[Reader-list] protests against Gaza Siege - ideological arrogance

[Pawan Durani]

Rakesh ,

On your querry about Panun Kashmir , pls go through the below article

http://www.kashmiri-pandit.org/kplink/elibrary/articles/thepariahcalledppanunkashmir.html


*The Pariah called Panun Kashmir*

For political parties in Kashmir, without an exception, Panun Kashmir is a
pariah. Most of them become hysterical on hearing its name. A grin is
flashed across when its mention occurs directly or indirectly in an odd
seminar or symposium. An impression is created that talking of Panun Kashmir
is talking about the wildest of crimes and calumnies.

The Government of India is prepared to talk to the separatists and
secessionists in Kashmir and without pre-conditions. She will not talk to
Panun Kashmir. And who are the separatists and secessionists? Yasin Malik,
the JKLF supremo has the murder case of six airforce personnel pending
against him.

Bitta Karate said in a televised interview that he could remember 22
killings of Kashmiri Pandits after which he lost the count. Jamaat-e-Islami,
a component of APHC declares waging of jihad meaning armed uprising, its
birthright to bring freedom to the Kashmir. To these people and their
leaders and supporters, the State and the Central government will talk but
not to the Panun Kashmir.

The reason for this calculated discrimination is simple. Panun Kashmir
represents the three lakhs of internally displaced persons of Hindu
religious minority in Kashmir. It is not a vote bank for any political
party. It has launched a non-violent struggle for homeland and it does not
play the game of this or that political party. Therefore it is a pariah and
must be dealt accordingly.

Panun Kashmir came into being as early as 1990 when exodus was forced on the
entire Kashmiri Pandit community. In Margdarshan resolution of 1990, it
demanded homeland for the community in South Kashmir with the option to
place it under central administration, something short of union territory,
till the situation became conducive for the Pandits to move about freely.
For this demand, Panun Kashmir came to be labelled as communal,
anti-national, separatist, CIA-inspired, KGB-funded, Mossad-initiated and
MI-5 supported.

Farooq Abdullah, speaking in R.S. Pora last year said that homeland for the
displaced Pandits would be possible only on his dead body. However, he has
no inhibitions to confer autonomy to sub-regions on religious basis, a
process in which he fully aware the Pandits remain sidelined as
territoy-less community. The APHC came into being many years after Panun
Kashmir was formed. Its leaders are in regular contact with the ISI,
Pakistani embassy in New Delhi, and other capitals of Islamic countries
particularaly Riyadh, which fund them. It demands secession from India and
justifies the use of gun by its activists. It gives frequent calls for
strikes crippling Kashmir economy. Despite all this, the APHC is recognised
as a reality and is offered unconditional talks.

Contrarily, Panun Kashmir is treated an outcast because it opposes
secession, rejects the gun, does not succumb to blackmail, has not links
with any organisation local or foreign, and does not go to the doorsteps of
foreign missions in New Delhi. Therefore, sincerely nationalistic as it is,
the Panun Kashmir is a pariah.

New Delhi is battling for talks separatists for restoring peace in the
strife torn state. The sky has been fixed as the limit. But for Panun
Kashmir it would not rise an inch not to speak of sky limit. For the three
hundred thousand persons hounded out of their age-old places of origin, the
only prescription with the Centre and the State is to coerce them into
returning to uncertain and insecure environs in Kashmir where repeated
massacres of minority community members takes places. Authorities feel no
need to talk to them.

When the prestigious International Commission of Jurists (ICJK), a UN
accredited NGO with the UNHRC asked the Government of India to submit its
observations, the official document mentioned about ethnic-religious
cleansing of 250,000 Kashmiri Pandit religious minority in Kashmir by armed
fundamentalists. It did mention about the pitiable conditions of their
refugee camps in Jammu. But when, in connection with the petition filed by
the Pandits before the National Human Rights Commission, the Honourable
Commission asked the Government of India to submit its report on the exodus
of the Pandits, it said that they had left of their free will and nobody
forced them to leave Kashmir. This double speak is a classical example of
politicising a human issue.

Panun Kashmir is as good a political group in the State as APHC or any other
group is. Its credentials are more agreeable than those of APHC or any other
organisation. No talks for restoration of peace in Kashmir will meet with
success unless the issue of the Pandits is resolved according to their
wishes.

