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Ever since the latest round of violence began in the valley of Kashmir, there has been a sustained effort in the Indian media, both print and electronic, to spread disinformation about the origin of this violence, despite the fact that the instigators are out in the streets defying curfew and government orders, and openly exhorting others to join them. In the process when some of the protestors become victims of their own participation in the violence, the media is ready to pounce upon the security forces for doing their job, while completely ignoring the role of the instigators. Lately I have been reading column after column by well established political commentators like Vir Sanghvi, Jyoti Punwani, Firdous Syed, Neerja Chowdhury, Seema Mustafa and others who all have only one common theme. In their considered opinion India has failed the people of Kashmir, and if the “poor” Kashmiris have had to resort to violence to make them heard, it is only because we the Indians have been completely indifferent to their suffering. Hira Fotedar, co-founder and past President of the Indo-American Kashmir Forum, had made a forceful presentation in October 2008 in Chicago as a case study in the manipulation of Indian media. But that has largely been ignored and forgotten by the American and Indian authorities and the media. The purpose of this article is to revisit the subject and examine the so-called suffering of the Kashmiri Muslims closely and put it in a proper perspective.
When Kashmir, with the rest of India, became independent from British rule it was, without doubt one of the poorest parts of the country. The valley had almost no industry apart from a primitive silk factory that produced a very inferior quality of silk cloth, and a match factory near Baramulla. Agricultural production was not enough to feed the population; items like sugar, salt and other commodities had to be brought in from the plains. The only link with Jammu was an unreliable road over the Pir Panjal range that would frequently close due to landslides and heavy snowfall. Air connections were also unpredictable as the Dakotas in use then could not fly if the Banihal Pass (at about 10000 feet the only available corridor for flying across the mountains) was hidden by clouds. In the winter of 1951-52 I have gone to the Srinagar Airport every day for 21 days for catching a flight to Pathankot, before a plane could come across and leave the same afternoon.
Kashmir’s tourist season was also relatively short in duration. People from the plains would mainly come during the summer holidays, usually for 2 months. There would be some traffic during the annual Amarnath Yatra, but that consisted mainly of pilgrims who provided some employment for pony drivers and a few porters. Shawls, which had been the mainstay of the economy of Kashmir, had only contributed to the enrichment of a few merchant families, while keeping the actual artisans and weavers perpetually poor. Kashmiri Pandits had realized long before that in order to improve their lives they would have to invest in education. This they proceeded to do in right earnest. Educating the young, whether male or female, had become the sole objective of the Pandit families. Consequently, a number of them were sent to Universities in Punjab, Delhi, Benares, etc., from where they obtained degrees in Humanities, Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The only employer for their services was the Government who had no alternative but to fill available vacancies from this pool.
Understanding that poverty could not be eradicated by platitudes, the first democratic Government of Kashmir, headed by Sheikh Abdullah, instituted a number of progressive reforms. The land reform of Kashmir that took the land away from landlords and gave it to the tillers is still unimplemented in the rest of India in totality. Equally important was the making of education almost free up to University level for the residents of Jammu & Kashmir. I have studied in the state and remember paying Rs 5.00 for my fees for one year of college education. The standard of education was no less than any other institution in India, although the state did not yet have many professional training institutions for engineers and doctors.
The people of Kashmir, though not wealthy, were quite content within their limitations. There was respect for the state leaders, among whom Sheikh Abdullah was indeed the tallest, as also for national leaders. As school children we have enthusiastically welcomed Prime Minister Nehru, Home Minister G. B. Pant, and the other visiting dignitaries from India and abroad. People moved freely across the land and the only visible uniform on the roads would be worn by the men of Jammu & Kashmir Police. The CRPF were in barracks far from the towns and cities, while the Indian Army was stationed at the outposts along the Line of Control that came into existence after Pakistan’s first attempt to wrest the province by military force. The Army Cantonment was at the entrance to the city of Srinagar at a place called Badami Bagh, and its inmates hardly interacted with the local population. My brother was a Sub-Inspector in the state Police and I have travelled to some very remote and beautiful parts of the valley with him during my school vacations. On one such trip we followed a criminal right up to the no-man’s land before the LOC; a chase that lasted for two days across steep mountains and deep valleys, and apart from two pill boxes manned by a single soldier each, we did not see any other person in uniform except the members of our police party. Even at the last village before the LOC we found no men in uniform. The village was small and its headman welcomed us and bade us stay in his house. We were treated with utmost respect and affection. The criminal was caught, and brought back to the original village for further proceedings.
That Kashmir had forgotten its earlier periods of violence during several invasions dating from 1320 A.D., and had evolved a truly syncretic way of life for its people was amply illustrated by the events of 1947 when Pakistan tried to annex the province through force and sent in a tribal militia to hide its own face. The rulers of Pakistan had assumed that the predominantly Muslim population of Kashmir would welcome the raiders with open arms and that their way to Srinagar would be strewn with rose petals by the locals. They were to be in for a rude shock when, first Maqbool Sherwani sent them in the wrong direction (for which he later paid with his life at Baramulla), and secondly when the locals resisted them with everything they had at their disposal. Though the communal carnage had reached levels of insane frenzy in the Punjab and Bengal, Kashmir had remained peaceful and the Pandit and other minorities were protected by their Muslim neighbours from these predators from Pakistan.
The twin initiatives of giving land to the tillers and providing free education to all was grabbed with both hands by the peasantry who found that they could now spare the young from their fields and send them to school to get a proper education. They were no longer living a marginal existence where every hand had to be productively employed in the fields or in the sweat shops run by wealthy merchants knitting shawls or knotting carpets.
