(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 But the proposal has not been withdrawn, merely kept for the moment in abeyance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The doors and windows of all Kashmiris must be opened to all Kashmiris without regard to religion.
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