(Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha)
The worst of a coalition of opposites, such as we have in Jammu & Kashmir, is that to keep the alliance going, the partners indulge in what can only be described as "competitive communalism".
Nothing else explains how an otherwise decent Chief Minister could have made the appalling suggestion that he would construct a series of habitations in the Valley into which he would funnel returning Kashmiri Pandits, thereby reducing the proposed exclusively Pandit communities to a string of Bantustans, as the apartheid regime in South Africa had done to definitively separate White from Black. Fortunately, Mufti Sahib has now fudged his original intention by claiming he was misunderstood. But the proposal has not been withdrawn, merely kept for the moment in abeyance.
It is the BJP partner in the coalition who is pressing for the early return of the Pandits to the Valley. Mufti Sahib's PDP is more than willing to welcome back the Pandits. Indeed, all elements of the Kashmiri polity, including the Hurriyat, assert the necessity of the Pandits returning to Valley. They do not, emphatically do not, regard the Pandits as aliens. But the Pandit community as a whole continues to be apprehensive about their security in the company of their fellow Kashmiri Muslims, and the BJP-Sangh Parivar does everything it can to aggravate these fears, however unfounded.
Hence, on the one hand, the movement for a Panun Kashmir, carved out of a portion of the Valley, where the Hindus would live isolated from, and apart from, the Valley Muslims, and not in composite neighbourhoods. It is a repudiation of the essence of Kashmiriyat, an institutionalization of the wholly bogus line that Hindus and Muslims cannot live together in the Valley, that they must remain separated. This is the line favoured by the bulk of the Jammu BJP. Stopping short of the Panun Kashmir line, but not going so far as to draw the Hindu-Muslim divide along the Chenab river that divides Kashmir from Jammu (as the Pakistanis have sometimes suggested), the PDP has sought to bridge the two positions by placing on the table for discussion the establishment of a series of Hindu Bantustans in the Valley. In practical terms, there is little to choose between the Panun Kashmir proposal and the Mufti proposal. Both would spell the end of the spirit of Kashmiriyat and institutionalize a gulf between Pandit and Muslim that was never part of the traditional unique ethos of the State, where the two communities have lived in peaceful harmony for centuries.
The original sin was that of Jagmohan, who in his second term as Governor of J&K, that happily lasted under six months (January-May 1990), either panicked or revealed the deepest of his prejudices in facilitating the emptying of the Valley of almost all its Pandits in a matter of days in March 1990. The Pandit population in 1990 was about 1,70,00. It has now been reduced to some 7,000 - but all 7000 have lived through the last terrible 25 years in the same mohallas as the Muslims, a shining beacon of secular togetherness in this most trying of times. So integral to Kashmiriyat is the imperative of the two communities living together that the separatists led by Syed Geelani have been among the loudest in affirming the importance of the Pandit community returning to the Valley and condemning the idea of Pandits-only Bantustans.
Why did Jagmohan panic? He has provided the answers himself in his book,
My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir, a detailed apologia for his actions during the disaster that overtook the Valley in his brief term. He arrived just as extremist elements began filling the governance void in Srinagar consequent on the elected Farooq Abdullah government resigning office and Governor Krishna Rao doing the same in the wake of the VP Singh government refusing to heed their cautionary advice against the State government releasing dreaded convicted terrorists in exchange for the release of the kidnapped daughter of the then Union Home Minister, the same Mufti who is now Chief Minister of the State.
True, night after night, the most vicious anti-Pandit propaganda was broadcast from microphones installed in mosques. True, gruesome killings accompanied the propaganda. True, eminent, secular Kashmiris, the very embodiment of Kashmiriyat, were targeted. It looked as if the only way the Pandits could save themselves would be to flee the Valley. But why? It was the duty of the administration led by the Governor to not succumb to these threats, to take appropriate action to protect the unprotected, and to take the sternest action against those who were disrupting the peace of the Valley. Instead, the Governor took fright.
On page 478 of his book, Jagmohan quotes his Additional Director-General of police. He says that in the period between December 1989 and May 1990 (Governor Jagmohan's term), a total of 134 innocent persons were assassinated. Of these, says the Additional DG, as many as 71 were Hindus. Elementary mathematics would show, although the additional DG is not quoted as saying so, that this must mean 63 were Muslims. In other words, the number of Muslims killed was just eight less than the number of Hindus killed. This was not a communal massacre. It was a massacre of loyal Indians by thugs and terrorists. The rhetoric was communal, but the victims were almost equally Hindus and Muslims.
Much closer to the truth than the Governor was HN Jattu, President of the All-India Kashmiri Pandit Conference who was quoted in The Hindustan Times of 8 February 1990 - that is, in the middle of the worst atrocities - as saying that all communities suffered, the Pandits much as the Muslims. He also said - and this is the moot point - that the Kashmiri people were suffering not because of any Hindu-Muslim incompatibility but because of "misrule and maladministration".
Whose misrule? Whose maladministration? Governor Jagmohan's, of course. He had taken undue and unwarranted advantage of the J&K Constitution to dissolve the duly elected assembly and assume dictatorial powers of governing the State. Indeed, it was the extent and depth of his misrule that led to VP Singh recalling him within six months. There could be no more damning indictment of the suffering he caused the people of Jammu & Kashmir, specifically the Pandits whom he had deprived of home and hearth instead of throwing a protective arm around the collective shoulders of all Kashmiris, Hindu or Muslim. For a quarter of a century, we have continued to rue that misrule.
Yet, it is Jagmohan's fans and acolytes who swell the ranks of the BJP in Jammu. It is they who are advocating a Jagmohan-like solution that is worse than the problem. It is they who want the Pandits back in the Valley - but in Hindu ghettos that emphasize the Hindu-Muslim divide. That is why they must be resisted. Mufti Sahib must not let himself be deflected from his larger purpose by these half-baked proposals for the return of the Kashmiri Pandit to his homeland.
The doors and windows of all Kashmiris must be opened to all Kashmiris without regard to religion.
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