[Reader-list] 2-Amarnath Accord - What A.G.Noorani did not tell you !

[Pawan Durani]

Dear Shuddha / Dear All,
I wish I should have stuck by Rashneek advise about ignoring your mails. He
had summed up your knowledge about in just few words. I wish I should have.

You consistently ignore the court ruling, the report of Wildlife warden and
then you are not even happy with Nitish Sen Gupta. All because non of them
suit your ideology.

How you differentiate between Jammu & Kashmir is best known to you , as if
Jammy people have no rights over land in Jammu .

I requested you that the topic about Sanjay Tikoo may be avoided. I know the
risk he and the rest of Hindu population carry. However you have your own
ego to satisfy, even if it means risking someone
.........................unless you use your good relation.

You have chosen to ignore most of the facts I presented to the readers [
http://thekashmir.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/noorani/ ] and started off like a
cassette which is on a auto rewind mode.

I wonder what do I call you use the words like "immoral might of Indian
State" for your own country. That speaks of your character and integrity.

If you have choices to think of me as a fool or whatever ....i have narrowed
down mine to just one for you. A Neo convert..........

I do not wish to write more on the subject as you have gained the
characteristics of people from Zaina Kadal area of Kashmir. The best rumor
mongers of the world....

Your cyber knowledge about Baltal is not enough. I have been visiting that
place and higher ups since 1978. You would have even heard the name Baltal
then.

Bye.......as Rashneek said.....you deserve to be ignored as just are not
ready to accept the facts as that hurts your ego.

Pawan





On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 10:13 PM, Shuddhabrata Sengupta <shuddha at sarai.net>wrote:

