Author: Balbir K Punj
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: August 15, 2003
The Hizbul Mujahideen (HM)'s soliciting
the Kashmiri Pandits to return to the Valley and join the 'independence
struggle' against India should at best be considered a cruel joke, if not
insanity. Being all through very close to the Jamaat-e-Islamis of Kashmir
and Pakistan, and drawing most of its 1,500-odd cadres from the former,
the Muzzafarabad-based organisation has been a strong votary of Kashmir's
Islamisation and its merger with Pakistan.
The outfit's first major targets
were genuine Kashmiri Muslims like Moulvi Mohammed Farooq (Mirwaiz of Kashmir),
Mohammed Imam Khan (Kashmir's Director of Food and Supplies) and Wali Ahmed
Itoo (National Conference leader) etc. It has worked in tandem with both
the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Harkut-ul- Ansar to perpetrate the Wandhama
and Chittasinghpura massacres of Hindus and Sikhs, paradoxically those
whose support it now seeks to perpetrate future acts of terrorism. The
Nadimarg massacres and attacks on Vaishno Devi pilgrims were recent manifestations
its resolve.
Was it coincidental that the call
came on the eve of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's offer of a conditional
'ceasefire' along the Line of Control if India reduced its strength of
forces in the Kashmir Valley, ceased 'atrocities' on the Kashmiri people,
and released political prisoners? President Musharraf-who once said there
could be many more Kargils but now says India should forget Kargil- accepts
the role of Pakistan in unleashing proxy war.
But neither Panun Kashmir nor the
Government of India was naïve enough to walk into the word-trap of,
respectively, the HM or Musharraf. So both proposals stood rejected, and
perhaps will not resurface in the coming days. It should be noted President
Musharraf hasn't budged his ground with regard to his definition of the
Kashmir problem-it is a freedom struggle, he maintains. And the HM, founded
in 1989 as the militant wing of Kashmir's Jamaat-e-Islami at the behest
of Pakistan's ISI and funded by it, also hums the same tune by scaling
down its jihad-fixation. What it now tries to show is that terrorism in
Kashmir is a 'freedom struggle' by all Kashmiris (including Kashmiri Pandits)
against India.
It cites one Kuldeep Kumar alias
Akhtar Ansari of Kishtawar as one of its fellow fighters. But here the
HM argues against itself on the role of religion- Kuldeep Kumar, a Hindu
but not a Kashmiri Pandit, on being converted to Islam, not only became
a practising namazi but joined in the war against India. His father has
disowned him as a traitor and a blot on the family name.
There is no denying that religion-
Islam-has been used as the prime psychological weapon for insurgency in
Kashmir. HM itself wielded the name Al-Badr (based on the Prophet's war
against kafirs) for sometime after its establishment in 1989. It was founded
under the prodding of the ISI as a Pakistani counterpoise to the undivided
Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) of Ammanullah Khan (established
in 1977). The latter stood for a sovereign State of J&K, independent
of both India and Pakistan.
Bereft of its own network of terror
in the Valley, the ISI was constrained to depend on the JKLF's network
in the beginning, even though they were ideologically at loggerheads. But
slowly, the ISI's emerging outfits like the HM, the LeT, and Harkat gained
better terror potential and phased out Ammanullah's JKLF.
Turbulence in Kashmir catapulted
to the forefront in 1983. The then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi blundered
on it as she did with Punjab, Assam and Sri Lanka. The problem festered
in the backdrop of a volcanic Punjab through the Rajiv era. But could it
be a coincidence that it was soon after the ISI's crossing the JKLF road
that Kashmiri Pandits had to leave Valley en masse in 1990? Natur-ally,
the idea of a Hindu minority was incompatible with the notion of Greater
Pakistan that mujahideen (fighters of Islam) were committed to.
Till now, separatist groups have
been at pains to explain to the world why Hindus-especially Kashmiri Pandits,
culturally the Valley's original inhabitants-did not join their 'freedom
struggle' against India. Unfortunately, no 'secularist' explanation is
possible for it. But the favourite scapegoat has been former Governor Jagmohan.
Kashmir's parties insist that the Pandits could well have lived on in the
Valley safely had it not been for Mr Jagmohan, who audaciously brought
them out and tarnished the fair name of communalism-free Kashmir.
The HM reiterated the same in its
recent call. Nothing as malicious could be further from the truth, the
best testimony of which is borne by Kashmiri Pandits themselves. Having
lived in the misery of shanties in refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi for
13 long years now, the disillusioned Pandits ask if the exodus was his
capricious personal decision. But they hold that every child of the community
would be indebted to Mr Jagmohan for his timely action.
Common sense would be enough to
see why no Hindu can be part of any struggle for a Greater Pakistan. The
very concept of Pakistan, with its Islamic raison d'être, presents
the antithesis of the Hindu political view. The Hindus and Sikhs of the
Valley stand for the sway of the Indian Constitution over the whole of
J&K, which to them is an integral and inseparable part of India. A
Kashmiri Pandit is thus unquestionably and spontaneously Indian. Nay, he
sees Kashmir, the ancient seat of learning and the Shaivaite culture, as
the very springhead of Indian civilisation. Moreover, he also equates the
safety of his life and property and the honour of his womenfolk and culture
with being part of India. Having gone through the worst during the 1980s
and 1990s, he would be living in fool's paradise to think it would be better
if Kashmir were independent or with Pakistan.
Here is a parallel analogy from
the subcontinent. It is often claimed that Kashmiriyat, based on a shared
Sufi heritage, is the binding factor for Kashmiris. But the truth is that
the Wahabi version of Islam has infiltrated Kashmir's deep- rooted Sufi
tradition. Incidentally, the Hizbul itself burnt down the last major Sufi
shrine Charar-e-Sharif on May 11, 1995. In our neighbourhood, East Pakistan
metamorphosed into an independent country, Bangladesh, in 1971. The political
struggle for the creation of Bangladesh was a secular, Bengali nationalistic
movement led by Mujibur Rehman. Unsuspecting Bengali intellectuals saw
in it a neutralisation of MA Jinnah's two-nation theory. Even Indira Gandhi
in her Indira- Mujib friendship treaty thought safeguards for Hindus would
be redundant in 'secular' Bangladesh!
But the truth was that, after the
assassination of Mujib, ironically on August 15 (1974), a second Pakistan
in its Bengali avatar was created in the Indian subcontinent. Indira Gandhi
stood a mute witness to the gradual process of the de-Hinduisation of Bangladesh
that began before her term was out.
One can take the analogy a step
backward to Pakistan's creation itself. Jinnah, a professed secular liberal
with little grounding in Islam, created Pakistan as a homeland for the
subcontinent's Muslims. His Pakistan was 'secular' in the sense that he
did not want a theocracy shaped by the Shariat. But little did he realise
he was riding piggyback on historical forces he pampered but had little
control over. Jinnah's secular Pakistan virtually wiped out Hindus and
Sikhs. To Hindus (read kafirs), the result was still the same-extermination.
Let's not forget Kashmir was originally
envisaged as part of Pakistan both by Allama Iqbal and Chaudhary Rehmat
Ali in the 1930s. Jinnah was largely in agreement with this idea in 1948.
General Ziaul Haq's dream went further: Not only to wrest Kashmir by a
thousand cuts through Operation Topac but also to split India into millions
of pieces that Pakistan would swallow up. The forces of jihadi Islam remain
wedded to same agenda.
