listen to the members of the WGCSR and know what exactly transpired in the Working Group meetings. All of them were one as far as the condemnation of the Justice Sageer Ahmed’s report was concerned. Everyone took the Justice to task for preparing, finalizing and submitting the report to Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah in a hush, hush manner without the approval of the members of the Working Group. Everyone rejected the report saying it had perhaps been drafted by the ruling National Conference and that Justice Sageer Ahmed had simply signed it. One of the members of the Working Group even asserted that “had Justice Sageer Ahmed been a serving judge, he would have been impeached”. Everyone repudiated the report saying it was not just anti-Jammu, anti-Ladakh and anti-religious and ethnic minorities, but also anti-India.
In fact, everyone emphasized the need for opposing tooth and nail the Justice Sageer Ahmed report and urged the people cutting across party lines to prepare themselves for a full-scale movement so that New Delhi is prevented from taking any action on the fundamentally Kashmir and separatist-centric report. It was the positive outcome.
However, the most disturbing aspect of the whole meeting was the role of the convener of the JKPF, Ramesh Sabbarbal (RSS activist) and Arun Jaitley. The convener of the forum dumbfounded everyone in the meting when he said that the “Justice Sageer Ahmed’s report is vague”. The report is not vague. It clearly recommends maximum possible autonomy to the state; it clearly asks the Prime Minister to consider the self-rule document as and when the People’s Democratic Party submits it; it rejects outright the demands put forth by those representing Jammu and Ladakh and representing several religious and ethnic minorities, including internally-displaced Kashmiri Hindus and Gujjar and Bakerwal Muslims; and it repudiates outright the demands of the hapless refugees from West Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied-Jammu and Kashmir and the border migrants of 1965 and 1971.
It can be said that the convener of the JKPF insulted the deeply concerned members of the WGCSR at the very outset by terming the otherwise definite recommendations and suggestions as contained in the Justice Sageer Ahmed’s report as “vague”. Perhaps, the RSS-sponsored JKPF wants to deflect the people’s attention away from the real issue in order to facilitate the Kashmiri separatists’ anti-India agenda. Everyone now knows that there are elements in the RSS and its political organ, BJP, who have made up their mind to compromise the Indian position on Jammu and Kashmir and give credibility to the communal politics in Kashmir.
The presentation made by Arun Jaitley of the BJP was no less disturbing. Particularly his formulation that the prime cause responsible for the unrest in Kashmir or the ongoing secessionist struggle in Kashmir is the refusal on the part of Pakistan to accept Kashmir as an integral part of India was all the more disturbing. What he said regarding the origin of Kashmir problem established that Arun Jaitley is blissfully ignorant about the real cause responsible for the ongoing separatist movement in Kashmir.
Yes, it is true that Pakistan considers Kashmir as an unfinished agenda of the communal partition of the country. But it is also a fact that the problem facing the Indian nation in Kashmir is psychological. The Kashmiri Muslims (read Kashmiri-speaking Sunnis) believe that they are a distinct nation and hence, they are not willing to remain within the Hindu-majority India. It other words, the problem facing the Indian nation in Kashmir is the concept of nationalism the Kashmiri Muslim leadership advocates – concept which is both religious and territorial in character and implications.
Even the Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has candidly acknowledged that the conflict between India and Pakistan is ideological and that “Pakistan is ready to wage a 1,000-year war with India over the Kashmir dispute”. He said so while addressing a joint-session of the Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir Assembly just five days ago (January 7) in Muzaffarabad and made it loud and clear that “this is a war of ideologies and would last for generations”.
That Arun Jaitley, instead of focusing on the real and deeper causes responsible for the Indian troubles in Jammu and Kashmir, put forth confusing and misleading formulations only suggest that the party to which he belongs doesn’t want to learn lessons from history and that it is no different from other “secular” formations whose single-point agenda is to garner votes and enjoy the loaves and fishes of office.
It needs to be recalled that the role played by Arun Jaitley in the Working Group meetings was also highly controversial. The Working Group was a forum which should have been used by the BJP leader to contest those demanding autonomy and self-rule. But he did not do so. Instead, he suggested that the Working Group should discuss non-controversial issues, development-related issues and so on. He took this stand despite the fact that the votaries of autonomy and self-rule were quite forthright and assertive.
The truth, in short, is that the BJP leader and the newly-created JKPF have disappointed the nationalist camp as well as those working for the empowerment of the neglected regions and the marginalized communities in the state. They have established that their agenda is different and that they want to accommodate communal and separatist politics which is being indulged in by the Kashmiri leaders.
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