During the sixties, within a span of ten to fifteen years, Kashmir had a significant population of educated, lower-middle class youth, with normal aspirations of gainful employment. However, during this period the moral climate had been completely vitiated by a succession of self-serving and venal class of politicians, who came to power after the thoughtless dismissal and incarceration of Sheikh Abdullah in 1953. This blunder of truly Himalayan proportions by Nehru was second only to his call for cease fire when still a large part of Kashmir was in hostile possession. Kashmir was handed over first to the most corrupt family then in existence, known as the BBC (Bakshi Brothers Corporation), who amongst them bled the valley while building enormous fortunes for themselves. The Kamraj plan was, mercifully, used to get rid of this son of the soil, but his successors were even worse. In between came people like Shamsuddin (I am sure nobody even remembers that he was the Chief Minister for a few months), followed by the leftist G. M. Sadiq, and Syed Mir Qasim, in whose times began the alienation of the newly educated youth of Kashmir. By the time the Sheikh had been let out of jail and reinstated by Indira Gandhi in 1974, under the Indira-Sheikh accord as the C.M., much damage had been done to the secular fabric of Kashmir.
Pakistan too had not forgotten its humiliation of 1947, and had never accepted Kashmir as a part of India. It continued to harp on the promise of plebiscite that Nehru had made while ordering the cease fire and approaching the UN. However, it conveniently forgot that plebiscite applied to the entire province of Jammu & Kashmir, and not just to the valley. The territories occupied by it illegally and from which it had ceded some parts to China did not figure in its arguments. Nehru had said that a plebiscite could be held if the Pakistanis withdrew to the positions that existed before the tribal raid, and allowed the displaced populations to return to their homes. This was not possible because the Pakistanis, in their misplaced zeal and haste, had surrendered some portions of Northern Kashmir to China. Further they had no intentions of withdrawing from their occupied portion of Kashmir and creating a situation of status quo ante.
Having failed to get their agenda enforced by the UN, even with blatant American support, the Pakistanis embarked on a deliberate policy of creating dissent and disaffection among the people of Kashmir. The first phase of this operation was code named “Gibralter”. This operation was put into effect by the Martial Law President of Pakistan Gen. Ayub Khan in 1965. The operation involved heavy infiltration of Pakistani nationals among who would be disguised military personnel who would provide military training to Kashmiri youth. The recruitment of the youth was done through Jamaat-i-Islami which had deep connections with the Rabita-ul-Islam, the international headquarters of the Islamic fundamentalist movement based in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan’s Jamat-i-Islami was the organization through which the funding and operational guidance would be channelled. An elaborate infrastructure for propagating Wahabi style of Islam was organized in mosques, schools, and Islamic study groups throughout the valley. In the early seventies this movement gained strength due to the fact that the Indian Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi bent every rule in the book to consolidate her hold on the Congress party and through that on the nation. Mrs. Gandhi encouraged personal loyalty to her at the expense of integrity. This led to the rise of a whole breed of politicians and bureaucrats who were ready to bend and crawl to fulfil her every whim. This was the time when governance suffered extremely and Pakistan was able to take advantage of this weakness and further its agenda in Kashmir.
The Jammat in Kashmir imported Moulvis from Bihar, UP, and Assam, who were soon installed in new mosques built according to Arab tradition and architecture all over the valley. The earlier Kashmiri mosques were a synthesis of various architectural styles incorporating elements from Hindu and Buddhist temples. The imported clergy were instructed to preach the harsh version of Wahabi faith and to discourage the Kashmiris from Saint Worship. The centuries old Sufi tradition of Kashmiri Islam was publicly ridiculed. Kashmiri Muslims were exhorted to repudiate their tradition of tolerance and were taught to despise the liberal Hindus and Muslims among them. Women were also enrolled in this operation and an organization known as Dukhtaran-e-Millat was installed. The women of Kashmir had always been liberal in their outlook and the veil was never a part of their culture. The militant members of the Dukhtaran-e-Millat started threatening ordinary women with dire consequences if they appeared in public without a burqa. Some women had acid thrown on them, thereby making them an example. The members of this organization provided support to the militant groups by indulging in subversive acts like gathering information, distributing arms and ammunition, providing shelter for militants, keeping kidnapped persons in their custody, and above all, by raking up false stories of human rights abuse mainly to involve and discredit the security forces in the valley. The media, always ready to grab any bit of juicy gossip, was a willing victim of their manipulation.
The defeat in 1965 followed by the humiliation inflicted upon Pakistan in1971 when it lost the eastern wing that became the independent nation of Bangladesh had brought home to the rulers that they could never win a conventional war against India. The wily Bhutto who had fooled Indira Gandhi into surrendering all the gains India had made in the 1971 war without conceding anything on Kashmir, was soon overthrown by the Army and political control once again came into the hands of the Generals. Zia-ul-Haq, in order to retain and legitimise his control on the country, introduced Islamic law in accordance with the Wahabi school of thought and thus converted the country from a quasi-secular nation to a completely fundamentalist state. After hanging Bhutto on charges upheld by a Kangaroo court, he put the second phase of operation “Gibralter” into action. In the late seventies he launched a proxy war against India to wrest control of Kashmir. The battle for the minds and hearts of young Kashmiris was joined in real earnest. The Jamaat had already established a fundamentalist structure in the valley’s schools, colleges, and had enlisted a large number of young recruits in the police and men in government offices. The objective was to launch an offensive against India by these home-grown elements which could be euphemistically called a struggle for Azadi. Pakistan would be able to deny its active involvement in arming and training these subversive elements while publicly clamouring in international forums about the repressive role of the Indian security forces that were seen to be suppressing a struggle for independence by the “oppressed” people of Kashmir.
Part of the action plan involved sudden and violent attacks on Army and other security establishments, thereby keeping them fully engaged. On the other hand the militants began to attack soft targets among the Hindu minority, beginning with the murder of a number of Kashmiri Pandit intellectuals that included teachers, lawyers, poets and bureaucrats. The mosques were used to spread panic among the minorities when their loudspeakers spewed propaganda and exhorted the Kashmiri Pandits to leave the valley or face the bullets. Mosques became training grounds and hiding places for these terrorists, and the young unemployed youth of the valley fell easy prey to this propaganda. Wahabi Islamic code was being enforced; cinema halls and video parlours were shut down, beauty parlours were closed, and consumption of alcohol was strictly forbidden. There were attempts to ban Indian currency and to introduce Pakistani currency as the legal tender. By 1989, the valley of Kashmir had virtually begun to look like a part of Pakistan. The Pandits were intimidated, terrorized and urged to leave the valley. On January 4, 1990 Aftab an Urdu daily of Srinagar published a press release from Hizbul Mujahdeen asking Kashmiri Hindus to leave Kashmir or face annihilation. Pandits were told in no uncertain terms that if they wished to live in Kashmir they would have to convert to Islam. Nearly 4 lakh Kashmiri Pandits fled the valley, leaving behind hardly a few thousands, who probably had nowhere to go, to their fate. Kashmir had been completely Islamized without an open war with India.
