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| Stay away from Hari Niwas- APDP | | `It is a haunted place and spells doom’ | |
Early Times Report
Srinagar, Jan 16: The association of the parents of disappeared persons (APDP) has accused the Chief Minister of destroying material evidence of custodial torture by facilitating renovation of Hari Niwas Palace. The association has urged the Chief Minister to shelve the plan in the best `interests of justice.'
The government has plans to turn the erstwhile palace into a guest house for VVIPs. Orders to this effect were issued last year by the general administrative department. After renovation the erstwhile palace shall be taken over by the hospitality and protocol department. .
The APDP members believe converting Hari Nivas for hospitality of diplomats and ambassadors was state’s new policy to camouflage these structures where innocent were tortured. According to them, the decision to convert it into a state guest house will destroy vital evidence of killings and custodial torture and thus hamper administration of justice.
The APDP issued an appeal to all the embassies at New Delhi last year urging the diplomats to refrain from staying in the `haunted palace’. The appeal read: “The government has been using the erstwhile palace as a torture chamber since 1985. Thousands of souls have been tortured in it. Many of them died or have been subjected to enforced disappearance. Hundreds of bodies must have been buried in the nearby forest. Vital evidence has already been lost as the government renovated the palace recently. And, if you choose to stay in this torture chamber, it will amount to rubbing salt into our wounds.”
Notwithstanding the protests of the APDP, the government is believed to have undertaken the work of converting the historic structure into a guest house.
The palace has a chequered history. Like APDP members, noted historian, Fida Muhammad Hasnain also believes that the palace was inauspicious. “Maharaja Hari Singh was cautioned against constructing the Hari Niwas Palace at the place where it stands now.”
Fida writes on page 122 of his book Historic Kashmir.
”Hari Singh had a great sense of aesthetic taste. He selected the shores of the famous Dal Lake for building his royal palaces. The place selected by him was the sloes of the Zabarwan hills which in the past was a site of Buddhist stupas. When the Shaivists got ascendancy in the Valley the site was appropriated by the Hindu goddess of Doom, known as Shiksha Devi or the goddess of Shikas. She could not get any place in the whole of India and she got a refuge to settle in this corner on the banks of the Dal Lake. On both sides of the site were the shrines of two Muslim saints highly revered by the Muslims. The Maharaja was warned to desist from laying his palaces at the ominous and condemned site but as he was stubborn he refused to hear. His trouble started in the same year when he completed his palaces at the cursed site in 1931. His end also came from this very site when he was forced by circumstances to run away to Jammu in 1947. Before he ordered collection and carriage of his household to Jammu he is said to have cried—— “the raiders are near, I don’t want to leave my people at my mercy, they want me to leave for Jammu. What can I do?”
Fida also cautioned former Chief Minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad when he desired to reside there. The CIK office was shifted and a hefty sum was spent on its renovation. However, Azad did not shift to the palace for unknown reasons.
The foreign diplomats may not heed Fida’s advice but the members of APDP have valid reasons to call it a haunted place. They have threatened demonstrations outside Chief Minister’s residence incase the plan was not shelved.
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