Author: Arvind Lavakare
Publication: Sify.com
Date: August 25, 2008
URL: http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14745911
[Arvind Lavakare may be 71, but the fire in
his belly burns stronger than in many people half his age. The economics post-graduate
worked with the Reserve Bank of India and several private and public sector
companies before retiring in 1997. His first love, however, remains sports.
An accredited cricket umpire in Mumbai, he has reported and commented on cricket
matches for newspapers, Doordarshan and AIR. Lavakare has also been regularly
writing on politics since 1997, and published a monograph, The Truth About
Article 370, in 2005.]
When several of our mainline English dailies
recently splashed what they thought was the novel headline, "Jammu vs
Kashmir", on account of the unprecedented angst and anger in the Jammu
region of J & K state over the denial of land to the Amarnath Shrine Board,
I was amused.
I was amused because as many as seven years
and 11 months ago a major web portal had posted an article of mine bearing
the headline "It could finally be Jammu vs Kashmir". My forecast
then was not based on astrology or prescience but on a study of the past agonies
of Jammu that had run over into the present. And study is something that current
bred of "Breaking News" journalists hardly do, if at all.
It did not require meticulous research, but
just some serious reading, to know that Jammu's troubles had begun soon after
the monarch of J & K, Maharaja Hari Singh, from the Dogra community of
Jammu, chose to sign his princely state's accession to India, rather than
to Pakistan, in October 1947 under the British Parliament's Indian Independence
Act, 1947. The troubles emanated from Sheikh Abdullah, the towering National
Conference leader from the predominantly Muslim populated Kashmir Valley,
who, for reasons as yet unclear, was the pet of Jawaharlal Nehru, our first
Prime Minster among several Congress ones who believed that the Hindu community
was a danger to free India. It was just a matter of time therefore that Nehru
coerced Maharaja Hari Singh to hand over the reins of the J&K state to
the interim government of Sheikh Abdullah and his National Conference Party
--- the first time that Muslims, not Hindus, became the rulers in J&K.
So enamoured of Sheikh Abdullah was Nehru
that while he had left the integration of 561 princely states either into
India or Pakistan to his deputy and Home Minister, Sardar Vallabhai Patel,
he chose to deal with J & K himself. And so crafty and cunning was Sheikh
Abdullah that he got Nehru to agree to include in the Constitution of India,1950,
the Article 370 that gave J & K a special status that no other state of
India has ever enjoyed. And even as J & K was allowed to draft its own
State Constitution (separate from the Indian Constitution), Abdullah was permitted
to hold the position of the state's Wazir-e- Azam, or Prime Minister and the
J&K state was permitted to have its own flag.
The supreme dominance of the Kashmir Valley
and its Muslims over Jammu & Kashmir state had begun. The suppression
of Jammu and the state's third region, Ladakh (predominantly Buddhist) had
begun.
And the first opposition to this monopoly
over the state of J&K was started more than half a century ago. Ironically,
it was started by Nehru's ministerial colleague, Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee.
The Bengal tiger staked his life in his effort to (i) secure the integration
of J&K with the rest of India and (ii) save the Dogras of Jammu from Sheikh
Abdullah's actions that were reportedly described by a former central intelligence
chief as a bid at ethnic cleansing.
In a speech at Kanpur on December 29, 1952,
Dr Mookerjee had made the grave charge that, "Mr Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah
have jointly decided to carry on a ruthless policy of repression in Jammu."
He had referred to "an impression gaining ground that with our blood
and money we are carving out a virtually autonomous state for Sheikh Abdullah."
Therefore, he proclaimed, "Jammu and Ladakh must be fully integrated
with India according to the wishes of their people."
Dr Mookerjee categorically stated that while
he did not want the partition of J&K, it had become a matter of Hobson's
choice: Kashmir Valley could be made a separate state with all necessary subventions
desired by the Sheikh and his advisers, but Jammu and Ladakh must not be sacrificed.
Dr Mookerjee died on June 23, 1953, under
suspicious circumstances while under house arrest in an abandoned cottage
on a hill outside Srinagar, with no telephone or medical facility within miles,
without Nehru meeting him there even once during his 40-day detention. His
soul must surely be astir now with talk gaining ground about the revived call
for a separate Jammu and a separate Ladakh.