The deliberate policy of intimidating and murdering the minorities was part of the strategy to cleanse the valley of non-Muslims and force the Indian government to bring the security forces out from their barracks and spread them in the towns and cities. This made them easy targets and almost every day there were attacks on their posts. Retaliatory action was condemned as brutality against civilians, and if one or two of the protesters were killed in the operation, their funerals were conducted with the pomp and ceremony deserved by heroes. Lakhs of mourners would march in the streets chanting anti-India slogans, burning the Indian flag while openly asking for merger with Pakistan. The Indian and international media had already been co-opted by the propaganda machinery of Pakistan, and these so-called liberals began berating the Indian Armed Forces as part of a planned strategy for their demoralization. The deaths of hundreds of officers and jawans in militant actions were never mourned by the media, as if they were not human beings. Terrorists caught by the security forces were soon released by the administrators calling them “misguided youth”, thereby signalling to them that they were safe and could continue with their activities.
The liberalization of the Indian economy ushered in by Rajiv Gandhi and further implemented by Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister, the current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, had changed the Indian society from a “socialistic pattern” to a capitalist one. Businesses were unshackled from government control and profit was no longer a dirty word. The newspaper industry, which till then had largely been seen as an ethical business enterprise, soon changed gears as profits became the sole motive for existence. Television channels mushroomed all over, vying for TRPs and eyeballs. The Indian public, starved of entertainment for so long, enthusiastically lapped up whatever was dished out by these channels. Realising the potential of the media to inflict damage on the country, newspapers and TV channels were funded by shady organizations through the FDI route. The editors of most of these media enterprises have been compromised to mouth the sentiments and policies of these hidden owners. It is rumoured that a large sum of money has been paid by Saudi Arabia to the editors of two prominent Indian TV news channels, with the mandate that they highlight atrocities against Muslims in India and blame the Indian security forces for all that has gone wrong in Kashmir. The Central Government is a willing partner in this manipulation, as it suits its political ends to keep the agitation in Kashmir going. The Indian state is pumping colossal amounts of money into the valley to placate the hardliners, and to maintain the security forces. A large portion of this money is going towards lining the pockets of both the givers and the recipients who are but politicians and bureaucrats. The longer the turmoil lasts, the more is the money that they can make.
The Kashmiri Pandits who were forced to flee and took refuge in Jammu and elsewhere in India were cleverly dubbed as migrants and not as refugees. Their properties were either occupied by the local Muslims or burnt down. The Central Government connived in this fraud by denying the fact that nearly 4 lakh of the citizens of this country had been rendered homeless not due to any natural calamity like flood, earthquake, or tsunami, but by the wilful and carefully planned strategy of terror by another section of the citizenry. The ethnic cleansing of the Pandits was glossed over by the news media and there was never a serious attempt by them to highlight the plight of these unfortunate people. The subhuman conditions in which these Pandits were living in Jammu camps infested with snakes and other reptiles were never exposed to the people at large, but the death or injury of a single protester or stone-pelter on the streets in Kashmir was highlighted and the security forces roundly blamed for thoughtlessness and insensitivity.
In Kashmir many political parties and organizations claim to be secular, but their membership consists of hard-core Islamists. Outside India, World Kashmir Movement (WKM) in London and Kashmir American Council (KAC) in Washington DC serve as mouthpieces of Islamists and pro-Pakistani elements. These organizations have hired Western lobbyists, paid by Arab and Pakistani money, to project Islamic terrorists as freedom fighters fighting for liberation of Jammu & Kashmir from India. At the same time they have recruited known bleeding-heart leftist academics, politicians, and journalists in India to advance their agenda and created a pressure group to favour Kashmir’s secession. These mouthpieces are regularly invited to voice their opinions in the visual media where they keep on harping on the theme that India has failed the youth of Kashmir. Without actually saying that we should hand over the state on a platter to Pakistan, they keep repeating stories of imagined atrocities committed by the security forces that they would like to see withdrawn from Kashmir.
The present generation of the young Kashmiris is totally disconnected from the earlier generation, be it Hindu or Muslim. The Pandits have moved on and settled down to making a new beginning in Jammu and elsewhere in India and abroad. Not being entrepreneurial by nature, they have depended upon executive and administrative employment in either business houses or the government. Both are absent from the valley. There are no employment opportunities for the young in today’s Kashmir and the Pandits are better off outside the valley. Even if the communal climate in the valley stabilizes, the lack of job opportunities will prevent the Pandits to return to their ancestral homes. Pakistan has surely succeeded in completely Islamizing the valley. The Muslim leaders in Kashmir know that the Pandits will not return and their assertion that they are safe once they return is nothing but eyewash. Even if it is safe, the Pandits will go to the valley like other tourists, somewhat like the Italians, Greeks, and Spaniards who have settled for generations in America, to visit the mohallas and localities where their ancestors used to live, and to savour the vegetables, fruits and other local products that some of them nostalgically yearn for.
The Muslims on the other hand have boxed themselves into a valley 60 miles long and 40 miles wide, and have lost the ability to look beyond their narrow piece of sky. They have begun to disown their unique heritage and have wholeheartedly adopted the Arabian Wahabi system of their faith. While beating their breasts at the destruction of the holy shrine of the great Sufi saint Shaikh Nur-ud-din (1337-1442 A.D) at Chrar-e-sharif (revered also by the Hindus as Nund Reshi), they had no qualms in letting dreaded terrorists occupy it who eventually set it on fire. The people have forgotten the message of the Shaikh about how Islam should be followed in the following verses from his great body of work:
Should you not shun inner anger?
