Author: Arvind Lavakare
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: April 15, 2004
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/2004/apr/16arvind.htm
The Hurriyat has shown its true
colours --- yet again. Its call to the people of Jammu and Kashmir to boycott
the coming Lok Sabha polls because 'the election process is no solution
to the Kashmir problem' is one in a long series of deeds which reveal its
disdain for democracy and all else that India stands for.
The Hurriyat is not only a hybrid
of several political outfits, but is also a mirror of hypocrisy -- pretending
to be an Indian conglomerate when its heart and soul are either self-centred
or yearning to be with Pakistan or both.
Nothing but nothing that the Hurriyat
has done all these years has indicated an iota of support for the position
on J&K adopted by India, the very country that has treated J&K
state like an over- pampered child, meting its needs by straining itself
at the seams, if needed, and never mind if the pampered child hasn't the
kindergarten courtesy of saying 'Thank you' in return.
Has the Hurriyat, for instance,
ever called for a Srinagar bandh over the plight of some 300,000 Kashmiri
Pandits who, for ethnic reasons, were hounded out of the Kashmir valley
to be left as refugees and destitutes in their own land? Did the Hurriyat
call for a valley bandh when the J&K assembly was attacked by terrorists
let loose by Pakistan? For that matter, has the Hurriyat ever led a march
to the Pakistan embassy protesting against that country's proven terrorism
in J&K?
Instead, the Hurriyat has had high
tea on the sly with Pervez Musharraf in Delhi; instead, the Hurriyat dared
to threaten boycott of the second meeting with India's deputy prime minister
until the alleged human rights violations in J&K by the Indian Army
had come to a halt.
Ah, that much-touted business of
human rights, the subject that has been abused and over- abused by so many
partisan parties like some Indian NGOs chasing Narendra Modi and the Bush
administration cloaking the prisons in Guantenamo Bay. Did the Hurriyat
or anyone else even speak a word on the human rights of the 22 army men
and their families killed by terrorists who attacked the military camp
at Kaluchak near Jammu in May 2002? Did they utter 'human rights' when
another similar attack on an army camp in the outskirts of Jammu killed
12 of our soldiers in June 2003? Did the Hurriyat speak about human rights
when yet another terrorist attack on the Indian army camp at Tanda, 40
kms north of Jammu, killed one brigadier and seven jawans in July 2003?
In any case, the Hurriyat or anyone
else speaking of protecting human rights in J&K is a joke. Why? Because
after the Indian Parliament enacted the Protection of Human Rights Act,
1993, the J&K state government did not want that law to apply to the
subjects mentioned in the State List of the Seventh schedule of the Indian
Constitution. This State List contains subjects on which legislation can
be made exclusively by the federal states of India. Included in those subjects
are matters of 'police,' 'prisons and persons detained therein,' 'water
supplies,' 'right in or over land' and 'relief of the disabled and unemployable.'
Hence, theoretical violation of human rights pertaining to those subjects
in J&K is beyond the pale of the national law and of the National Human
Rights Commission established under that law. That is why it appears logical
that the NHRC hasn't looked into the massive abuse of human rights that
has occurred in respect of over 300,000 Kashmiri Pandits who were hounded
out of the valley by local and infiltrating Muslim zealots some 15 years
ago and are now withering away in refugee tents, without the property and
means of livelihood they earlier had.
It's not the Hurriyat alone that
has disdain, even contempt, for India's stand on J&K. The Peoples Democratic
Party of Mufti Mohammed Sayeed and the National Conference couldn't care
a damn for the Union of India as long as they keep on getting the attention
showered on a prima donna.
Ever since the Mufti became the
state's chief minister, he has talked to Kashmiris only about his healing
touch policy, not about India's legal, moral and constitutional right to
the whole of J&K. He has talked of releasing prisoners, of disbanding
the Special Protection Group police and of more funds from Delhi, but not
of what Kashmiris owe to India. He has pleaded to New Delhi for talks with
Pakistan, with the separatists, and, the other day, with the terrorist
body, Hizb-ul Mujahideen, as well. But he hasn't, one recalls, advocated
parleys with Kashmiri Pandits, and with the organisations in Jammu and
Ladakh provinces which want to scrap Article 370 so as to attain full territorial
and emotional integration with the rest of India because they feel trapped
and trampled by the never-ending rule of the despots from the Kashmir valley.