> Dear Pawan Durani, dear all,
>
> I am grateful,  Mr.Durani,  for your post in response to my reply, and I am
> equally happy to conduct this discussion under any heading, be it,  'What
> A.G.Noorani Did Not Tell You' or 'What Pawan Durani Does Not Want Us to Talk
> About'.
>
> You underestimate my patience in terms of taking this issue through to its
> logical conclusion. I may add, that I have no pre-determined agenda insofar
> as the end of any discussion is concerned. I believe in letting a discussion
> proceed on the terms of a reasonable exchange of ideas and information, not
> on name-calling as a means to stone-wall a discussion and to terrorize its
> participants, or its audience or readership, into submission. I invite you
> to try and do the same for a change.
>
> Unfortunately for you, Mr.Durani,  the issue is not about whether or not
> someone is 'buying' the land in Baltal. The SASB is not 'buying' the land.
> Its intent is to acquire the land through a state enforced fiat, on state
> enforced terms, at state enforced prices. You cannot call that 'buying'.
>  You can buy the land if someone is willing to sell it, if there is a
> perfect equality in terms between the two parties involved in the
> transaction, and if their desires (to buy and sell) intersect and are
> co-eval.
>
> If people are unwilling to 'sell' then, the land cannot be 'bought'. In any
> case, here, the legal 'owner' of some of the land, happens to be an agency
> of the State Government, and the legal owners of the land in question happen
> to be several other private parties. The 800 kanals in question are a mix of
> Foret land, State Government owned land, and private property.  (As Sonia
> Jabbar has pointed out before). If all the legal owners of the land are
> prepared to sell the land to the SASB, or to any other party, there cannot
> be any objection. Not even from me. That would be a straightforward and
> transparent transaction that is governed by the laws of how things
> (especially land) are bought and sold.
>
> And then your argument that the SASB's intention to get land is equivalent
> to the case of any citizen of Jammu or Ladakh buying land anywhere in J&K
> would have some basis. I am afraid, in the absence of sellers, or their
> consent, there cannot be a buyer, and certainly the SASB is not a 'buyer'.
> Since no 'purchase' of land is either occurring, or contemplated, your
> argument falls flat on its face.
>
> I might add, that It is the same issue that rears its head wherever else
> land acquisition by force or fraud comes up. In Singur, the Government of
> West Bengal, did not 'buy' the land from the people who owned the land,
> before passing it on the Tata Group. It 'acquired' it under the cover of a
> Land Acquisition Act enacted through the violence of colonial oppression in
> 1894. (The same act, incidentally, is used, by the Indian armed forces to
> 'acquire' land, including orchards and fields, in J&K),  Today, the West
> Bengal Government it is being compelled to rethink its previously unwavering
> posture on the matter of land acquisition. I am sure that in J&K, the
> patently undemocratic act of 'acquisition' of land for the SASB is bound to
> backfire in time on the authorities responsible for this decision. It has
> already cost them a great deal, it will cost them more in future.
>
> I am very well aware of who lives in Baltal. Baltal was a small impermanent
> settlement generally used for transhumance by nomadic shepherds following
> the banks of the Sindh nullah or the Romashi rivulet on their way to Dras
> and beyond from the Kashmir valley through the Zoji-La Pass that has grown
> into a small settlement. It was traditionally never used for the Amarnath
> Pilgrimage and came into prominence only when the possibility of helicopter
> services from the area to the Amarnath site became feasible. Today, it comes
> to life during the 'pilgrimage' season, when many of the local nomadic
> Gujjars, and other more sedentary Kashmiris, generally Muslim by faith, act
> as guides and pilgrims to the Hindu pilgrims who use the 'new' Baltal route.
> They are joined by Tibetan refugee and Ladakhi seasonal wool and trinket
> traders, who do brisk business, and volunteers or 'sevadars' from the plains
> who assist the pilgrims.
>
> See - No sign of land row in Baltal by Shujaat Bukhari, in the Hindu of
> August 12, 2008, for more details about Baltal.
> http://www.thehindu.com/2008/08/12/stories/2008081254781100.htm
> (The Hindu's reports on Kashmir, especially those by Praveen Swami, are
> items that Mr. Durani and his friends particuarly relish offering to this
> list. So, I am sure that he would take this report with utmost seriousness)
>
> The trek from Baltal climbs steeply from Domail, (2 kms from the Baltal
> base camp) and the area is especially prone to storms and landslides, which
> is why there has always been an insistence on keeping the number of pilgrims
> low along this route. The 'overall' figure for pilgrims on the 'Baltal
> route' recommended by the Nitish Sengupta committee nowhere exceeds 700
> pilgrims per day. This is what the committee recommended on the basis of
> what it thought was the possible infrastructure load that the area could
> accommodate, and keeping in mind reasons of health and safety of the
> pilgrims. Nitish Sengupta has now emerged as a voice in support of the
> SASB's current position of claims on the land, (though he continues to
> maintain that the number of pilgrims, and the duration of the pilgrimage
> need to be curtailed) but the one-man committee report presented by him is
> explicit in terms of the number of pilgrims that the Baltal region can take.
