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| By Internet Archive Book Images |
Historian Writer, Chitralekha
Zutshi, writes
in “The Print” – The idea of Kashmiriyat is dead. The article is shared across
multiple digital portals including The Scroll.That apart, this article comes up
almost forty days after the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir. Another
Article came up in The Print, written by
Zainab Sikandar, wherein she lamented the loss of voice of Muslims,
making it impossible for anyone to raise a voice of protest against the killing
of Pehlu Khan or Tabrez Ansari because of Jinnah, as the article claimed in the
title, however, eventually she ends up blaming the fact that the Muslims did
not take Jinnah’s invitation to join Pakistan, the Land of faithful, the
Islamic republic for eventually landing in this situation in a Hindu majority
state. She carefully forgets that both Pehlu Khan and Tabrez Ansari case hogged
both national and international headlines for months if not years. She also
forgets while the well-coordinated, media-left nationwide protests in both the
cases remained constant fodder for Prime time debates on Mainstream channels
and source material for editorials in national dailies, there was a studied
silence on later investigation results declaring that Junaid case had nothing
to do with beef, that the meat found in Akhlaq’s home was beef (it is
banned by the law promulgated by the Congress under Indira Gandhi as per the
directive principle of Indian Constitution in the state), that Pehlu Khan was a
Cow smuggler engaged in the illegal cow-slaughter industry and that Tabrez Khan
died three days after he was beaten up, in Police custody. She will not talk
about Chandan, killed by Muslims for asking the price of Lassi he was selling,
Dhruv Tyagi killed for opposing molestation of his daughters by Muslim
neighbors, Ramalingam, slaughtered for opposing conversion and three ascetics
killed by splitting their bodies in the middle in Kanpur, a six year old killed
by Muslim neighbor in UP and another in Delhi, Dalit burnt alive in UP and Dalit
raped in Rajasthan. People taking law in their hands is a sad thing and can
never be supported. Any lynching is a failure of law to act, or a manifestation
of lack of faith of common people in the legal system of the society. It is not
a new phenomenon, and it goes long back in the history, even to
pre-independence days when a well-known freedom fighter Ganesh Shankar
Vidyarthi was lynched by a Muslim mob when he went trying to pacify people
during a riot. His body was only to be discovered few days later and no one
even had the tendency to hand his body over. Even on the day Tabrez was beaten,
a Dalit tribal, Mangru Pahan was lynched by three rowdy Muslims outside his
house. Unlike Tabrez, Mangru’s antecedents were clean, he was an honest,
hardworking, daily-wage labor working in the same state of Jharkhand and was in
his own house when killed merely for asking to three drug-addict men to move
away from his house where he lived with one teenage daughter and two other
kids. He never made it to the headline and his ancestor never gave him an
option to move to a Hindu land unlike the parents of Zainab Sikander who could
have but did not move to Pakistan. Bharat, Dr Narang, Ramlingam, Dhruv Tyagi,
Riya Gautam have this land and this land only, whether they die in silence
without a drop of tear shed for them. The organized protest around half-baked
propaganda around Rohith Vemula to Junaid might not be to the violent standards
of Azad Maidan protests for the co-religionists in faraway land to gain the
approval of Ms. Sikandar; they are enough to raise an angry disgust against the
hypocrisy of these thought-leaders among the common people and no one will buy
her argument that these deaths, unfortunate as they are, have been met with no
protests across the country. If anyone ought to protest Jinnah, it should be the Hindus of India who out of some inherent guilt at having accepted Jinnah's charge of being an aggressive majority have almost been apologetic of their own faith.
I
was wondering why such articles are again suddenly appearing, with such
propensity in such marked platforms. Then I realized that Pakistan address in
UNGA is about to come and just as a child does the revision before the
examinations, Indian tutors are tutoring the child who fails all exams, merely
on account of dishonesty of his answers. Pakistan’s key arguments in UNGA on
Kashmir is likely to revolve around intolerant Hinduism, the validation of
two-nation theory (It was put forth in first session in Pakistan Parliament
after abrogation of Article 370, that Kashmiri leaders who first did not join
Pakistan as per Two-Nation theory, must now understand their error), Secularism
in Kashmir threatened by abrogation of Article 370 (Don’t ask me how
restoration of secularism is a cause for Islamic world, since one cannot expect
consistency from Pakistan as a nation and Imran Khan as the leader of it). So
Ms. Zainab’s article did the first two chapters as a refresher for the dim-wit
student and the third that of Kashmiriyat is expected to be done by the latest
article of Chitralekha Zutshi who
lives in London and writes about Kashmir. This is another round of fire on
behalf of Pakistan is evident from the fact that both the articles are brazenly
selective and openly partial. Both Zainab and Chitralekha are well-read people,
I wonder what drives them to write their little half-truths to fit in the Pakistani propaganda. There will be more
to come until this theater of absurd after stand-up, sit-down and lie-down
drama of Pakistan culminates into a drama of desperation, reaches its last
scene and the haggard handsome of Pakistan has sung in the UN Assembly on 27th
of September, 2019.
