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| Gen Sinha opposes autonomy, self-rule | | DELHI SEMINAR | | Rustam
JAMMU, Aug 25: Former Governor of Assam and Jammu & Kashmir, Lt Gen (retd) SK Sinha, who is associated with state from the day of its accession to India and who knows more about the Kashmiri politics than any other person in India, including BJP veteran and former Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani, has done well to reject the autonomy formulation and self-rule doctrine and urge New Delhi to retrieve the Jammu & Kashmir territories (Pakistan-occupied-Jammu & Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan region) Pakistan illegally occupied in 1947-1948. He gave these sane counsels on Thursday while speaking in a seminar organized by the RSS-founded Jammu & Kashmir Study Centre in New Delhi. A number of law-makers participated in the seminar and expressed their views on the problems in Jammu & Kashmir.
Gen Sinha opposed the autonomy formulation saying the grant of autonomy as demanded by a Kashmir-based party would undo all that has been done in the state during all these years of accession to bring it closer to India and promote mainstream politics there and facilitate the task of those who have been seeking to de-link the state from India on the ground that it is a Muslim-majority region. He put things in perspective saying that Jammu & Kashmir was a princely state and not part of the partition plan. His views on the self-rule doctrine were also similar. He not only opposed this pernicious doctrine, but also said that it and the February 2005 Farooq Kathwari's report on Jammu & Kashmir are nothing but a replica of the former Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf's four-point Jammu & Kashmir solution. He was absolutely right. The self-rule doctrine, like the Musharraf's formula, provides for self-rule (read self-governance as suggested by Musharraf), demilitarization, porous or soft borders and Line of Control, joint mechanism and division of the state on religious lines. The self-rule doctrine, if endorsed and given an effect to, would not only mean a step short of the state's compete independence from India and permanent slavery of the people of Jammu Pradesh and Ladakh, but would also mean the rise of a situation under which Islamabad would enjoy co-equal sovereign powers with New Delhi in the Indian Jammu & Kashmir. Gen Sinha regretted that New Delhi is toeing a line that suits the votaries of self-rule and Musharraf's formula. It is obvious that he hit out at the Congress-led UPA Government.
It would not be out of place to mention here that the autonomy formulation and the self-rule doctrine are the two sides of one and the same coin. Both stands for the withdrawal of all the Central laws from the state and both consider the Indian Constitution fundamentally bad and anti-Kashmir. The only difference between the two unsettling concepts is the self-rule doctrine's insistence on shared sovereignty. The protagonists of autonomy do say time and again that New Delhi should talk to Pakistan, saying Islamabad is an important factor in South Asia, but it has never talked about supra-state measures the votaries of self-rule talk about day in and day out. The opposition of Gen Sinha to the autonomy formulation and self-rule doctrine needs to be viewed in the context of the dangerous consequences which would follow on the acceptance of these highly pernicious concepts.
As far as POJK and Gilgit-Baltistan were concerned, Gen Sinha very strongly urged New Delhi to take up this issue in a big way at international level, saying these areas are legitimately Indian which needed to be retrieved and merged with India at whatever cost. "Solution of PoJK and (Gilgit-Baltistan) should come from the common people and not from Pakistani-funded separatists and politicians," he also said.
Gen Sinha's message was loud and clear: Implement the February 1994 unanimous parliamentary resolution and educate the international opinion so that Pakistan is compelled to vacate the aggression and India takes back from Pakistan the Indian territories. Yet another message of his was that New Delhi must reject out-of-hand the autonomy formulation and self-rule doctrine and integrate the state completely into India. All right-thinking Indians would surely appreciate what Gen Sinha said so candidly and unambiguously.
If India today agrees to NC's demand of autonomy, tomorrow they have to fulfill PDP's demand asking for more and then separatists' demand, he said, advising India to draw a line to stop these things and not to lower its guard.
Panthers Party MLA Balwant Singh Mankotia while speaking said that there is a need for reorganization of J&K State so that Assembly and Lok Sabha seats are determined on the basis of population thereby ending the political imbalance with Jammu and Ladakh. Reorganisation of J&K is necessary in the interest of India's integrity and independence, he added.
Advocating his demand of trifurcation of J&K State, Ashwani Sharma, MLA Jammu State Morcha, said there is nothing common between the Kashmir valley and Jammu and Ladakh regions as far as topography, language, style of living and necessities are concerned.
"West Pakistani refugees are facing the worst type of discrimination, as they have no right to vote in the Panchayat, local bodies and MLA elections in J&K", he maintained.
Ex-MLA and chairman, J&K Tehreek-e-Insaf, Mohd Farooq Mir stated that the nationalist forces are being treated step motherly in the State and the terrorism victims of Jammu region are at the edge of starvation and despite Supreme Court's ruling nothing has been done for Jammu migrants.
Senior BJP leader, Dr Nirmal Singh alleged that Article 370 is the root cause for all the problems in J&K, as it denies the justice to the common man and beneficiaries of this Article are some political families only. |
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