No one can conquer Kashmir by force, only by virtue and love, the residents here are afraid only of the afterlife, not of armed people! – Pandit Kalhan (Rajatarangini)
On 5 August 2019, the Narendra Modi government decided to remove Article 370 from Jammu and Kashmir after winning the elections for the second time! This was part of the policy of the political party Jan Sangh founded in 1950! Which is known as Bharatiya Janata Party after 1980! Jan Sangh’s founding president Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee died of heart disease in Jammu jail in the year 1953 when he was on a satyagraha in Jammu to repeal Article 370! So I knew that after being elected with an absolute majority, the BJP would take action to repeal Article 370 of Kashmir! But passing such a resolution in the Assembly before repealing Article 370 is a violation of constitutional provisions! More than 70 cases have been filed in the Supreme Court! But five years have been completed in this August! Still our Supreme Court has not yet found time to consider the 370 opposition petitions! So I myself, what situation has arisen in Kashmir? I immediately tried to go twice to see it! But it was sent back from Delhi airport! Mother B’s people who stopped me said that Rahul Gandhi was also sent back a day before me!
So this time I deliberately travelled by shared Sumo train from Jammu after travelling by train till Jammu! It took three days to go! And coming but only for one day! Almost one week was completed in the journey! Only four days were left in hand! Still in these four days one day was spent in Srinagar one day in Bandipora and the rest two days were spent visiting some places in rural areas like Budgam, Nesbal, Wahkapora, Hilal Abad Argam, Khusroo, Khan Sarai, Chadora, Chararesharif etc!
I was getting similar calls from friends in Kashmir asking me to come and see the current situation!
Finally I went to Kashmir from 1st June to 10th June! While travelling from Jammu station to Srinagar by a shared Sumo train. Among the other passengers was a young Sikh boy of 25-30 years! On talking to him, I came to know that he was from a village called Tral in Anantnag district! (Tral is notorious as a centre of terrorism!) and owns farms and orchards! And he gave the most shocking information! “That his father has died and his mother takes care of the farm orchard!” He spent four years studying engineering in Gurdaspur, Punjab. And now we were heading back to Tral after completing our education with all our luggage!
We talked a lot during the 7/8 hour journey! I asked him, “Tral is a hub of terrorists! I heard from the media! You were studying in Punjab for four years! Your father died at home and your mother had to take care of all your fields and gardens! He said, “It will be good if you come to my village! Because if I start telling you right now, you will not think that it is true! It has been five years since my father left our village! But the villagers did not realize it at all!” They help my mother the most and the car in which we are sitting right now belongs to our village and will drop you and take me home late at night!
Now on the way from Jammu, a new road, a new tunnel has been built and its name is Dr. Shyamaprasad Mukherjee! Before entering the tunnel, the security guards allow the cars to enter only after checking the vehicles thoroughly! While traveling in our car, I saw two women from Bengal state sitting on the driver’s seat and a Sikh youth sitting on the driver’s seat! And all the luggage was in the back seat! Who are the security guards and where did they come from? When asked, we did not ask anything beyond the answer we gave! But the driver and the Sikh youth sitting next to him got out of the car and after checking their identity cards and other things, the car was allowed to go through the tunnel!
In fact, we three citizens from outside Kashmir were easily allowed in! And seeing the investigation and release of local citizens, I felt that this is a kind of humiliating treatment of the residents of Kashmir! So overall, the local people are angry with the Indian Army or other paramilitary forces! Because our army entered the houses of the local people at night and destroyed their belongings and took away their wives and daughters along with a small boy! In such a situation, fifty thousand people below the age of forty are missing and Advocate Parvez Imroz is trying to find them through an organization called Missing Persons Quad! I have not been able to sleep since that day after seeing that more than fifty thousand people below the age of forty are missing in this area with a population of less than one crore!
