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| NC-PDP two sides of one and the same coin, seeking to break India | | | RUSTAM
EARLY TIMES REPORT
JAMMU, Oct 7: Former Governor of Jammu and Kashmir Lt Gen (Retd) SK Sinha is right when he says that "religious fundamentalism" is primarily responsible for the ongoing "secessionist movement in Kashmir" and that "religious fundamentalism poses a most serious challenge to our national security." No objective Kashmir-watcher with an objective and secular outlook would ever contest what Sinha says. The fact is that those who know something about the political history of Jammu and Kashmir and the rest of the country would surely agree with him. In fact, they would go a step further and say that religious fundamentalism has been dotting the state's scene right since 1846, when Kashmir became part of the Jammu Kingdom under the Treaty of Amritsar. They would even go to the extent of asserting that the secessionist movement engulfed Kashmir not in 1989 (as is generally believed) but in 1846 itself.
The religious leadership of the Valley was opposed to the Kashmir's union with Jammu in 1846. And, it as well as the Valley-based "mainstream" political leaders and separatist leadership is condemning the Treaty of Amritsar even today, saying the "British sold the life, honour and dignity" of the Muslims of Kashmir to the Jammu Dogras for a paltry sum of Rs 75 lakh. The National Conference denounced this Treaty as late as in 1999 and virtually demanded that "the Treaty of Amritsar must go lock, stock and barrel" as "it was an insult to the people" (read Kashmiri Muslims (National Conference's "Report of the State Autonomy Committee, April 1999, P.63). The ground was, and continues to, primarily religion.
Between 1846 and 1947, they did their best to wreck the state in order to obtain independence from Jammu. Since 1947, they have been seeking to subvert the Indian State both from without and outside to achieve independence or semi-independence from India. The reasons are the same.
It would not be out of place to look at what happened in Jammu and Kashmir in 1846, 1847, 1913, 1917, 1924, 1931, 1946, 1949, 1952-53, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1990 and what has been happening in Kashmir since 1991. It would be only appropriate to say that it is all the manifestation of religious fundamentalism, all against pluralism and all for separating Kashmir from the rest of the country on the ground that it is a Muslim-majority area.
One also needs to go through the Persian records, Old English Records, General Department Records, Political Department Records and correspondence between the state and the British Indian Government to determine the extent to which religious fundamentalism played havoc with the state polity and society. All these records are available with the National Archives of India, New Delhi, and the State Archives Repository, Jammu. One also needs to go through the newspapers of the time like the Paisa Akhbar, the Zamindar, the Eastern Times, the Kashmir Magazine, the Civil and Military Gazette and so on to determine the nature of the movement in Kashmir.
There is hardly any need to reflect on the ideology of the Wahavis, the Deobandis, the Brelvis, the Aligarh Movement, the All-India Muslim League, to mention only a few. For, it is too well-known that all of them represented an extreme form of religious fundamentalism and all stood for a particular type of dispensation. In fact, the Aligarh school of thought and the followers of the Muslim League had coined and advocated the two-nation theory, saying the Hindus and the Muslims were the two distinct nations, which could not co-exist or which could not live together under one system.
So much so, they made common cause with the British to harm what they called the "Hindu Congress," which at that time stood for pluralism, secularism, democracy, strong center, joint electorates, permanent land settlement, Indianization of services and the Army, free press, responsible government, fundamental rights, equality and so on.. The British also helped them for reasons not difficult to understand. The result was the victory of fundamentalism, communal partition of India and the emergence of Muslim Pakistan, which continues to trouble India even today and wants to grab the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir by all means - war, low-intensity proxy war, terror tactics, aggressive diplomacy, lobbying, nuclear blackmail and so on, notwithstanding the fact that Jammu and Kashmir was not part of the partition plan. Jammu and Kashmir was a princely state and not part of the British India that was to be divided into countries, India and Pakistan.
Let us have a glance at what the People's Democratic Party patron and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, who led the Indian parliamentary delegation to the United States in November 2006, said at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Washington D.C., on November 12. Such an exercise would help put things in perspective and establish that there is no fundamental difference between what the former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf sought through his four-point formulation on Jammu and Kashmir - withdrawal of Army, joint Indian-Pakistani supervisory mechanism, potential self-governance and irrelevant borders and porous Line of Control -- what the People's Democratic Party is advocating (self-rule). (To be continued) |
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