Chitralekha
Zutshi begins in a somber and sad tone, stating Kashmiriyat is dead. She says
Kashmiriyat has been dying through decades, claims it had secularism and human
values associated with it and now Indian Government’s decision to abrogate
Article 370 drives the last nail in the coffin. I am often confounded with this
sense of elitism with which the term ‘Kashmiriyat’ is oft-repeated in terms of
State of Kashmir. Romantic writers created this illusion to hide the inconvenient
truth when an entire generation of one particular religion was wiped out from
Kashmir. No, Ms. Zutshi, Kashmiriyat did not die today. It died long ago and
today the Central Government has only exorcised the ghost of an idea which was
glamourized to defend religious fanaticism which demanded to be treated
differently from any other state, merely because one particular religion was in
majority in that state. It is really strange that Ms. Zutshi credits the state
that used Article 370 for special and exclusive treatment, to keep even
reference to the term ‘Secularism’ out of state constitution is credited with
secularism under the same Article which kept secularism out of the state. For
an ordinary fanatic to utter such lie is acceptable, but for an academic to
lend weight to such a fake narrative with her hefty credentials is almost
criminal. She laments that Kashmir is no longer special. She does not explain
why it should be special and not Bihar from where Ashoka came to lay down the
founding stones of first city of Kashmir, Srinagar with its Vishnu temples. In
Bihar too, Hindus and Muslims live together in harmony, have lived together; it
is a poor state and monetary assistance from the center pales in comparison to
what Kashmir gets on per-capita basis. Why Bihariyat doesn’t deserve special
status and Kashmiriyat does, is hard to understand except that special interest Kashmir gets from Pakistan, being a Muslim-majority state in a Hindu-majority nation.
It
is really sad to find the learned academic struggling through the contradictory
commentary she writes in order to establish a narrative – of wronged Kashmiri,
of righteous Jihadis. She write, for instance, and I quote- ‘Islam has made
inroads into Kashmir not through force but rather peaceful means.’ In the next
sentence she writes- ‘Beginning with the Mughals, alien rulers had destroyed
Kashmir’s peace and plunged its people, regardless of religious affiliation,
into a benighted state.’ She says this helped National Conference to
distinguish itself from Muslim League and their Two-Nation theory. Writers have
written that Two-nation theory was a hoax. Sheikh Abdullah almost achieved what
Maulana Iqbal and even Maulana Mahdudi dreamt of- an autonomous Muslim state
within India. This would have created an exclusively Muslim state with its
rules and governance, funded, protected and supported by Hindu India. Maulana Mehdudi wrote that his idea of Pakistan was to be- ‘Only a Muslim cultural home and not a Muslim state, but if God wills
it, the two may become one.’ This possibly explains the lack of administrative and political readiness of leaders of Pakistan when they eventually got a state to build and
rule. The article, supposedly attempting to trace back the history, moves from
pre-independence era when Muslim Conference became National Conference (post a
split, which she doesn’t delve upon) to post-independence. She credits this transformation of MC to NC to secularism inherent in Kashmiriyat which Sheikh Abdullah discovered suddenly, forgetting that while claiming Kashmir to be a Muslim cause and invoking the Ummah all along, Imran Khan too covers it up with cries of secularism and democracy. With a splendid
sophistry and creative craftiness, she writes, ‘As India and Pakistan battled
over the erstwhile princely state’ making it sound like it was an
aggression towards Kashmir which was equally shared by Indian and Pakistan. It
is strange the even Indians, after some time in the west, slip into this
tendency of hyphenating world’s largest democracy with a rogue state which has
found the sole reason of its existence in the creation of chaos for the whole
world. She ignores that Kashmir acceded to Indian not because India and
Pakistan went to fight for it, rather because it was attacked by the Tribals from
North-West Pakistan, backed by Pakistan Army. A desperate King reached out to
India and India agreed to step into the fight only if Kashmir were to become a
part of India. The participation of Pakistan Army regulars in this tribal
invasion could not remain hidden for a long time and within months UN mission
discovered this. It is great intellectual dishonesty on the part of the writer to
have bent the facts to fit her narrative. She fleetingly refers to terrorism in
Kashmir and rather brushes it under the alienation of Kashmiri Muslims. This
argument of alienation on account of neglect by the centre always sends me back
to people for Bihar, UP and Odisha, braving the rain and sun, sometimes
hostility and beatings in other state for the sake of mere sustenance in the face of abject misgovernance and state apathy. They do
not feel alienated enough to threaten leaving the union, and Kashmiris, in spite of being the most pampered lot,
feel so alienated that the answers of alienation can only be found in the ISIS flags raised by
the Kashmiri Muslims now and then. She then links Kashmir insurgency with what
she calls Hindu majoritarianism of
the BJP. She forgets that the genocide of Kashmiri Hindus in the valley began
when BJP was a notional entity in the national politics. Thankfully, she ends
her essay there else she would have linked slavery in the United States, Mao’s
Long March, Stalin’s Purges and Hitler’s gas chamber with the BJP. There is no
point rebutting such a fake article but then there is purpose and design behind
not only in the written word, rather in the hidden hands which propagates such
a shoddily written pieces on an industrial scale. It is meant to mold the
western minds in favor of Pakistan and against India in the most subtle manner.
They will pretend to act as a voice in support of secularism, while demanding
special treatment for the majority community in Kashmir; will act like advocate
of democracy while supporting Pakistan which has sent the previous elected PM to the prisons, the gallows or to exile. And they all know what it is that they are
actually supporting. If you name that word, you will be termed bigot and Hindu
nationalist, as if the latter was an abuse for the Hindus who are nationalists. It is
a pity that Hinduphobic is still not a word in the English dictionary.
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