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| Roundtable Conference on Jammu and Kashmir | | Rigorous Exclusion of Jammu-Ladakh | | STARK REALITY
RUSTAM
EARLY TIMES REPORT
JAMMU, Apr 20: J&K acceded to India on October 26, 2011. Delhi committed blunder that very day itself by involving the then NC president and a known protagonist of greater autonomy and bitter critic of the Jammu Dogras, Sheikh Abdullah, overlooking the fact that he had no locus standi in the matter. New Delhi did all this to humble Maharaja Hari Singh, a democrat of democrats and great Indian who had played a magnificent role in the roundtable conference in London it the beginning of the fourth decade of the twentieth century, organized to find ways and means to involve the Indians in the country’s law-making processes and executive. Ever since October 26, New Delhi has been committing blunder after blunder in J&K, queering the Indian pitch in the state and humiliating the people of Jammu province and the people of the trans-Himalayan Ladakh. In fact, the story of New Delhi’s role in the state is one of blunders.
That New Delhi continues to play with dangerous tools and outrage and humiliate the patriotic constituency in the state in general and the people of Jammu province and Ladakh in particular could be seen from the composition and complexion of the roundtable conference its interlocutors held in Srinagar on April 18 and 19. It could also be seen from the fact that some of the sessions of the conference were chaired by none other than former Chief Information Commissioner of India Wajahat Habibullah and Agha Ashraf Ali. While Habibullah is a protagonist of Chenab formula or a votary of a solution that divided Jammu province along Chenab River on communal lines, Ali is a well-known sympathizer of Kashmiri separatists and rank communalists. Habibullah wants five assemblies in the state, two each for Jammu (one for plain areas and other for hilly areas) and Ladakh (one for Buddhis-majority Leh district and other for the Shia-majority Kargil district) and one for the entire Kashmir province. He believes that Kashmir province is, unlike Jammu and Ladakh, homogeneous and he describes homogeneity and heterogeneity in terms of religion. As for Ali less said the better. Suffice it to say that he represents that ideology that separates people on the basis of religion and that also imposes the sectarian will on the unwilling people of Jammu and Ladakh.
Who were the other participants? The most notables were the pro-self rule People’s Democratic Party (PDP) legislators Nizam-ud-din Bhat and Murtaza Khan; pro-greater autonomy National Conference leaders Mehboob Beg and Choudhary Muhammad Ramzan; separatist Hameeda Nayeem; and pro-separatist and pro-greater autonomy Muhammad Shafi Pandit, Principal SSM College Dilafroza Qazi, advocate Imtiyaz Ahmad, political scientist Prof Gul Muhammad Wani, former VC, Islamic University, Prof Siddiq Wahid, Siddharth Gigoo and columnist Z G Muhammad. Former editor of the Hindustan Times and former media advisor to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, HK Dua; pro-autonomy Meenakshi Gopinath, pro-autonomy and pro-APHC former Chief Engineer Jatinder Bakshi, Delhi University Professor and a votary of autonomy Navnita Chadha, controversial Lieutenant General (retd) VG Patnagar, Rahil Jalali, journalist Muhammad Tahir Syed, Professor Zahur-ud-Din, Professor Ashok Aima and Congress leader and member of pro-Musharraf’s Kashmir formula Kashmir Committee Ashok Bhan. Jammu-based journalist Arun Joshi, who always refrains from doing anything controversial and tries his best to report what needs to be reported fairly and fearlessly, was also there. He was, like Ashok Aima, an odd face in the audience.
This was the composition and complexion of the roundtable conference. It is hardly necessary to point out that the organizers of the roundtable conference did all that they could to ensure exclusion from the deliberations of those considered inconvenient. The bottom-line of the story is that New Delhi has refused to learn any lesson from its past mistakes and that it again appears out to humiliate Jammu and Ladakh in its desperate bid to achieve the unachievable in Kashmir (peace). It would be naïve to say that New Delhi doesn’t know anything about the nature of the ongoing movement in Kashmir. It knows that struggle in Kashmir is for secession and not for empowerment and yet it is yielding overlooking the grave evils that would follow on the introduction of a policy it is seeking to evolve through roundtable conferences participated in either by the separatists or by their supporters and sympathizers. It would be no exaggeration to say that a bulk of the participants had only advocated the need of separation of the state from India.
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