Politicking with minorities in J&K

By Raja Jaikrishan

Can you recall the time

when, in the scorching sun

in the middle of the blackened road

your verse-burning, aflame - was written

in crimson, warm, vibrating dove-blood?

To this question of Abdul Rahman Rahi, a Kashmiri poet, one can recall many instances. One can start from Lal Chowk in Srinagar and go on to Florida, (USA), Bindura (Zimbabwe), and London.

Before 1947 Sher-i-Kashmir Sheikh Abdullah waged a crusade against the monarchy in the state. In 1967 thousands of Pandits dared the government and demanded the right to life, liberty and employment. In the nineties multitudes of Muslims gathered to demand independence from India and usher in Nizam-e-Mustafa.

When Hindu girls were raped and men killed in Anantnag as a precursor to the anti-Pandit crusade in the late eighties, a section of protestors against the politics of fear and intimidation urged the well-settled Pandits outside the Valley to strive for the timely migration of Pandits from the Valley.

The elderly who savoured the cool air of the Valley in summer, while enjoying secure jobs in the plains, questioned this assertion. They said if minorities left the Valley, what would happen to the secular character of the Valley? In this manner they would be handing over Kashmir on a platter to Pakistan. Events that followed, of course, proved them wrong.

Recently when Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal opened the gates of Punjab to besieged Kashmiri Sikhs during the bhog ceremony of 35 Kashmiri Sikhs at Chatti Singhpora, it was evidently welcomed by people of varied political shades.

This politicking with human life and dignity is not confined to politicians of the Indian variety alone. Politicians in Americans are engaged in a battle over the custody of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez who survived a shipwreck escaping from Cuba along with his mother and step-father (the mother didn't survive).

Fidel Castro has said the boy should be reunited with his father. But Elian's Miami relatives want him to remain in the USA. Cuban exiles who fled the country and settled in Florida declare that "we will go the last mile" to prevent Elian from either being re-united with his father or heading back to 'Castroland'.

Cuba is an idea preserved in the lyrical memory of exiled novelist G.Cabrera Durante. He has written that the metaphor of the ship that sinks and a Cuban, Lord Jim, who cowardly saves himself is completed not with Fidel Castro's famous phrase "the rats are leaving the sinking ship", but with the only "Titanic" crew member who had survived - "I didn't abandon my ship, your lordship, my ship abandoned me," he told an English judge.

Cuban exiles in the words of Kassabova, the writer of novel "Reconnaissance", are aware about "those in the freedom and the prosperity of the mature West who suffer from broken manicure, lack of the love and understanding, excessive body hair, failed relationship, paranoia, fatty thighs, ennui and children - they hate us, our misery, our darkness of our East". Still they prefer exile to Castroism.

In Oxfordshire a gang of white youths tried to set on fire a mulatto. The victim, Christopher Barton, escaped with superficial burns but indelible marks on his psyche of hate against whites.

It seems the world over one suffers because a section of society perceives that you are different, they abuse you for being so, and then hound you to the concentration camp or throw you on the pyre.

Dictatorship of or on behalf of the proletariat gobbles up human rights of all, including the dictator.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe supported the right of squatters to invade white farms and asked white farmers "if you can't accept rule by blacks you can leave: no one will stop you from leaving. All doors are open". He listed all the border crossings through which whites could flee Zimbabwe and added, "if you want a plane, we can accompany you to Harare airpoort..let (white) farmers not create unnecessary circumstances that might lead them to being hurt". There was also a vote in Parliament to remove the right to compensation for land seizure.

These utterances and actions by a Non-Alligned Movement leader kindle the historic acts of Sher-i-Kashmir. On assuming the charge of Jammu and Kashmir's Prime Minister after the state's accession to India he ordered land to tillers without compensation by the stroke of a pen, thereby dispossessing many, including Pandits, of their land holdings.

Years later acting on behalf of the Muslim majority in the Valley, Congress Chief Minister Gulam Mohammad Sadiq passed a law to ensure preference to the Muslim majority in state jobs and admission to professional and other educational institutions. These measures curbed the rights of minorities in the Valley and forced them to fend for even small jobs outside the Valley.

The anti-Brahmin movement in Tamil Nadu and other South Indian states proved a precursor to the anti-Mandal agitation which unleashed caste-based majoritarianism. Bihar is the worst example. The majoritarianism in Jammu and Kashmir is of religious variety, different from racial and caste ones. Perpetrators of majoritarianism in the state lack sympathy of the majority in India.

An exile from the state is caught in between the culture within him and the culture of his adopted place. He can't leave the former and accept the latter either. His condition of siege has been described by Keshav Malik as:

But come the hour of ghostly moon

And once more the marauders from the deep

Will batter at the gates of reason-not to retire

Until crimson has been drawn

Upon the heart of peace".

(Source: The Tribune)

Previous

Index

Next