How can you, your external wrath?
Unless you cleanse you inner mind
You'll lead an ostriched life
"Why are you bent upon to create hatred amongst them?
They are the descendants of one and the same mother,
Serve to the best of your capacity Mussalmans and Hindus.
If you follow this path God will bestow his grace on thee."
And he had foretold how events would unfold if his advice was not followed:
"They will cut the throat of that very cock.
Who calls them to prayers.
They will simply weigh him for their own ends.
I beseech I may not be born among such people Oh! God."
"You have crammed the books only for worldly ends.
Your learning never prevents you from your bad deeds.
You always think in terms of trapping each-other
Your contention is wrong, for you consider.
Yourselves to be amongst the chosen.
I foretell with authority that you will not reach the goal.”
The young Kashmiri Muslims have been inoculated with this poisonous vaccine of a militant Islam at conflict with the rest of the world over religious identity. It is a lament for the lost glories of Islamic Empires that flourished for centuries over large parts of the globe, and have now shrunk to a few sheikhdoms in oil-rich Arabia. The Sheikhs are a powerless elite, dependent upon the West who exploit them for their oil and in return permit them to indulge in their fantasies. But as with Saddam Hussain, these dictators know that they will be tolerated only till they keep on toeing the line of the Western powers. The frustration at this knowledge of helplessness builds anger in the minds of young Muslims who are ready to avenge their lost glory on the first hapless victim they come across. This is what Pakistan has recognized as the weakness of the Kashmiri Muslim youth and has been exploiting through its agents in the mosques, educational institutions, and the media.
As said earlier money has never been in short supply in the valley from the time Mrs. Indira Gandhi took complete control of the Congress party and the country. To keep herself in power she indulged every corrupt politician and hundreds of millions were diverted from public schemes to the private coffers of the powerful and the power-brokers. To keep control on the valley she installed Sheikh Abdullah as CM in 1974, who was no longer the lion that he had been in his earlier phase. A long time in jail and out of power had dulled his fire and he was happy to be back in office. Under his stewardship corruption rose to new heights and all the money that the centre was providing for infrastructure development and employment-generating schemes just went into private hands. Kashmiris were becoming rich without doing anything and the centre was happy to go along turning a blind eye. Indira Gandhi believed that she had brought the state firmly into the Indian Union and that there would be no more talk of a plebiscite or merger with Pakistan. Little did she realize that the funds she was providing were being utilized by the enemies of India to train and mobilize a deadly column of young jihadis who would be completely indoctrinated with the philosophy of militant Islam. After her assassination in 1984 she was succeeded by her son Rajiv who was inexperienced and naïve and thus became a pawn in the hands of his mother’s wily adherents. These parasites had been encouraged by his mother to help her stay in power and they now switched over to his body. Rajiv was completely isolated by this coterie around him and kept in an ‘ivory tower’ that made him lose touch with reality. In 1989, not only did he lose the Lok Sabha elections that he had won five years ago with the greatest majority ever, but the country was almost at the threshold of balkanization as sectarian and fissiparous pressures were tearing the national fabric into shreds. There were, in the famous phrase of Sir Vidya Naipaul, a “million mutinies everywhere”. However, India did ride that crisis except in the valley of Kashmir. The ethnic cleansing of the minorities began in the same year and the valley has been openly rebellious against India from that time onwards.
Going by the comments on Facebook by Kashmiri youth, who seem to have taken to it with great relish, one can see how completely alienated and indoctrinated these young men have been. Instead of Maqbool Sherwani it is Maqbool Bhatt who is their current hero. I have gone through hundreds of profiles and thousands of statements made by them openly on this website and am appalled at the kind of language they are using to denounce India. These are all educated, English speaking, T-shirt and jeans clad youth, and not some bearded, Salwar-Kameez-wearing fanatics. The hatred for India and the Indian security forces in their hearts is running deep and fast. There are a large number of women on Facebook who echo these sentiments, perhaps with even more vehemence. Facebook is a public domain and anyone can access it and read the innermost thoughts of most people who like to post their comments on it. The Kashmiri youth is not in the streets pelting stones at the security forces because they have mundane demands like employment, education or, as we have a tendency to say in India, “bijli, sadak, aur pani”. The youth have no such demands. The writers and intellectuals, who are continuously harping upon the theme that India has not done justice to Kashmir, have never actually put down the nature of the demands of the agitators. They want to gloss over the fact that the young Kashmiri Muslims have only one demand - to be given independence from Indian rule and to establish a complete Islamic state in the valley. The demand for independence is just a pretext as they do not openly want to admit that their ultimate goal is a complete merger with Pakistan. Everybody knows that a landlocked independent Kashmir cannot survive and the moment Indian troops move out, the Pakistani Army will move in and bring the state under its rule. Ask any young Kashmiri in the street and he will confirm that he does not want anything else but Azadi from India.
The pseudo-secular media has conveniently ignored to report on this aspect of the movement in Kashmir. They have not even once asked the question that why the people of Jammu and Ladakh have not resorted to the same tactics as the people of the valley. It is because the truth is inconvenient to their agenda and the real people who control them. The Jyoti Punwanis, Vir Sanghvis and others have compromised themselves to a position on Kashmir for reasons best known to them. Unfortunately, they are in a position to influence public opinion by projecting a wrong image of the Indian Security forces in Kashmir while sympathizing with the openly anti-nationalist and anti-Indian people of the valley of Kashmir. The Government of India is led by a weak Prime Minister and an arrogant-ignorant Home Minister. It is doubly unfortunate that the Congress President, who by virtue of a surname, is in a position to influence policy and decision-making, is instead totally occupied by the mission to have her son anointed as the next Prime Minister. It is he who is dictating policy at this time and there is no one in the Government or the party who dare say a word contrary to his. Much like his father he is too inexperienced and naïve to understand what the enemies of India are planning. The state’s energies are diverted towards holding such wasteful extravaganzas as the Commonwealth Games. Making money has become the mantra of the urban masses with Western lifestyles as the ultimate achievement. The media is actively encouraging this tendency and conspicuous consumption has become the norm. In this pursuit for more and more consumerism, we have forgotten the purpose for which we had fought for our independence in the last century. That independence is under serious threat from an extremely hostile neighbour on our Western flank and our own citizens from the North. Our present indifference to these threats will cost us very dear in the future and may eventually end up with a complete break-up of the entity we know today as India.