The UN bodies have recognised the essential principle that the internally
displaced persons have to be rehabilitated in their land in a concentrated
manner with constitutional and legal guarantees for security, safety and
perpetuity.. Their representation in various organs of the State has also
been accepted as relevant to the enjoyment of human, civil and political
rights. The US Congress has also kept itself informed of the rights and
privileges of the internally displaced persons, including the Kashmiri
Pandits, and has, in fact, written to the Indian Prime Minister. The
European Parliament has also opined in favour of safe and concentrated
rehabilitation of the internally displaced persons.

Today, we hear from all sides the shrill notes of Government's
intentions/plans of taking back the Pandit displaced persons to their
respective places in the valley. There are various proposals prepared by the
state bureaucrats. Even a senior minister had an exchange of views with a
large gathering of Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu. This was followed by
statements and press releases from Panun Kashmir organisation's headquarters
in Jammu that the community had rejected the proposal of taking back the
Pandits without taking cognizance of ground realities..

The Pandits ask for their homeland in South Kashmir with the option of
inviting the Union Government to administer it in the long run. The Hurriyat
asks for rejection of Indian Constitution by the people of Kashmir,
rescinding of accession, which it considers fake and illegal, and
determining the will of the people to join one of the two countries or even
to remain independent. The Hurriyat's demands do not make it a pariah, but
PK's demand for homeland does make it a pariah. The Hurriyat says that its
men have suffered oppression and repression by the Indian security forces
and their sacrifices cannot go unrewarded. But the killing of nearly two
thousand innocent, harmless and unarmed Kashmiri Pandits by the gun-wielding
fundamentalists is not considered a sacrifice. The decade- long continuing
privations suffered by the Pandits in refugee camps in Jammu and elsewhere
are not considered a sacrifice.The status of territoy-lessness of the
Pandits is not considered a sacrifice. Their properties vandalised by the
locals in Kashmir, or the distress sale of properties inflicted on them is
not considered a sacrifice. The endless psychological and physical trauma
suffered by the old, the weak, the women and the deprived Pandits in exile
are no sacrifices. Criminal policy of destroying the educational career of
brilliant Pandit student community is not accepted a sacrifice. Still India
claims to be secular and pluralistic state and 'Kashmiriyat' the symbol of
communal harmony in Kashmir.

The NC government has its own compulsions to coerce the Pandits into
returning to the valley. It is debating the autonomy bill in the Legislative
Assembly beginning on 19th of June. The bill is already before the Union
Cabinet. Passing the bill with the Pandits continuing to remain the
territory-less state subjects is an anathema. The NC wants to overcome it by
moving a few thousand Pandits to their respective places and then declare to
the world that normalcy is restored.

The Government would be first probing the rural sections of Pandit displaced
persons because according to its own calculation, the villagers in the
valley would not be that hostile to the Pandits. This is a wrong hypothesis.
The people in rural Kashmir are not what they were ten years ago. Secondly,
the neighbour of the Pandit in his village eyeing his property, land,
orchard etc. will, in ultimate analysis, prove more threatening to the
Pandit than the actual gun-wielding separatist.

The second compulsion for the government is that having taken a few thousand
Pandits to their places of origin, it would break the Panun Kashmir's demand
for homeland. Thirdly, Dr. Farooq Abdullah wants to take the credit to be
another Bud Shah of Kashmir who brought the Pandits back. He forgets his own
statement that he had sent three hundred of NC youth across the border to
receive training in arms because " he feared Jagmohan". He is not bothered
in what conditions he would be sending them back because he knows in the
eyes of New Delhi the Pandits are expendable. This would also give
legitimacy to his demand for enormous funds from the centre in the name of
rehabilitation of Pandits. Where the major chunk of those funds would
ultimately go, is a part of history.

Panun Kashmir is a reality and its demand for Pandit homeland in South
Kashmir is the reality of all realities. The Pandits were entitled to it way
back in 1949 when Article 370 was incorporated into the Indian Constitution
on the basis of Muslim majority character of the State. But Pandits kept the
demand in abeyance in the hope that the State and the Central Governments
would realise their moral duty of empowering the Pandits in accordance with
the international norms of empowering minorities in a democratic set up.
That did not happen. What happened was their total extirpation in which many
actors now shedding crocodile's tears played their role, ru lers in Srinagar
and Nnew Delhi included. No settlement of Kashmir issue will be lasting
unless the Pandits are provided with their homeland. If the Indian Union
thinks of writing off the Pandits from Kashmir, it will be signing its own
death warrant. Then it has no moral right to be in Kashmir because its
edifice of secularism and pluralism will be dashed to ground. Its
credibility in the comity of nations will fall to nadir. And with that the
tantrum of Kashmiriyat will be exposed. The Panun Kashmir homeland is as
real on the map of the subcontinent as the Kashmir of Hurriyat's conception
is.


