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| Freedom struggle in Jammu enters a crucial phase MINICING NO WORDS | | | NEHA
EARLY TIMES REPORT
JAMMU, Mar 20: Things in Jammu have changed dramatically. In fact, the freedom struggle, which the people of Jammu started as early as in November 1947 (immediately after the accession) against the Kashmiri leadership, has entered a very crucial phase.
However to say this is not to undermine the significance of what the nation witnessed in Jammu during June-August 2008. That was indeed a great movement – the kind of the movement India did not witness pre and post-1947 in any other part of the country. It had been rightly described by the Jammu University’s History Department Professor as “Mother of all the movements in the world.” The movement that the people of Jammu engineered in 2008 was essentially an ideological movement – movement directed both against the regressive forces in Kashmir and those in New Delhi who tried their best to pander to communalism and separatism in Kashmir. The movement was a grand success. The people of Jammu proved that they were the torchbearers and that they constituted the country’s backbone as far as nationalism was concerned. BJP leader L K Advani and Congress leader Karan Singh had described, and rightly, the developments in Jammu as a movement between nationalists and anti-national forces. The memory of what happened in Jammu during those eventful days will linger in the Kashmiri mind for years and years together. In fact, they would always remember the Jammu of 2008.
It is in a different context that this scribe says that the freedom struggle in Jammu has entered a crucial phase. I am referring to the remarkable unity the people of Jammu province are witnessing these days among the Jammu-based political formations, including the BJP, the Panthers Party and the Jammu State Morcha, as well as unity among all the Jammu-based social groups. All these groupings are working with a single-minded devotion to defeat the Kashmiri leadership’s anti-Jammu policies, as also to controvert the pernicious influence of the separatists on the national scene.
It is hardly necessary to reflect on the role the BJP, the Panthers Party and the Jammu State Morcha have been playing in and outside the state legislature, particularly since February 28, when the winter/budget session of the assembly commenced, as the people of Jammu province are fully aware of it. Suffice it to say that their role has been inspiring and the people are appreciating it. Whether or not these Jammu-based formations have succeeded in defeating the Kashmiri leadership is not important. What is important is the manner in which they have been projecting the Jammu case and taking on those speaking against India and the Dogra rulers. They have, undoubtedly, risen to the occasion and demonstrated their identification with the Jammu cause as well as the national cause, with the Kashmiri leadership not really in a position to counter them. It would not be an exaggeration to say that these three formations have put the Kashmiri leadership on the defensive, if not on the mat in the real sense of the term.
What has led to this noble situation? Several factors. These include naked and gross discrimination with Jammu; move to divide Jammu province along the Chenab River on communal lines; the insistence of Kashmiri leadership on a demand that seeks to separate J&K from India, introduces in the state a theocratic system of governance, empowers Kashmir and one Kashmir-based sect to further strengthen their stranglehold over Jammu and Ladakh and jeopardize the paramount national interests in the state; the interlocutors’ recommendations that are essentially divisive and communal in character and implications; New Delhi’s lop-sided approach or New Delhi’s indifferent attitude towards the nationalist but the marginalized and oppressed constituency in the state; the kind of freedom New Delhi has given to certain elements in the state to wreck the country both from within and outside the state legislature; and exclusion of Jammu and Ladakh from the debates and conclaves being organized by sections of print and electronic media in Delhi.
The determination with which the parties like the BJP, the Panthers Party and the Jammu State Morcha have started fighting out the Kashmiri leadership and the methodology they have been employing to put across their point of view are something that has given an altogether new orientation to the ongoing struggle in Jammu for freedom from Kashmiri domination and for obtaining justice and linking their fate with New Delhi. The suffering people of Jammu province, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs included, would surely achieve their most cherished goal if these parties continue to operate for some more time in the manner they have started operating, acting and speaking. This is the public opinion in Jammu. At the same time, however, there are people in Jammu who want these parties to give more radical orientation to what they have started doing. The most significant aspect of the whole situation is that the people have stopped looking towards the Congress party. The reasons are not far to seek.
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