Author: V Sundaram
Publication: News Today
Date: April 16, 2006
URL: http://newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06apr/1504ss1.htm
'Oh mischief! Though art swift to enter in
the thoughts of desperate men!
Shakespeare
The great difference between the real statesman
and the pretender is, that the one sees into the future, while the other regards
only the present; the pretender lives by the day, and acts on expediency;
the statesman acts on enduring principles and for immortality. What morality
requires, true statesmanship should accept. The three great ends for a statesman
are: security to possessors, facility to acquirers and liberty and hope to
the people. True statesmanship is the art of changing a nation from what it
is into what it ought to be. Mark Twain said: 'In statesmanship get formalities
right, never mind about the moralities'. Viewed from the angles of both formalities
and moralities, I am rather sceptical as to whether A.R. Antulay, Union Minister
for Minority Affairs, is politically right in going full steam ahead to notify
Hindus in Jammu & Kashmir, the North East and Punjab as a 'MINORITY' from
the larger angle of preservation of national integrity and security. He is
reported to have stated: 'This is my own idea given to me by God'. He has
already scheduled consultations with Kashmiri Pundits on April 15 and again
on April 22 to finalise the proposal, prior to the approval of the Union Cabinet.
It is expected that these meetings will be attended by representatives of
the State Government as well as those of the Union Home Ministry.
Mahatma Gandhi had hoped that Kashmir would
be a shining symbol of secularism after independence. His dreams have been
turned into ashes because of the terror unleashed by Pakistan-backed militants
and communal elements in Kashmir during the last 20 years, who have resorted
to selective victimization and killing of hundreds of Hindus. Thus in the
late 1980s was set in motion the sad and cruel process of an exodus of practically
the entire Hindu community (Kashmiri Pundits) from the place of their origin
and birth for more than two thousand years, a fact which has not found adequate
media coverage either in India or abroad. Pro-Pakistan militant organizations,
such as the Hizb-Ul-Mujahideen, Harkat-Ul-Ansar and Lashkar-E-Toiba have played
havoc in the valley by letting loose a reign of terror. This has resulted
in the killing of hundreds of innocent people, rape and molestation of woman
folk, ransacking of houses and looting of people's property by these fanatic
militants.
Kashmiri Pundits and their sympathizers bore
the brunt of this organized genocide. Ruthless killing of innocent people
accelerated the migration process till almost the entire population of Kashmiri
pundits was forced to migrate to safer areas in Jammu and other parts of the
country. Undergoing a Diaspora, this small, well educated, peaceful and talented
community has got scattered through out the country and are living presently
under pitiable conditions in make shift refugee camps. To give some relevant
statistics in this context, out of a total Kashmiri Pundit population of about
4,25,000 in Jammu & Kashmir in 1989, only 15,000 Pundits are presently
living in the Kashmir Valley. 1800 Kashmiri Pundits have been killed by the
Pakistan-sponsored militants. About 2.2 lakhs have moved to Jammu Region as
migrants, while another 1.44 lakhs are reported to be living in Delhi as refugees.
About 50,000 Kashmiri Pundits are reported to be living in different cities
in India as migrants. A large number of these helpless people, having been
deprived of their ancestral homes in Kashmir, are now confined in unhygienic
shanties and slums. There exist only a few parallels in world history, when
the entire population of a particular religious minority community had been
forced to leave their place of origin in such a brutal manner, leaving behind
all their movable and immovable assets. The psychological trauma undergone
by the Kashmiri Pundits is a dark chapter in the long and troubled history
of India. Thanks to the Congress policy of pseudo-secularism founded on the
bed-rock of minority appeasement at the expense of Hindu majority, all the
peace loving Muslims of India are more concerned about the rights of Muslims
in Palestine than about the rights of Kashmiri Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists
in Kashmir.
Moderate Kashmiris say that what has been
destroyed is something called kashmiriat, an invisible but palpable understanding
that Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and others would live together peaceably.
Today, almost 55 years after the partition, the culture of secularism has
been eroded and replaced by a culture of fundamentalism. And Antulay is trying
to confirm this position by declaring the Hindus in Jammu & Kashmir as
an Ethnic Minority.