In such a situation, the current visit was the first after the abrogation of 370! At this time, after the Bhagalpur riots, some students of Shantiniketan were going to create peace and harmony under the leadership of Professor Veena Alase (1989-90). Who is currently trying to counter the communal forces in Bengal by establishing the Bangla Cultural Forum! And she is the principal of a government school in Bengal! She was also with me in the Kashmir trip!
We left on June 1 and reached Srinagar at ten o’clock on June 3! From June 4 to June 7, I had to go to a secondary school in a village on the road to Charare Sharif Sufi Dargah for four consecutive days and Manisha Banerjee took an English class and made the boys and girls sing community Kashmiri folk songs and Bangla Baul folk songs herself! So, the school principal gave a good welcome and we had a brief speech! It was a government school, the building and the whole school campus was clean and was on the mountain, so our eyes were filled with a very beautiful view!
Charar Sharif was nearby so I went there! Two huge radars are still standing at a distance of one or two kilometers from Charar Sharif, where Mrs. Indira Gandhi had talked to Rakesh Sharma, who went into space on behalf of India! Now there is a unit of CRPF! Also, different contingents of our security forces were seen in large numbers in all four directions of Charar Sharif! Even then a Pakistani terrorist Mast Gul remained camped in the Charar Sharif area for almost a year (May 11, 1995)! In Charar Sharif village, he went to someone’s house and slept after eating food! Always keep 56 loaded guns with you! After several days, the Indian government decided to send security forces to the area of Charar Sharif under Operation Charar Sharif. And Mast Gul reached the border of Pakistan safely! Most likely he is still alive and doing terrorist activities!
Rishi Parvez on June 5 is a freelance journalist friend! Who participated in the pilgrimage to Palestine in 2011 and that trip lasted for about a month, Rishi Parvez, Syed Kirmani, Mohammad Yakub and Sajjad Ladakhi are four friends! We go with them on our Kashmir trip and stay with them in turns, this time on June 4 Mohammad Yakub and Parvez stayed with Rishi and Syed Kirmani! Which looks surprising in the eyes of our Kashmiri Pandits (untouchables) because we stayed! And it has been thirty years in my mind that Kashmiri Pandits all over India have to leave Kashmir and live somewhere else! But how would it be to live with 90 percent Muslims with a hatred of racial superiority? With this question I started my return journey!
After the demolition of Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992, Mr. It has been 29 years since India Today published a report which was made by LK Advani and India Today sent its representative to confirm this statement and said that no temple was vandalized! Still, an attempt should have been made to know about this. Far from demolishing temples, on the contrary, if we went to the place where the temple was visible, we would have seen, on the contrary, there was no Hindu in that area. But looked at the temple in order! For example, a village with a population of eight thousand in Badipora district Budgam, five Hindu houses in the village are closed. But the temple on the hill next to the village looked good! An elderly Muslim gentleman named Aziz from the village came to Baghihit to arrange for the temple. He himself said that there is a temple in the nearby village Hushru and some Hindus also live there. So when we went to Hushru village, there was a lot of activity there. But a 40-year-old gentleman living there said that he had left his job in America and was a brahmachari, a Brahmin, he kept saying it again and again. He showed it off. There was a woman of the same age there. And on the first floor, in a curtained hall, some enlightened Maharaj lives, he does not meet anyone. When the gentleman and the woman with him, who said that they were from America, inquired about us, they came to know that we were from a Kashmiri Muslim family. She was very surprised to hear this. And on hearing that we eat there, she said, “We consider Muslims untouchables and we do not trade bread with them.” We keep their utensils separate. I said that this is the reason why the majority of people in Kashmir have become Muslims. And being fed up with this type of caste discrimination, Dr. Baba Saheb Ambedkar, along with his lakhs of followers, adopted Buddhism at our Deekshabhoomi in Nagpur 68 years ago. Since Swami Vivekananda, I also believe that Islam and Christianity in India were accepted by the people of Bahujan Samaj, fed up with caste discrimination. The forty-year-old man jumped up and said, “Are you touching a very sensitive topic!” If I had still held him, he would have probably run to hit me. He kept repeating “I am a Brahmin, we have a history of five thousand years!” Hearing this, I said to myself, “Just see Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind’. But seeing his absence, I kept quiet. Parvez Rishi’s village Bandipora is on the way to Amarnath Yatra on 5 June. There is also an old temple there. When we went there, we met the police guard and the water of the well near the temple was so sweet, Rahat tied a rope and drew water for us.