On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 10:09 AM, Rakesh Iyer <rakesh.rnbdj at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Pawan (and all)
>
> I also went through now a fair bit of the site you told; although I must
> concede here that I have not read anything from the sites about which you
> told me yesterday; I will defnitely try to go through them and complete that
> by possibly this week, or may be till next, as it's quite a lot of
> information. Infact, I have not even completed reading from the sites you
> told me through this series. Please bear with me, I shall go through them as
> fast as I can.
>
> Now coming back to some of the issues we had talked about yesterday, so
> much also for what I have read, here is what I wish to say.
>
> Kashmir or for that matter, Jammu, are not the servants of Indian
> government and the Indian nation state. Just because Madhya Pradesh,
> Karnataka, Tamil Nadu etc. are states of the Indian republic, does not mean
> that the Indian govt. can completely disregard the people of these states.
> What is more, just because the Indian Govt gets taxes from these states,
> does not mean that Indian Govt. can do whatever it likes.
>
> The states are a part of India, because the people of those states feel
> that they are Indians. Make no mistake about it. When you go to Maharashtra,
> they are definitely Marathis, but they also feel that they are Indians. And
> hence Maharasthra is a part of India, Raj Thackeray's agitation
> notwithstanding.  However, that does not give a right to the Indian Govt to
> follow any policy in Maharashtra, regardless of the consent of the people.
>
> Kashmir is in a slightly different league. Since Indian independence,
> Kashmir has never expressed belief in being Indians. The person they
> supported was Sheikh Abdullah, and as time passed, their support grew in
> him. After his death, they tried to see what would happen. And this is where
> I think they are feeling let down.
>
> Ironically, there are two important sections of the Kashmiri society who
> are feeling let down by each other as well as the Indian Govt. The Kashmiri
> Pandits feel they have been tortured and brutalized by the Kashmiri Muslims,
> and also left to fend for themselves, by the Indian Govt., which abandoned
> them in the name of secularism. I think there is merit in the argument, that
> when the state was supposed to protect their lives, it didn't try to do so.
> And hence Kashmiri Pandits had to go away from their land.
>
> But the reasoning that Kashmir gets grant from the Indian Govt, and hence
> must be subservient to it is totally bakwaas. In that case, Bihar also gets
> a lot of grant from the Indian Govt. Does that mean that Bihari people
> should totally disregard their dignity, and act as servants of the Indian
> Govt, which today is following economic policies of the WTO and the IMF,
> backed by US. (Never mind that the same system has led to an economic
> disaster across the globe, and now we are asked to follow it, so that we can
> also destroy ourselves.Great going by the three.)
>
> People first want dignity, and justice. That is why the poor like
> democracy. That was snatched away from the Kashmiris. Having said that, when
> they did protest, they did not have the right to drive away the Kashmiri
> Pandits by violent methods, based upon voices of Shabbir Shah and Yasin
> Malik. And if those separatist leaders had driven them away, it becomes
> their responsibility morally to try first to bring the Pandits back to
> Kashmir. I must state here that the Indian Govt and even Mufti Mohammed
> Sayeed's govt, had tried to do so, but failed; the reason being the demand
> of Panun Kashmir.
>
> As I see the map of Panun, I feel that the Valley would be a Union
> Territory. I oppose it for two reasons: one, since the Pandits feel that
> Valley Muslims can't be trusted and the Muslims are in a majority, they have
> asked for a UT, since every election would depend on the Muslims more and
> less on the Pandits. This is wrong because every good society functions on
> trust; the day trust is lost you will see violence breaking out in some form
> or the other among the communities of the society. I think either both
> Pandits and Muslims must begin to trust each other now, (it is tough mind
> you, after the bloodshed of 1989), but I think both must forgive and forget
> and try to build bridges now.
>
> Two, the Pandits say that Muslims haven't tried to welcome them, because
> they don't believe in secularism and nationalism. First of all, nationalism
> is something I don't know what to do with. India is one of the most
> nationalist countries in the world, according to a survey I read about 3-4
> years ago, and yet, nationalism is not right. For, in the name of
> nationalism, people have been asked to give away their land without
> compensation for SEZ's and dams. In the name of nationalism, people have
> been asked to lose their relatives in aircraft hijacks. In the name of