There is an informed section of Muslim opinion
which feels that the exodus of Kashmiri Pundits has adversely affected the
standards of teaching and education in the Kashmir Valley. Qudsia Shah, former
president of the women's college in Srinagar has stated: 'The exodus of Hindus
is not good for Kashmir. Kashmir Pundits being liberal and broad-minded are
good teachers. We Muslims are the losers...Academic standards have dropped,
to say the least.' The new ethos is that of Islamic fundamentalist education,
with veiled little schoolgirls, and women in purdah, in a land that was once
a happy haven of peace. A new gun-culture has replaced the culture of harmony
that once epitomised 'the rich, artistic, syncretic culture' of the valley.
Amitabh Matoo, a Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi
also expresses the same view when he says: 'The real tragedy is that the ancient
traditions of music, dance and literature forming the rich syncretic culture
of Kashmir have been destroyed or forgotten.'
As Minister for Minorities, A.R. Antulay should
take immediate action to restore normalcy in Kashmir and pave the way for
the Kashmiri Pundits living as refugees in different parts of India to get
back to their original home under conditions of safety, security and peace.
Instead of doing that, Antulay is trying to bandy words such as 'minority
status' to the Hindus of Jammu and Kashmir without caring for the long-term
consequences of his flippant semantic approach to the tough and substantive
issue of established rights of a race going back to the dawn of history. Or
is he doing it only after fully realizing the consequences as a pseudo-secularist
politician committed only to the sole cause of appeasement of real Muslim/Christian
minorities in the country under the newly created artificial umbrella of Hindu
minority in Jammu & Kashmir, Punjab and the North Eastern States? At any
rate all pseudo-secular politicians in India I mean the grisly gang of anti-Hindus
would be delighted by Antulay's announcement that Hindus who are in majority
in the country as a whole are going to be completely relegated to the status
of officially declared 'minorities' in certain specific pockets of India like
Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and the North East. It is feared that in these pockets
by his newly announced policy, Antulay would make all the Hindus a minority
both in the de jure and de facto sense. In the rest of the country, the Hindus
though in de jure majority have already been reduced to the status of a de
facto minority by all the unscrupulous pseudo-secular politicians like Antulay,
and others of his tribe. In other words, Antulay's declaration is that Hindus
in Jammu & Kashmir are voiceless minorities in a minority while the Hindus
in the rest of India are 'voiceless minorities' in a majority. The UPA Government
seems to have run out of ideas and therefore it is not surprising that Antulay
is ruminating over the past, endeavouring to go back to the pre-partition
days of Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan who were all the time concerned about
ever shifting and ever shuffling Hindu-Muslim minorities in the swirling waters
of ever-violent Islamic Communalism!
The last thing a political party gives up
is its vocabulary. The Congress Party will never give up its game of political
duplicity, playing with favourite words like majority and minority in regard
to every issue affecting our national life. For Congress Party and Antulay,
minority refers to the forces of secular good and majority to the forces of
communal evil all the time. THIS IS THEIR ENTIRE LIFE-LINE. This is because,
in Indian vote-bank politics, it is the minority crowd that dictates the language,
and such a crowd often relinquishes the original core ideas it has been given
more easily and more readily than the snappy catch words it has learned. Antulay
may have his political reasons to choose this semantic trap for the Hindus
but he has no right to drag the Indian nation as a whole into this deadly
trap. He cannot take the Hindus of India into the secularly conceived and
politically planted quagmire of minority politics. Is Antulay trying to create
another mini-Pakistan in Kashmir by promoting the 'communal' cause of Hindu
'minoritysm'? Is he trying to create a mini-Christian State in the North East?
Is he attempting to please Pakistan by declaring that the Hindus in Kashmir
Valley are not only second class citizens stripped of all fundamental rights
but also officially a minority community not fit to rule the State now and
for ever? Antulay's proposal will only open the floodgates of public demands
for different types of territorial divisions and demarcations based on every
ground other than public interest or permanent national interest. Great caution
should be exercised by our Prime Minister to restrain the wild enthusiasms
of a run away politician like Antulay with a poor track record of probity
in public life, in the larger interest of preservation of our nation's territorial
integrity and survival of India as a nation.
(The writer is a retired IAS officer) e-mail
the writer at vsundaram@newstodaynet.com