However, in 2016, I had almost the same experience while meeting the Pandits living in Jagti Camp, near Nagrota, fifteen kilometers from Jammu. And even now, since we are going back, we would have come back refreshed, the arrogance is the same. After hearing that “Now Narendra Modi will set everything right” I said that “It has been three years and you are still in your camp, why haven’t you been taken to your native village till now?” He said that Modi is the incarnation of Mahadev, he will set everything right! “This is what a Pandit named Mattu from Jagti Camp said! While leaving, I said that “How can you live with Muslims considering them untouchables? Will love and brotherhood increase or decrease among you?” While reaching Jammu station, asking this question, I was thinking that “Where are the happy faces of Sikhs in Khan Sarai?” And without ending the arrogance of these Pandits, rehabilitation of Pandits in Kashmir is impossible! And the reason for displacement will also be caste superiority. Who met the people of the Sikh colony and they did not even get a hint of this. At the same time, in the Kashmir Files film, a placard is seen in the hand of Anupam Kher demanding that 370 be repealed and Manusmriti be implemented! And the way the Prime Minister of this country is promoting this film and calling upon the state governments to make it tax free, it seems that Narendra Modi will cash in on his Teli caste in the elections. But some BJP-ruled state governments have given tax exemption.
On August 5, 2019, within seventy-five days after the NDA government came to power for the second time, it was decided to divide Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh and make it a Union Territory by revoking Article 370! This is the first attempt to end the status of a state and make it a Union Territory after India’s independence. And due to this, discontent has again arisen in Ladakh and Kashmir and for the last few days, there have been continuous peaceful protests in Ladakh and what is the indication that BJP does not have the courage to field its candidate in the Lok Sabha constituency in Kashmir?
Just as Narendra Modi had first decided demonetisation in November after being elected in 2014, similarly the removal of Article 370 in Kashmir was also kept a closely guarded secret. In fact, it is well known what the common citizens had to suffer due to both the decisions.
Before the removal of Article 370 from Kashmir, at least one lakh additional soldiers were redeployed in Kashmir. The soldiers already sent in October 1947 have not returned! On the contrary, their number is increasing from time to time. Soldiers of every division of the Indian Defense Force can be seen in Kashmir! (Infantry, Border Security Force, BRO, CRPF, Tibet Police, one soldier behind a Kashmiri family! Kashmir must be the only land in the world where there are so many soldiers in a specific area! Because I have been to Palestine twice! And have a picture of Palestine as the most disturbed part of the world! But in reality Israeli soldiers were not seen in Palestine, but now since last October Israel has been attacking Kashmir from time to time. If a boy or girl born in Kashmir sees this scene as soon as they open their eyes, what impact will it have on their mind? This question always bothers me whenever I go to Kashmir.
My visit to Kashmir started in 1977! Mrs. Khairnar’s job started from the Kendriya Vidyalaya of Kashmir! So, from 1977 to 2024, it has been forty-seven years! How many times have I been to Kashmir? I don’t remember exactly. And with every visit to Kashmir, I also know the changing nature of Kashmir.
Before my current visit, a 23-year-old youth named Burhan Wani was deliberately killed by security guards from Rashtra Seva Dal, and for the first time in the history of Kashmir and most of the world, it was locked down for more than six months! So I went to Jammu for two consecutive weeks from October 1 to October 12, 2016, to Ranjitsinh Pura (to observe the situation after the surgical strike in the villages on the India-Pakistan border!) and the new houses built by the UPA government in 2007 for Kashmiri Pandits, from Jammu, I spent the whole day in Jagti and Nagrota, fifteen kilometers away, on October 2 and reached Srinagar on October 3. But there was utter silence everywhere. Not a single shop, office was open! And there were fewer vehicles but the army was moving around everywhere.