> nationalism, Muslims have been raped and murdered in Gujarat as well (it's
> Hindu nationalism, as they call it). And it's this nationalism which has
> threatened to completely overlook all ethnic, religious, gender-based and
> other diversities in India, which form an important landmark in Indian
> culture.
>
> Now, secularism. I agree they were not secular then certainly. The
> propaganda was communal. But as Gandhi himself said, give a chance even to a
> criminal to reform himself. I don't feel all Kashmiri Muslims are criminals,
> and they deserved to be given a chance to be trusted. They did get blown
> away in emotions, and it's still an emotional issue. But then why not get
> that trust back. If people from UP and Bihar can go and live in the Valley
> (on rent of course) and sell vegetables, why can't Kashmiri Pandits go back
> to their land? This mistrust will lead us nowhere.
>
> Last point. Yesterday, there was this issue of Bangladesh immigration and
> Christian conversion raised by you in your private chat with me. I make it
> clear, that any conversion based on fraud, force or allurement is wrong, not
> only in the Constitution, but also morally; for no religion asks people to
> convert based on these kind of things. Infact, as Gandhi himself said, if
> people feel some other religion is better than theirs, rather than
> converting to it, they should follow the practices of that religion. That is
> enough. Infact, I am proud to say that a Hindu can actually read namaz 5
> times a day, and not do idol worship, because idol worship is not central to
> Hinduism (even athiesm and agnostics are accepted), and still be a Hindu. A
> Muslim can't however do idol worship, as it's against Islam (which I believe
> was to integrate the Arab tribes).
>
> And as for illegal immigration, it is wrong. It is wrong for Bangladesh
> morally that their citizens have to come to this country to earn livelihood
> in an illegal manner. This means in their own country, they don't have any
> program to help their citizens get employment locally without having to
> cross the border, and even live off in places like Jaipur and Mumbai. It's
> wrong for India because politicians use these immigrants to get vote always
> for themselves, without doing anything for them. Moreover, it destroys the
> demography of India, and affects it to a degree where outsiders have been
> affecting vote patterns.
>
> However, I am not completely convinced by the last argument; the reason
> being that there are immigrants who are living in their constituency for
> more than 5 to 10 years, and these people have a concern in seeing that the
> constituency develops and they themselves develop. And it may be so that
> they are being forced only to vote for particular parties during elections,
> or it may not be so.
>
> I think, there is no harm in allowing them to come for work. And after a
> certain time period, they should have legal rights to vote as Indian
> citizens, subject to the fact that they would not vote in Bangladesh
> elections then, or their citizenship will be taken away from them. There is
> one other question as well.Since Bangladeshis are Muslims, it's believed
> this is being done to ensure Congress and other such parties will always
> win.
>
> I personally am confused as to what I would do. I know that illegal
> immigration is against laws, and I agree that BJP and others do have a
> point. But I also understand that the immigrants are not living in a very
> good condition, and also the allegation that terrorists are coming through
> the Bangla border, though widespread in terms of perception, has not been
> something which can be widely substantiated through proofs, although there
> are some people coming through that border who are terrorists or anti
> nationals.
>
> So, I really don't know what is the solution from here. If they are allowed
> to work, what about the locals? The locals too have a right. But if that is
> the case, why should Biharis be allowed to work in Maharashtra, and not
> Bangladeshis in India, is beyond me. Just because they are two different
> nations, doesn't mean we are human beings, and Bangladeshis are not. And
> they come here to be economially better off.
>
> Should they be given voting rights? If yes, then it's legal to get them
> crossing the border. And the BJP can certainly see it will not win anywhere
> in the border states on the east. Are there chances they are using funds to
> spread terror. That's something intelligence agencies can tell us about. And
> we can go in for action based on those inputs. Should we deport them back,
> even if they have lived here for even upto 30 years, and have their wives
> and children here?
>
> I really don't know what to suggest here. And I must admit this. I can
> accept arguments from both sides, for both have some amount of validity. But
> for me, a solution doesn't seem to come in my mind as of now.
>
> Regards
>
> Rakesh
>
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