>
> Incidentally,  the head priest of Dashnami Akhara Mahant Deependra Giri the
> traditional custodian of the 'Cchari Mubarak' (the holy mace) and who
> initiates the ritual processes that inaugurate the annual pilgrimage to the
> Amarnath Shrine, is also of the express view that the Baltal route should be
> avoided as it has no scriptural sanction whatsoever.
>
> Here is a report quoting the Mahant on his conclusion of the pilgrimage
> this year.
>
> Mahant: Reduce Yatra Period, Avoid Baltal
> Kashmir Observer, August 19, 2008
> http://www.kashmirobserver.com/index.php
> ?option=com_content&view=article&id=886:mahant-reduce-yatra-period-avoid-baltal&catid=50:localnews&Itemid=81
>
> I quote from this report -
> "Mahant, who resigned from the SASB over the issue of extending the
> duration of the yatra, had urged pilgrims not to visit the cave before the
> 'Vyas Purnima' and prefer the traditional 46-km Pahalgam route to the
> shortest 12-km Baltal route for religious reasons."
>
> Clearly, Pawan Durani will tell us that the statements made in public fora
> by Kashmiri Pandits based in the valley and the Mahant of the Dashnami
> Akhara cannot be trusted, but we must take whatever he says on face value.
> Durani says that people like Sanjay Tickoo are 'hostage to the terrorists'.
> Now he will probably say that Mahant Deependra Giri is also a 'hostage to
> terrorists' . A statement of this nature is serious, and unless Tickoo
> corroborates what Durani says, must be treated as a malicious attempt at
> putting words by Durani into Tickoo's mouth. I could just as easily say that
> Durani and the entire Panun Kashmir-Roots in Kashmir archipelago are
> 'hostages to state terror' but I do not believe that arguments can be made,
> won, or lost by such utterly pointless exchanges. We must argue on the basis
> of publicly verifiable statements. And insofar as publicly verifiable
> statements are concerned, I am afraid that Durani & Co.s insistence that
> they speak on behalf of all Hindus in the Kashmir valley, or all Hindus in
> Jammu & Kashmir, or even all Hindus in India does not hold. It gives us a
> sense only of their exaggerated sense of their importance and their
> arrogance.
>
> Again, we cannot pretend, like Durani, that the right to acquire land is
> equal to the right to movement, Article 370 restricts transactions in land,
> not movement. The right to equality operates in situations when the same end
> is sought by two parties. If two parties seek movement, the right to
> equality would mean that both have the equal right to move. If two parties
> seek to purchase land then the right to equality would mean that both
> parties have the equal right to purchase land. You cannot counterpose the
> conditions attendant to the right to purchase land as an objection to to the
> conditions that apply to the right of movement, and then invoke the right to
> equality as a plea in favour of a decision one way or another. The right to
> equality applies when the conditions are such that the two entities s can be
> seen as capable of brought under considerations in terms of identity (I mean
> identity here in a logical sense, as in saying that an apple from Himachal
> Pradesh and an apple from Kashmir are both identically, apples, and must be
> considered as comparable units of the same class). To do otherwise is to
> offer an argument that confuses its apples for its oranges.  And then says,
> why are apples not being considered equal to oranges.
>
> Finally, I find it interesting that Pawan Durani should use the term
> 'trespassing'. There is considerable literature on how traditional commons,
> became sequesterd and segregated through arbitrary invocation of
> 'trespassing', and how the word trespass was used to effect enclosures upon
> hitherto existing commons. The violence of the early history of Capitalism
> throughout the world, is full of usages of the word 'trespass'.
>
>  If the people of Kashmir had said to the Amarnath pilgrims - "this land is
> 'ours' you cannot pass through it, and if you do, we shall consider you to
> be 'trespassers'...' or something to that effect, I would have been spoken
> as much against such a declaration, as I do today against the SASB and its
> partisans. In fact, the people of Kashmir, including those who have agitated
> against the land transfer, have reiterated time and again that they seek to
> maintain the highest standards of hospitality towards who pass through
> Kashmir on their way to Amarnath. It is only the protagonists of the SASB,
> such as our own Pawan Durani, who have no compunction in insulting that
> generosity by invoking the language of trespass.
>
> And no, I do not believe that the restrictions that limit movement on the
> night of 25th or the 26th of January are moral. I hold them to be deeply
> immoral. And I also do not believe that there should be borders, or barbed
> wire fences along borders. I guess that makes me a trespasser. But it makes
> me a trespasser who has the wherewithal to buttress my words and my beliefs
> with a sustainable argument. Like many of those who invoke the law of
> trespass against the passage of common people, Pawan Durani has no ethical,
> or reasoned argument, all he has behind him is the brutal and immoral might
> of the Indian state.
>
> I might be basing my arguments on the basis of reports on what Pawan Durani
> characterizes as "Anti-Nationalist and Islamist" newspapers such as Greater
> Kashmir and Rising Kashmir. (Incidentally, They are neither "Anti
> Nationalist", nor do I see in them any consistently "Islamist" traces. They
> are not "anti-nationalist" because they are clearly sympathetic to one or