When Kashmir, with the rest of India, became independent from British rule it was, without doubt one of the poorest parts of the country. The valley had almost no industry apart from a primitive silk factory that produced a very inferior quality of silk cloth, and a match factory near Baramulla. Agricultural production was not enough to feed the population; items like sugar, salt and other commodities had to be brought in from the plains. The only link with Jammu was an unreliable road over the Pir Panjal range that would frequently close due to landslides and heavy snowfall. Air connections were also unpredictable as the Dakotas in use then could not fly if the Banihal Pass (at about 10000 feet the only available corridor for flying across the mountains) was hidden by clouds. In the winter of 1951-52 I have gone to the Srinagar Airport every day for 21 days for catching a flight to Pathankot, before a plane could come across and leave the same afternoon.
Kashmir’s tourist season was also relatively short in duration. People from the plains would mainly come during the summer holidays, usually for 2 months. There would be some traffic during the annual Amarnath Yatra, but that consisted mainly of pilgrims who provided some employment for pony drivers and a few porters. Shawls, which had been the mainstay of the economy of Kashmir, had only contributed to the enrichment of a few merchant families, while keeping the actual artisans and weavers perpetually poor. Kashmiri Pandits had realized long before that in order to improve their lives they would have to invest in education. This they proceeded to do in right earnest. Educating the young, whether male or female, had become the sole objective of the Pandit families. Consequently, a number of them were sent to Universities in Punjab, Delhi, Benares, etc., from where they obtained degrees in Humanities, Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The only employer for their services was the Government who had no alternative but to fill available vacancies from this pool.
Understanding that poverty could not be eradicated by platitudes, the first democratic Government of Kashmir, headed by Sheikh Abdullah, instituted a number of progressive reforms. The land reform of Kashmir that took the land away from landlords and gave it to the tillers is still unimplemented in the rest of India in totality. Equally important was the making of education almost free up to University level for the residents of Jammu & Kashmir. I have studied in the state and remember paying Rs 5.00 for my fees for one year of college education. The standard of education was no less than any other institution in India, although the state did not yet have many professional training institutions for engineers and doctors.
The people of Kashmir, though not wealthy, were quite content within their limitations. There was respect for the state leaders, among whom Sheikh Abdullah was indeed the tallest, as also for national leaders. As school children we have enthusiastically welcomed Prime Minister Nehru, Home Minister G. B. Pant, and the other visiting dignitaries from India and abroad. People moved freely across the land and the only visible uniform on the roads would be worn by the men of Jammu & Kashmir Police. The CRPF were in barracks far from the towns and cities, while the Indian Army was stationed at the outposts along the Line of Control that came into existence after Pakistan’s first attempt to wrest the province by military force. The Army Cantonment was at the entrance to the city of Srinagar at a place called Badami Bagh, and its inmates hardly interacted with the local population. My brother was a Sub-Inspector in the state Police and I have travelled to some very remote and beautiful parts of the valley with him during my school vacations. On one such trip we followed a criminal right up to the no-man’s land before the LOC; a chase that lasted for two days across steep mountains and deep valleys, and apart from two pill boxes manned by a single soldier each, we did not see any other person in uniform except the members of our police party. Even at the last village before the LOC we found no men in uniform. The village was small and its headman welcomed us and bade us stay in his house. We were treated with utmost respect and affection. The criminal was caught, and brought back to the original village for further proceedings.
That Kashmir had forgotten its earlier periods of violence during several invasions dating from 1320 A.D., and had evolved a truly syncretic way of life for its people was amply illustrated by the events of 1947 when Pakistan tried to annex the province through force and sent in a tribal militia to hide its own face. The rulers of Pakistan had assumed that the predominantly Muslim population of Kashmir would welcome the raiders with open arms and that their way to Srinagar would be strewn with rose petals by the locals. They were to be in for a rude shock when, first Maqbool Sherwani sent them in the wrong direction (for which he later paid with his life at Baramulla), and secondly when the locals resisted them with everything they had at their disposal. Though the communal carnage had reached levels of insane frenzy in the Punjab and Bengal, Kashmir had remained peaceful and the Pandit and other minorities were protected by their Muslim neighbours from these predators from Pakistan.
The twin initiatives of giving land to the tillers and providing free education to all was grabbed with both hands by the peasantry who found that they could now spare the young from their fields and send them to school to get a proper education. They were no longer living a marginal existence where every hand had to be productively employed in the fields or in the sweat shops run by wealthy merchants knitting shawls or knotting carpets.
During the sixties, within a span of ten to fifteen years, Kashmir had a significant population of educated, lower-middle class youth, with normal aspirations of gainful employment. However, during this period the moral climate had been completely vitiated by a succession of self-serving and venal class of politicians, who came to power after the thoughtless dismissal and incarceration of Sheikh Abdullah in 1953. This blunder of truly Himalayan proportions by Nehru was second only to his call for cease fire when still a large part of Kashmir was in hostile possession. Kashmir was handed over first to the most corrupt family then in existence, known as the BBC (Bakshi Brothers Corporation), who amongst them bled the valley while building enormous fortunes for themselves. The Kamraj plan was, mercifully, used to get rid of this son of the soil, but his successors were even worse. In between came people like Shamsuddin (I am sure nobody even remembers that he was the Chief Minister for a few months), followed by the leftist G. M. Sadiq, and Syed Mir Qasim, in whose times began the alienation of the newly educated youth of Kashmir. By the time the Sheikh had been let out of jail and reinstated by Indira Gandhi in 1974, under the Indira-Sheikh accord as the C.M., much damage had been done to the secular fabric of Kashmir.
