Rise
of Armed terrorism
Armed
militancy and terrorism has surfaced in the valley
from the year 1988-89 on a large scale with the
connivance and support of Pakistan. Muslim youth
of the valley have been crossing the border in
large numbers since 1984 and returning with
sophisticated arms and ammunition after receiving
training in sabotage and warfare. Their design has
been to subvert democracy and secularism,
establish an Islamic theocratic State and to
secede from India. As a first step the minority
Hindus of the valley became the first victims of
this operation and they were gunned down
indiscriminately, hanged or murdered by other
brutal means. Torture, molestation and rape,
threatening letters and telephone calls, posters
and quit-notices pasted on doors and warnings
through newspapers for the whole community to
leave the valley within short and specified time,
became the order of the day leading to a mass
exodus of this community. More than a thousand
members of this community have been done to death,
and nearly three hundred thousand forced into
exile.
While
the exodus of the minority Hindu community on all
occassions prior to 1947 were at the behest of and
because of the tyrannics of despotic rulers swayed
by fits of communal frenzy, the present exodus of
1989-90 is unparalleled in the history of world
democracies. This time a large segment of a
community has taken up arms with the aim of
subverting secularism, mortgaging religious
pluralism, decimating a Hindu minority and forcing
its exodus in order to establish an Islamic State
with the final aim of seceding from its parent
country. This has happened in the largest
democracy, that is India, and the minority Hindu
community has been the helpless victim of a
terrorism sponsored by the majority community of
the valley with the connivance and support of the
State administration and overlooked by successive
Central governments.
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