> the other variety of Kashmiri Nationalism. I am no doubt, an
> anti-nationalist, because I believe that all forms of nationalism, including
> Kashmiri nationalism, are ultimately detrimental to human beings, but it
> would be unfair to confuse me with the sources I am quoting) But whatever be
> the case, the instances I am quoting involve quotes from Kashmiri Pandit
>  and non-Muslim individuals who cannot on any grounds be considered  either
> "Anit-Nationalist", or "Islamist" (They have not said they are either, and
> we cannot accuse people of holding political positions that they have
> themselves refrained from upholding). The statements that they have made,
> and which I have quoted, can be either disproven, which would be the case if
> it were shown that these people did not say these things, or they can be
> verified. They cannot be considered unacceptable merely because the
> newspaper that reported them is not of the same Ideological persuasion as
> Pawan Durani.
>
> In my last posting, I had offered the possibility of considering Pawan
> Durani either as a fool or as a charlatan, based on a my assessment of his
> demonstrated ability to hold a sustained argument. This meant, that in my
> opinion, he either did not have the intelligence to hold on to a sustained
> argument by reasonable means (hence, fool), or cared not to, and was intent
> on misleading us with his malafide postings (hence, charlatan). This
> reasoning was entirely based on the form and substance of his argument. I
> would like to known on what basis Mr.Durani has the impertinence to call me
> a 'neo-convert'. What dose he think I have 'converted' and that too, newly,
> to? How can he even think he knows what transpires in my conscience, or what
> he calls my 'heart' especially when, not a single argument offered by me is
> based on any question of faith, emotion or sentiment.
>
> I have revised my opinion about Pawan Durani, he is clearly not a fool. He
> is using what Tapas Ray has referred to in his recent post as -  'human
> tragedies' - for all that they are worth in order to buttress a morally,
> ethically, rationally weak position, with enough skill not to warrant being
> mistaken for a fool. That leaves only one possibility.
>
> regards
>
> Shuddha
>
>  Dear Shuddha,
>> It is very obvious of what way you want the discussion to end up. Let me
>> just share with readers some example.
>>
>> 1. Instead of replying to my post , Mr Shuddha changes the subject to
>> :Noorani Reads the fine print on Amarnath Accord", while as the original
>> subject line was "What A.G.Noorani did not tell you".This is the first
>> impression to understand of how fair Shuddha would have been to understand
>> my write up, and Shuddha lived upto his reputation for that ....perfectly.
>>
>> 2.When I say that every state subject has an equal right to every inch of
>> land , that does not mean to buy a piece of land in Srinagar a Ladakhi
>> would
>> have to go to Assembly to get an order passed. Mr Shuddhas understanding
>> of
>> the sentence is very poor and childish.
>>
>> 3.Shuddha is not aware of who lives in Baltal ? His understanding of the
>> area is based on his passionate reading of anti nationalist and Islamist
>> newspaper like Greater Kashmir and Rising Kashmir. Incidentally rising
>> Kashmir was inaugurated by Noorani himself. What a coincidence.
>>
>> 4.Shuddha again ignores the report of chief Wildlife warden on allotment
>> of
>> land and like a "parrot" repeats the Hurriyat language. And if this is how
>> Shuddha loves to debate without even acknowledging the report of those who
>> are in-charge of ecology and wildlife in the Baltal area , I wonder no one
>> would be able to satisfy his brain,which seems to be locked for any
>> reasoning.
>>
>> 5. What Nitish Sen Gupta had wanted on priority is that on high grounds
>> the
>> number of pilgrims should be restricted to 20000.
>>
>> 6. Shuddha quotes that KPSS or Sanjay Tikoo wanted his participation. What
>> Shuddha does not share that Sanjay Tikoo, who happens to be a close
>> friend,
>> is no less a hostage to the separatists. He has to tow their line. I would
>> not discuss this issue in detail as this may cause harm to my already
>> scared community members in Kashmir. Issue like this needs a broader
>> vision
>> which morons like Shuddha and Gautam Navlakha can not understand.
>>
>> 7. When I was discussing the fundamental right , I wrote " The right to
>> Equality " which Shuddha very cunningly altered to "Fundamental right to
>> Movement" ... It was so clever of him to change the whole context and to
>> ignore the expected discussion of how the 100 crore citizens of India are
>> being denied the right to be equal as against the state subjects of J&K
>> state. And let me remind to Mr Shuddha that neither is whole of J&K a
>> tribal
>> place nor a forest.
>>
>> 8. Shuddha gives a very childish and immature rhetoric statement that the
>> Amarnath accord violate the fundamental right to movement guaranteed under
>> Article 19 (A) of the Indian Constitution. Does that mean
>> that trespassing is no word to exist. Does that mean that I can stroll on
>> India gate lawns on night between 25th and 26th January. Does that mean I
>> can stand right next to barbed wire fence on the border? Does that mean I
>> can ride my bicycle on the runway of an airport. Shuddha has no understand
>> of where the violation applies and where not ?
>>
>> 9.Mr Shuddha may call me a fool or a charlatan. It does not matter to me .
>> I
>> know where his heart lies and what the Neo convert believes in.
>>
>> Pawan Durani
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>
>