I have had the opportunity to visit Kashmir since the Emergency, but I don’t remember how many times I have visited in these 47 years. But in 75, 77 I don’t even remember hearing the word terrorism, on the contrary I remember old socialist friends like Balraj Puri and Ved Bhasin saying that “The first free and fair elections in the history of Kashmir were held in 1977 when ten years later, the Janata Party government was in power in the 1987 elections, in which there was massive interference from the then central government and the entire election was conducted with the help of the defence forces in a manner that was convenient for them, a large number of people contesting the elections. Youth from various agitating groups in Kashmir went to the offices of current newspapers in Kashmir and said, “We no longer have faith in the ballot paper and we will do whatever it takes to solve this problem through bullets and with the help of Pakistan!” I got all this information from Prabodh Jamwal, the current editor of Kashmir Times, during a meeting in 2006.
Also, Nandita Haksar, born in a Kashmiri Pandit family, has described in detail in the book ‘The Many Faces of Kashmiri Nationalism’ (From the Cold War to the Present Day). Apart from A. G. Noorani, Balraj Puri, Suman Bose, Premnath Bajaj, most importantly A. S. Dulat who has worked as an officer of very important agencies like IB, CBI and RAW! After reading Dulat’s book ‘Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years’, in which the biggest responsibility for the complexities of the Kashmir issue was given to India’s IB, CBI and RAW and Pakistan’s ISI, I immediately demanded action against Dulat in a press conference in Mumbai five years ago. . . ! As after reading the Gujarat files, there has been a demand that action should be taken against Rana Ayub! And S. M. Speaking as a speaker at the launch of Mushrif’s book ‘Who Killed Karkare’ at the Constitution Club Hall in Delhi, I demanded that the author make serious allegations against the most important agencies of our country. But till now, not even a simple notice has been served to any of them. What can be inferred from this?
On the one hand, patriotism and nationalism were linked to each other and in fact, whether it is Kashmir, Gujarat, Malegaon, Mumbai 26/11, all these were used in politics with ease. And without actually doing anything to solve the problems that people face in their daily lives. They are repeatedly playing the game of misleading the public and adding fuel to their political hive. The question is of faith, not of law.
Now Kashmir Files film is the first time in Indian history that a Prime Minister himself will take the initiative for the promotion of a film.
The officials named Jagmohan, formed in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh branch, were in minority due to the pressure of BJP. V.P. On 18 January 1990, he was appointed Governor by the Central Government and on 19 January he officially took office. And on 19 January, in the darkness of the night, paramilitary forces started house-to-house raids in Srinagar city. And to please Jaganmohan C. R.P.F. Director General Mr. Joginder Singh arrested 300 youths from Srinagar city that night. And behaved indecently with women. Which added fuel to the fire and on the night of 20 January, violent protests started all over Srinagar city. And that night became the most infamous night in the history of Srinagar. In this, almost the entire Srinagar city was on the road. And the administration had completely collapsed. In this background, as a result of the action of Governor Jaganmohan, Kashmiri Pandits were taken away in army vehicles, claiming to be temporarily taken. Pandits say that four to five thousand Kashmiri Hindus are still living in Kashmir. And 35000 Sikhs have been living there for the last four to five hundred years. 19 January 1990 has been used in the film ‘Kashmir Files’, but Governor Jagan Mohan has not been mentioned in a single word anywhere. This is the same gentleman who died in the Turkman Gate incident in Delhi’s Jama Masjid area during the Emergency. D. A. Jaganmohan’s anti-Muslim face is visible today after 47 years, when he was the Chairman of Indian Railways, he bulldozed thousands of Muslims and displaced them in Silampuri (majority Muslim) now on the banks of the Yamuna river. Therefore, seeing this arrogance of the Governor who visited Kashmir on 18 January 1990, Jagmohan had to step down from the post of Governor five months ago.