Pakistan too had not forgotten its humiliation of 1947, and had never accepted Kashmir as a part of India. It continued to harp on the promise of plebiscite that Nehru had made while ordering the cease fire and approaching the UN. However, it conveniently forgot that plebiscite applied to the entire province of Jammu & Kashmir, and not just to the valley. The territories occupied by it illegally and from which it had ceded some parts to China did not figure in its arguments. Nehru had said that a plebiscite could be held if the Pakistanis withdrew to the positions that existed before the tribal raid, and allowed the displaced populations to return to their homes. This was not possible because the Pakistanis, in their misplaced zeal and haste, had surrendered some portions of Northern Kashmir to China. Further they had no intentions of withdrawing from their occupied portion of Kashmir and creating a situation of status quo ante.
Having failed to get their agenda enforced by the UN, even with blatant American support, the Pakistanis embarked on a deliberate policy of creating dissent and disaffection among the people of Kashmir. The first phase of this operation was code named “Gibralter”. This operation was put into effect by the Martial Law President of Pakistan Gen. Ayub Khan in 1965. The operation involved heavy infiltration of Pakistani nationals among who would be disguised military personnel who would provide military training to Kashmiri youth. The recruitment of the youth was done through Jamaat-i-Islami which had deep connections with the Rabita-ul-Islam, the international headquarters of the Islamic fundamentalist movement based in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan’s Jamat-i-Islami was the organization through which the funding and operational guidance would be channelled. An elaborate infrastructure for propagating Wahabi style of Islam was organized in mosques, schools, and Islamic study groups throughout the valley. In the early seventies this movement gained strength due to the fact that the Indian Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi bent every rule in the book to consolidate her hold on the Congress party and through that on the nation. Mrs. Gandhi encouraged personal loyalty to her at the expense of integrity. This led to the rise of a whole breed of politicians and bureaucrats who were ready to bend and crawl to fulfil her every whim. This was the time when governance suffered extremely and Pakistan was able to take advantage of this weakness and further its agenda in Kashmir.
The Jammat in Kashmir imported Moulvis from Bihar, UP, and Assam, who were soon installed in new mosques built according to Arab tradition and architecture all over the valley. The earlier Kashmiri mosques were a synthesis of various architectural styles incorporating elements from Hindu and Buddhist temples. The imported clergy were instructed to preach the harsh version of Wahabi faith and to discourage the Kashmiris from Saint Worship. The centuries old Sufi tradition of Kashmiri Islam was publicly ridiculed. Kashmiri Muslims were exhorted to repudiate their tradition of tolerance and were taught to despise the liberal Hindus and Muslims among them. Women were also enrolled in this operation and an organization known as Dukhtaran-e-Millat was installed. The women of Kashmir had always been liberal in their outlook and the veil was never a part of their culture. The militant members of the Dukhtaran-e-Millat started threatening ordinary women with dire consequences if they appeared in public without a burqa. Some women had acid thrown on them, thereby making them an example. The members of this organization provided support to the militant groups by indulging in subversive acts like gathering information, distributing arms and ammunition, providing shelter for militants, keeping kidnapped persons in their custody, and above all, by raking up false stories of human rights abuse mainly to involve and discredit the security forces in the valley. The media, always ready to grab any bit of juicy gossip, was a willing victim of their manipulation.
The defeat in 1965 followed by the humiliation inflicted upon Pakistan in1971 when it lost the eastern wing that became the independent nation of Bangladesh had brought home to the rulers that they could never win a conventional war against India. The wily Bhutto who had fooled Indira Gandhi into surrendering all the gains India had made in the 1971 war without conceding anything on Kashmir, was soon overthrown by the Army and political control once again came into the hands of the Generals. Zia-ul-Haq, in order to retain and legitimise his control on the country, introduced Islamic law in accordance with the Wahabi school of thought and thus converted the country from a quasi-secular nation to a completely fundamentalist state. After hanging Bhutto on charges upheld by a Kangaroo court, he put the second phase of operation “Gibralter” into action. In the late seventies he launched a proxy war against India to wrest control of Kashmir. The battle for the minds and hearts of young Kashmiris was joined in real earnest. The Jamaat had already established a fundamentalist structure in the valley’s schools, colleges, and had enlisted a large number of young recruits in the police and men in government offices. The objective was to launch an offensive against India by these home-grown elements which could be euphemistically called a struggle for Azadi. Pakistan would be able to deny its active involvement in arming and training these subversive elements while publicly clamouring in international forums about the repressive role of the Indian security forces that were seen to be suppressing a struggle for independence by the “oppressed” people of Kashmir.
Part of the action plan involved sudden and violent attacks on Army and other security establishments, thereby keeping them fully engaged. On the other hand the militants began to attack soft targets among the Hindu minority, beginning with the murder of a number of Kashmiri Pandit intellectuals that included teachers, lawyers, poets and bureaucrats. The mosques were used to spread panic among the minorities when their loudspeakers spewed propaganda and exhorted the Kashmiri Pandits to leave the valley or face the bullets. Mosques became training grounds and hiding places for these terrorists, and the young unemployed youth of the valley fell easy prey to this propaganda. Wahabi Islamic code was being enforced; cinema halls and video parlours were shut down, beauty parlours were closed, and consumption of alcohol was strictly forbidden. There were attempts to ban Indian currency and to introduce Pakistani currency as the legal tender. By 1989, the valley of Kashmir had virtually begun to look like a part of Pakistan. The Pandits were intimidated, terrorized and urged to leave the valley. On January 4, 1990 Aftab an Urdu daily of Srinagar published a press release from Hizbul Mujahdeen asking Kashmiri Hindus to leave Kashmir or face annihilation. Pandits were told in no uncertain terms that if they wished to live in Kashmir they would have to convert to Islam. Nearly 4 lakh Kashmiri Pandits fled the valley, leaving behind hardly a few thousands, who probably had nowhere to go, to their fate. Kashmir had been completely Islamized without an open war with India.