Contrary to the allegations of the pseudo-secularists,
this separatist drive and the present anger in Jammu over the Amarnath land
are not based on the Hindu-Muslim divide. Instead, it is entirely based on
the economic deprivation and political despotism exercised by the Abdullah
clan and its kith and kin from Srinagar. The charges against the Kashmir Valley
clique are many. Writing in the May 2000 issue of Voice of Jammu Kashmir magazine,
J N Bhat, retired judge of the J&K high court, alleged that:
1. Thousands of plots carved out in the suburbs
of Jammu have been allotted to Kashmiris, all the beneficiaries belonging
to one particular community.
2. In some localities of Jammu city, water
is supplied after a gap of three to four days, and not even enough of it to
quench the thirst of the people. Obviously, funds got for development get
misused.
3. In the Jammu region, the Hindu minorities
of Doda and Poonch districts have been tortured and many of them have found,
according to sources, conversion the only option, though they prefer death
to forced conversion.
Another eminent person who has made more serious
accusations is Hari Om, professor of history in Jammu University, and a member
of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR). In a newspaper article
--- eight years ago, mind you --- the professor complains that:
1. Though Kashmiris constitute roughly 22
per cent of the state's total population, the delimitation mechanism cleverly
devised by Sheikh Abdullah's National Conference Party in 1951 enables it
to capture nearly half of the total assembly and Lok Sabha seats. The trick
lies in 46 assembly segments having been created in the small Valley as against
41 segments combined in Jammu and Ladakh regions that are far bigger and more
populated than the Valley. This mechanism is apparently contrary to the rules
framed under the Indian Parliament's Representation of People's Act and those
under the relevant State Act of 1957.
2. Kashmiris hold over 2,30,000 positions
out of a nearly 2,40,000 positions in government and semi-government organisations
in the Valley. In addition, they corner nearly 25 per cent of the jobs in
the regional services of Jammu and Ladakh.
3. All the professional and technical institutions,
universities and all the big public sector industrial units like HMT, the
television, telephone and cement factories located in the Valley are the sole
preserve of the Kashmiris. Besides, they manipulate for themselves more than
50 per cent of the seats in Jammu's ill-equipped and under-staffed medical
and engineering college and in the Agricultural University in R S Pura. No
such institution exists in Ladakh.
4. The Kashmiris control trade, commerce,
transport and industry, and own big orchards as well as landed estates. None
of them is without a house. Likewise, the per capita expenditure on woollen
clothes in Kashmir is perhaps the highest in the world. Till date, no one
in Kashmir has, unlike in UP, Bihar and Orissa, died either of hunger or cold.
5. Interestingly, yet not surprisingly, a
vast majority of the Kashmiris don't pay even a single penny to the state
in the form of revenue due to it. It is Jammu and Ladakh that contribute over
90 per cent to the state exchequer, but a major part of this money is spent
not in the extremely backward and underdeveloped Jammu and Ladakh but in the
highly prosperous and developed Kashmir Valley.
As a result of the above, professor Hari Om
says, "It is Kashmiris and Kashmiris everywhere and all others in the
state exist nowhere."
The dismal scenario above has apparently prevailed
for so long that even editors of our national daily newspapers refer most
casually to J&K merely as "Kashmir", forgetting the fundamental
fact that "J&K" is not Kashmir and that "Kashmir"
is not J&K.
Sheikh Abdullah and his National Conference
cabal created that scenario with the connivance of Nehru and his Congress
dynasty. Today, the Mufti clan has added fuel to the fire. It has all become
perpetuated because Pakistan's cross border terrorism has struck New Delhi
with cowardice, denying them the courage to fight against the Kashmiriyat
clan for the rights of the meek and the oppressed, the Jammuites and the Ladakhis
who too have been demanding freedom from the tyranny of the rulers from the
Valley.
The coming months will show whether the Jammuites
have finally stopped turning the other cheek. If Jammu's old political outfit,
the Praja Parishad Party, can take re-birth as it were and join hands with
the Ladakhis, Buddhists and all, the ongoing Jammu vs Kashmir battle will
add another page of history to J&K and India.