Sheikh Abdullah's National Conference
party was the first of them. Snuffing out the aspirations of people in
Jammu and Ladakh provinces in a systematic manner, he was the one who seriously
thought for a while of shifting loyalty to Pakistan even six years after
J&K had legally acceded to India. The man's son, Farooq, was also for
a while on the side of those who wanted to be separated from India. It
was during his tenure as the state's chief minister that terrorism took
roots in the state and the Kashmiri Pandits took flight from the valley.
Now it's the son's son, Omar Abdullah,
who lords over the National Conference, and talks as though J&K belongs
to Kashmiris alone and not to India that has sustained the state all these
years with the tears, toil, sweat and blood of the people from other parts
of the country.
In its 18-page manifesto for the
current Lok Sabha polls, the line of the National Conference is not for
a greater rapport with the rest of India but a more pronounced cleavage
that is contained in the audacious demand for 'autonomy in its pristine
form,' going back to 1952 -- five years before the J&K Constitution
proclaimed that 'The State of Jammu and Kashmir is and shall be an integral
part of the Union of India.'
How utterly anachronistic and autocratic
the National Conference is can be seen in its manifesto's promise to keep
alive the discrimination, first created in April 1927, between two groups
of J&K's citizens -- those who are legally endowed with special rights
as 'permanent residents' and the others who, though Indian citizens, are
denied such fundamental rights as getting a government job, securing a
state scholarship and acquiring property.
The original sinner of J&K's
present mess is Jawaharlal Nehru of the Indian National Congress. Right
from 1947 till his death in 1964, Nehru was so soft towards Sheikh Abdullah
that the latter's National Conference, based in the Kashmir valley, has
now come to believe that the valley is all that matters to India and the
world, that Jammu and Ladakh provinces are just appendages, and, most,
importantly, that the Government of India as well as the rest of India
can be blackmailed with the veiled threat of its Muslim majority population
aligning with Pakistan. Aided and abetted by all those hypocrites who have
interpreted 'secularism' as appeasement of Muslims at all cost, this feeling
of being so powerful as to make the Indian nation bend at will has, one
suspects, spread to the entire population of the Kashmir valley.
As a result, Article 370, meant
as a temporary provision since its inception in 1950, has become a de facto
permanent provision, continuing to give such unprecedented autonomy and
exclusivity to one solitary state that it can decline to accept the application
of the CBI rules, the Indian Penal Code, the Prevention of Corruption Act
and other such legislations of the nation's Parliament.
The Vajpayee-led NDA government
has further fattened this massive ego of J&K rulers. In the last five
years of its reign, the NDA has treated the state with a brand new pair
of kid gloves. Farooq Abdullah's golf and other antics were not found reason
to hold up financial bounties. His son was made a minister of state and
when, after his globe trotting was over, he found a reason to fling his
resignation in Vajpayee's face. The prime minister simply ate crow, silently.
So on and so forth with one sop
after another to J&K until today when not only the abrogation of Article
370 has been forgotten by the BJP as part of its agenda but has also been
abjured in its Vision Document, 2004. Why, the prime minister, who is otherwise
so fond of seeking debates on issues, has not dared in the last five years
to ask for a nation-wide discussion on why Article 370 must go for the
sake of a more integrated India. This failure of the NDA to take on J&K's
ego head on and simultaneously letting Jammu and Ladakh drift along with
the Kashmiri Pandits must rank as one of its significant failures.
Make no mistake. The state of Jammu
and Kashmir is never going to be a truly emotional and ethnic part of India
until the Kashmir valley's ego is first burst and its back broken. That's
the only way to treat blackmailing hybrids and hypocrites.