The deliberate policy of intimidating and murdering the minorities was part of the strategy to cleanse the valley of non-Muslims and force the Indian government to bring the security forces out from their barracks and spread them in the towns and cities. This made them easy targets and almost every day there were attacks on their posts. Retaliatory action was condemned as brutality against civilians, and if one or two of the protesters were killed in the operation, their funerals were conducted with the pomp and ceremony deserved by heroes. Lakhs of mourners would march in the streets chanting anti-India slogans, burning the Indian flag while openly asking for merger with Pakistan. The Indian and international media had already been co-opted by the propaganda machinery of Pakistan, and these so-called liberals began berating the Indian Armed Forces as part of a planned strategy for their demoralization. The deaths of hundreds of officers and jawans in militant actions were never mourned by the media, as if they were not human beings. Terrorists caught by the security forces were soon released by the administrators calling them “misguided youth”, thereby signalling to them that they were safe and could continue with their activities.
The liberalization of the Indian economy ushered in by Rajiv Gandhi and further implemented by Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister, the current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, had changed the Indian society from a “socialistic pattern” to a capitalist one. Businesses were unshackled from government control and profit was no longer a dirty word. The newspaper industry, which till then had largely been seen as an ethical business enterprise, soon changed gears as profits became the sole motive for existence. Television channels mushroomed all over, vying for TRPs and eyeballs. The Indian public, starved of entertainment for so long, enthusiastically lapped up whatever was dished out by these channels. Realising the potential of the media to inflict damage on the country, newspapers and TV channels were funded by shady organizations through the FDI route. The editors of most of these media enterprises have been compromised to mouth the sentiments and policies of these hidden owners. It is rumoured that a large sum of money has been paid by Saudi Arabia to the editors of two prominent Indian TV news channels, with the mandate that they highlight atrocities against Muslims in India and blame the Indian security forces for all that has gone wrong in Kashmir. The Central Government is a willing partner in this manipulation, as it suits its political ends to keep the agitation in Kashmir going. The Indian state is pumping colossal amounts of money into the valley to placate the hardliners, and to maintain the security forces. A large portion of this money is going towards lining the pockets of both the givers and the recipients who are but politicians and bureaucrats. The longer the turmoil lasts, the more is the money that they can make.
The Kashmiri Pandits who were forced to flee and took refuge in Jammu and elsewhere in India were cleverly dubbed as migrants and not as refugees. Their properties were either occupied by the local Muslims or burnt down. The Central Government connived in this fraud by denying the fact that nearly 4 lakh of the citizens of this country had been rendered homeless not due to any natural calamity like flood, earthquake, or tsunami, but by the wilful and carefully planned strategy of terror by another section of the citizenry. The ethnic cleansing of the Pandits was glossed over by the news media and there was never a serious attempt by them to highlight the plight of these unfortunate people. The subhuman conditions in which these Pandits were living in Jammu camps infested with snakes and other reptiles were never exposed to the people at large, but the death or injury of a single protester or stone-pelter on the streets in Kashmir was highlighted and the security forces roundly blamed for thoughtlessness and insensitivity.
In Kashmir many political parties and organizations claim to be secular, but their membership consists of hard-core Islamists. Outside India, World Kashmir Movement (WKM) in London and Kashmir American Council (KAC) in Washington DC serve as mouthpieces of Islamists and pro-Pakistani elements. These organizations have hired Western lobbyists, paid by Arab and Pakistani money, to project Islamic terrorists as freedom fighters fighting for liberation of Jammu & Kashmir from India. At the same time they have recruited known bleeding-heart leftist academics, politicians, and journalists in India to advance their agenda and created a pressure group to favour Kashmir’s secession. These mouthpieces are regularly invited to voice their opinions in the visual media where they keep on harping on the theme that India has failed the youth of Kashmir. Without actually saying that we should hand over the state on a platter to Pakistan, they keep repeating stories of imagined atrocities committed by the security forces that they would like to see withdrawn from Kashmir.
The present generation of the young Kashmiris is totally disconnected from the earlier generation, be it Hindu or Muslim. The Pandits have moved on and settled down to making a new beginning in Jammu and elsewhere in India and abroad. Not being entrepreneurial by nature, they have depended upon executive and administrative employment in either business houses or the government. Both are absent from the valley. There are no employment opportunities for the young in today’s Kashmir and the Pandits are better off outside the valley. Even if the communal climate in the valley stabilizes, the lack of job opportunities will prevent the Pandits to return to their ancestral homes. Pakistan has surely succeeded in completely Islamizing the valley. The Muslim leaders in Kashmir know that the Pandits will not return and their assertion that they are safe once they return is nothing but eyewash. Even if it is safe, the Pandits will go to the valley like other tourists, somewhat like the Italians, Greeks, and Spaniards who have settled for generations in America, to visit the mohallas and localities where their ancestors used to live, and to savour the vegetables, fruits and other local products that some of them nostalgically yearn for.
The Muslims on the other hand have boxed themselves into a valley 60 miles long and 40 miles wide, and have lost the ability to look beyond their narrow piece of sky. They have begun to disown their unique heritage and have wholeheartedly adopted the Arabian Wahabi system of their faith. While beating their breasts at the destruction of the holy shrine of the great Sufi saint Shaikh Nur-ud-din (1337-1442 A.D) at Chrar-e-sharif (revered also by the Hindus as Nund Reshi), they had no qualms in letting dreaded terrorists occupy it who eventually set it on fire. The people have forgotten the message of the Shaikh about how Islam should be followed in the following verses from his great body of work:
Should you not shun inner anger?
How can you, your external wrath?
Unless you cleanse you inner mind
You'll lead an ostriched life
"Why are you bent upon to create hatred amongst them?
They are the descendants of one and the same mother,
Serve to the best of your capacity Mussalmans and Hindus.
If you follow this path God will bestow his grace on thee."
And he had foretold how events would unfold if his advice was not followed:
"They will cut the throat of that very cock.
