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| Were Nehru, Ambedkar communal? | | Article 370 & Congress | |
NEHA
JAMMU, May 13: Member AICC and former minister in the Ghulam Nabi Azad-led coalition government Abdul Gani Vakil on Saturday declared that the Congress will defeat forces conspiring to weaken Article 370.
He made this announcement while addressing a party workers meeting at Srinagar. He also said that "no single party could claim to be in possession of a readymade solution to vexed Kashmir imbroglio" and added "to resolve this issue people of different thoughts from three regions of the state have to be taken on board, Article 370 is to be strengthened and those communal forces bent upon dividing the state are to be kept at bay". "Divisive forces favouring abrogation of Article 370 are the enemies of state and are trying to weaken the state's relations with the Centre but the Congress would leave no stone unturned in defeating evil designs of those forces who are conspiring to weaken Article 370," he also declared.
Leave aside what he said about solution to the so-called Kashmir problem. Also ignore what he said about those (read people of Jammu and Ladakh) working for the division of the state. Also overlook his suggestion that the APHC leaders should come to the negotiating table to resolve what he termed as "vexed issue". Let's focus on his observations on Article 370 to find who is communal and who is secular and who is weakening the state's relations with the centre and who is not.
Let's us first know what Chairman of the Constitution Drafting Committee Dr B R Ambedkar said in 1949 while contemptuously rejecting the demand of National Conference president and Jammu and Kashmir Wazir-e-Azam seeking special status for the state. He told Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah: "You want India and Indians to defend Kashmir. You want Kashmir and Kashmiris to exercise all rights all over India. But you do not want India and Indians to exercise all rights in Kashmir. I am Law Minister of India and I cannot be a party to such an act of betrayal of national interest". Was Ambedkar communal? He was not. He was a secularist of secularists. He only wanted for Jammu and Kashmir a political system similar to the one the Indian Constituent Committee would hand down to the Indians across the country. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was basically responsible for the adoption of Article 370, had also declared umpteen times that this was a temporary provision and would become ineffective and redundant in due course of time. Was what Nehru said about Article 370 a manifestation of his communal approach to the issues facing Jammu and Kashmir at that point in time? No. He was not communal,notwithstanding the fact that he hobnobbed with Sheikh Abdullah and his men who wanted special status on the ground that Jammu and Kashmir was a Muslim-majority state. It's true that he hit the Dogra Maharaja and the people of Jammu below the belt by transferring state powerfrom Jammu to Srinagar. But it's also true that Nehru was not communal. He was biased against Jammu and Ladakh. Had he been communal, he would not have inducted in his council of ministers persons like Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, statunch opponents of Article 370.
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) of Mayawati is, like majority of the people of Jammu province and Ladakh region and internally-displaced Kashmiri Hindus, not only demanding trifurcation of the state but also abrogation of Article 370 saying this statue has harmed the interests of Scheduled Castes and other social groups like Scehduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes. Are the BSP leaders and those in Jammu and Ladakh demanding abrogation of Article 370 communal and divisive? No, they are not. They are democrats of democrats and secularist of secularists. You cannot term them divisive and communal just because they are demanding the application of the Indian Constitution to the state in full. They are simply struggling to bring the state closer to New Delhi. To dismiss them as divisive and communal would mean you are also denouncing the Indian statue book as communal and divisive.
The fact of the matter is that it is the so-called secularists inKashmir and elsewhere in the country who are conspiring to communalize the state polity, society and economy by opposing those demanding abrogation of Article 370, which has given absolute and unbridled powers to the ruling elite, deprived the people of even those normal social, economic and political rights which are available to all in rest of the country, strengthened those in Kashmir who have been describing Jammu and Kashmir as a disputed territory and created doubts in the minds of the international community about the status of Jammu and Kashmir in the Indian Union. They are the real problem; they are communalist of communalists; they have been feeding wrong information to the Kashmiri Muslims; and they are the real enemies of the people and the country. It is indeed unfortunate that there are in the Congress persons who have been making common cause with those in Kashmir whose single-point agenda all along was, and continued to be, to dismember India and give religious orientation to everything in the state. |
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