But the film ‘Kashmir Files’ is not a simple mention! So this film is a documentary based on typical Sangh discourse to create a very one-sided and anti-Muslim image. Which is promoted as a film. This kind of fake, exaggerated Tukar documentary is trying to defame Kashmiri Muslims. So the Kashmiri Pandits living there now seem to have gone into an insecure mindset.
Basically, the Kashmir issue is not a Hindu-Muslim issue. It is a cultural question of Kashmir and many Kashmiri Hindus are also involved in it. For example, when Balraj Puri was given the post of President of the Press Council of India after the formation of the Sri Janata Party government in 1977, he said, “I am from Kashmir, I should be given the post of Kashmir Press Council instead of Indian Press Council!”
Also in the current meeting Pandit Sampat Prakash (86 years) also advocated Kashmiri autonomy, I myself took an interview on June 5 and I have uploaded it on YouTube! Autonomy for all the North Eastern states (Naga, Bodo, Karbi, Khasi, Manipuri, many tribes are protesting for their demands!) Also Sindhi, Baloch, Swat Valley and Eastern North East Frontier in Pakistan renamed as Federal Administrative Area (FATA) Kurdish people on the border with Iran, Iraq, Turkey have been struggling for years. How was our neighbor Bangladesh created? Will army boots disturb the struggle that demands such autonomy?
Also, what are the demands of the majority of tribals living in the rest of India? Will the Naxals insult them by humiliating them? One fourth of India’s population is among those who insist on autonomy. And that is why when the Constitution of India was made, provisions like 370, 371, 372 were made in other places (mainly in the north eastern states!) and most importantly special provision of fifth and sixth schedule was made in the tribal areas. At the time of constitution and hence the demand of sixth schedule in Ladakh, 370 has been removed because Ladakh was ruled by the centre!
Kashmir is not the only state that has been given special status. But Kashmir has been Muslim majority from the beginning. That is why the Sangh has its eyes on Kashmir. If we look at it this way, then at the time of partition, Kashmir should have gone to Pakistan in every respect (considering the population and geographical position) and while merging the Indian states, Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru, who lead the current government, are being constantly criticized. But Sardar Patel had no interest in annexing Kashmir because it would have always been a headache for India. But Kashmir came to India on the insistence of Jawaharlal Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah. This is the reality. The Hindu king of Kashmir was also negotiating with Barrister Mohammad Ali Jinnah instead of joining India. And at that time Praja Parishad (the political wing of the Sangh in Jammu) which always sided with the king. Like the rest of India, the Sangh was in favor of the British. Therefore, it is not mentioned anywhere in the history of the Sangh that it joined the Indian freedom struggle.
The fifth and sixth schedules include fifteen to twenty crore tribal society! Even non-tribals cannot buy land there. But since the Muslim community is in majority in Kashmir, the political alliance of the Sangh and organizations like it has been using the Kashmir issue for communal polarization for the last seventy-five years. In fact, Kashmiri Muslims are quite different from the rest of the Indian Muslim community, being liberal and relatively non-radical due to the influence of Sufi saints.
And so during the partition, barrister Mohammad Ali Jinnah camped in Srinagar for six weeks. However, Jinnah failed to convince the Muslim community of Kashmir to join Pakistan. That is why he was verbally promising autonomy to Maharaja Hari Singh. But was not ready to give it in writing. On the other hand, when the Maharaja saw that the tribals were being forced to join India, he decided to join India by imposing Article 370. Those who signed the agreement included Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and the then Union Cabinet Minister. Shama Prasad Mukherjee has also signed. Even if he remains adamant on removing 370 after leaving the ministry.
After winning the elections for the second time on August 5, 2019, the Narendra Modi government revoked Article 370 and changed the status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir to a Union Territory, thereby ending the status of a state for the first time since India’s independence. Even if it is a violation of the Assembly. All these actions are against the Indian Constitution! And today, despite five years having passed, the Narendra Modi government has not shown the courage to hold elections to the Kashmir Assembly.