Who calls them to prayers.
They will simply weigh him for their own ends.
I beseech I may not be born among such people Oh! God."
"You have crammed the books only for worldly ends.
Your learning never prevents you from your bad deeds.
You always think in terms of trapping each-other
Your contention is wrong, for you consider.
Yourselves to be amongst the chosen.
I foretell with authority that you will not reach the goal.”
The young Kashmiri Muslims have been inoculated with this poisonous vaccine of a militant Islam at conflict with the rest of the world over religious identity. It is a lament for the lost glories of Islamic Empires that flourished for centuries over large parts of the globe, and have now shrunk to a few sheikhdoms in oil-rich Arabia. The Sheikhs are a powerless elite, dependent upon the West who exploit them for their oil and in return permit them to indulge in their fantasies. But as with Saddam Hussain, these dictators know that they will be tolerated only till they keep on toeing the line of the Western powers. The frustration at this knowledge of helplessness builds anger in the minds of young Muslims who are ready to avenge their lost glory on the first hapless victim they come across. This is what Pakistan has recognized as the weakness of the Kashmiri Muslim youth and has been exploiting through its agents in the mosques, educational institutions, and the media.
As said earlier money has never been in short supply in the valley from the time Mrs. Indira Gandhi took complete control of the Congress party and the country. To keep herself in power she indulged every corrupt politician and hundreds of millions were diverted from public schemes to the private coffers of the powerful and the power-brokers. To keep control on the valley she installed Sheikh Abdullah as CM in 1974, who was no longer the lion that he had been in his earlier phase. A long time in jail and out of power had dulled his fire and he was happy to be back in office. Under his stewardship corruption rose to new heights and all the money that the centre was providing for infrastructure development and employment-generating schemes just went into private hands. Kashmiris were becoming rich without doing anything and the centre was happy to go along turning a blind eye. Indira Gandhi believed that she had brought the state firmly into the Indian Union and that there would be no more talk of a plebiscite or merger with Pakistan. Little did she realize that the funds she was providing were being utilized by the enemies of India to train and mobilize a deadly column of young jihadis who would be completely indoctrinated with the philosophy of militant Islam. After her assassination in 1984 she was succeeded by her son Rajiv who was inexperienced and naïve and thus became a pawn in the hands of his mother’s wily adherents. These parasites had been encouraged by his mother to help her stay in power and they now switched over to his body. Rajiv was completely isolated by this coterie around him and kept in an ‘ivory tower’ that made him lose touch with reality. In 1989, not only did he lose the Lok Sabha elections that he had won five years ago with the greatest majority ever, but the country was almost at the threshold of balkanization as sectarian and fissiparous pressures were tearing the national fabric into shreds. There were, in the famous phrase of Sir Vidya Naipaul, a “million mutinies everywhere”. However, India did ride that crisis except in the valley of Kashmir. The ethnic cleansing of the minorities began in the same year and the valley has been openly rebellious against India from that time onwards.
Going by the comments on Facebook by Kashmiri youth, who seem to have taken to it with great relish, one can see how completely alienated and indoctrinated these young men have been. Instead of Maqbool Sherwani it is Maqbool Bhatt who is their current hero. I have gone through hundreds of profiles and thousands of statements made by them openly on this website and am appalled at the kind of language they are using to denounce India. These are all educated, English speaking, T-shirt and jeans clad youth, and not some bearded, Salwar-Kameez-wearing fanatics. The hatred for India and the Indian security forces in their hearts is running deep and fast. There are a large number of women on Facebook who echo these sentiments, perhaps with even more vehemence. Facebook is a public domain and anyone can access it and read the innermost thoughts of most people who like to post their comments on it. The Kashmiri youth is not in the streets pelting stones at the security forces because they have mundane demands like employment, education or, as we have a tendency to say in India, “bijli, sadak, aur pani”. The youth have no such demands. The writers and intellectuals, who are continuously harping upon the theme that India has not done justice to Kashmir, have never actually put down the nature of the demands of the agitators. They want to gloss over the fact that the young Kashmiri Muslims have only one demand - to be given independence from Indian rule and to establish a complete Islamic state in the valley. The demand for independence is just a pretext as they do not openly want to admit that their ultimate goal is a complete merger with Pakistan. Everybody knows that a landlocked independent Kashmir cannot survive and the moment Indian troops move out, the Pakistani Army will move in and bring the state under its rule. Ask any young Kashmiri in the street and he will confirm that he does not want anything else but Azadi from India.
The pseudo-secular media has conveniently ignored to report on this aspect of the movement in Kashmir. They have not even once asked the question that why the people of Jammu and Ladakh have not resorted to the same tactics as the people of the valley. It is because the truth is inconvenient to their agenda and the real people who control them. The Jyoti Punwanis, Vir Sanghvis and others have compromised themselves to a position on Kashmir for reasons best known to them. Unfortunately, they are in a position to influence public opinion by projecting a wrong image of the Indian Security forces in Kashmir while sympathizing with the openly anti-nationalist and anti-Indian people of the valley of Kashmir. The Government of India is led by a weak Prime Minister and an arrogant-ignorant Home Minister. It is doubly unfortunate that the Congress President, who by virtue of a surname, is in a position to influence policy and decision-making, is instead totally occupied by the mission to have her son anointed as the next Prime Minister. It is he who is dictating policy at this time and there is no one in the Government or the party who dare say a word contrary to his. Much like his father he is too inexperienced and naïve to understand what the enemies of India are planning. The state’s energies are diverted towards holding such wasteful extravaganzas as the Commonwealth Games. Making money has become the mantra of the urban masses with Western lifestyles as the ultimate achievement. The media is actively encouraging this tendency and conspicuous consumption has become the norm. In this pursuit for more and more consumerism, we have forgotten the purpose for which we had fought for our independence in the last century. That independence is under serious threat from an extremely hostile neighbour on our Western flank and our own citizens from the North. Our present indifference to these threats will cost us very dear in the future and may eventually end up with a complete break-up of the entity we know today as India.
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