Militants and Migrants

Shiban Khaibri
Shakespeare would have definitely rewritten the play- Romeo and Juliet -or at least withdrawn the famous lines “What’s in a name ? that which we call a rose/by any other name would smell as sweet ….” had he been living around these days and taken keen interest, though with a heavy heart, about the ongoing sporadic attacks of terror in Jammu and Kashmir, especially in Kashmir valley and its aftermaths. He would have lamented, as many otherwise continue to, over the compelling reasons of calling killers, blood thirsty people, gun totting misled and increasingly indoctrinated persons, agent saboteurs of Pakistan etc as ”Militants” instead of simple and straight-terrorists. Again, the worst victims-the hounded out Kashmiri Pandits called as ”Migrants” instead of ”Internally Displaced”, if not refugees in the ultimate sense. The caption may look somewhat incompatible in that naming the persecutors, the killers along with their victims as the former and the latter respectively denote, somewhat prosaic but it had to be like that with intent to bring home to the concerned some facts and realities.
However, here it is the reverse of ”What is in a name” and ”by any name would look and be understood about these ”Militants” as blood spillers – of innocents, of guilt free, of blameless, of sinless, of gentle and of the poor. The more these men influenced by some illusory, delusive, imaginary and non-existent dreams of seceding Kashmir from India and for achieving that hallucinatory goal indulge in attacking unsuspecting soft targets and killing people in most brutal but cowardly manner, the more is a large section of Indian print media calling them as ”Militants”. Thank, however, sweet and all complete Hindi language but meted out a treatment of ”touch not and own not” in this country except on September 14 each year to ”celebrate” symbolically Hindi Diwas as it was the same day in 1949 when in one voice in Constituent Assembly it was decided that Hindi would be ‘Rajbhasha’ or official language of India. Anyway, that being quite a separate topic, the print media in that language generally calls terrorists as ”Aatankwadi”-Aatank in Hindi meaning -terror while more ”moderate” ones even among them too, do call them as ”Ugravadi” the Hindi equivalent of Militants.
Literally, a militant is a feisty, a quarrelsome, an argumentative, pugnacious and disputatious and all these ”traits” of a militant cannot definitely create and spread terror, inject heaps of fear and anxiety among the people and keep one guessing about one’s safety. According to the basics of a trade union movement in the absolute Marxian sense, there are two faces or functions of Trade Unions – one is fraternal and the other is militant, latter denoting activities like sloganeering against the (capitalist) employer, causing work to rule to be followed, adopt tactic of go-slow in order to cause drop in output and total striking of the work and hence stopping production. Those are called militant activities. It is not known what is the rationale, the purpose and the aim of such sections of the print media and even in social media that the killers of the poor Gole Gappe street vendor whose daily income would have not been even touching Rs.500 being called as ”Unidentified Militants…”, the killers of two teachers including a woman after doing ”verification” of their religion again as ”Militants”, the killers of a chemist who being the indigenous inhabitant of Kashmir like five lakhs of his co- religionists hounded out from Kashmir in 1990 – again being called as …”unidentified militants”.
This mis-nomenclature, not an innocent goof but an apparent deliberate policy is in vogue since the days when unfortunately, terrorism was at its peak in Punjab too and this writer was posted in Himachal Pradesh and had very often to travel to the then troubled state for official work. In a lighter vein but denoting beyond that a bit , once while going through a leading Urdu Daily published from Jalandhar, the headline read as ” Yeh galat hai ki hum Malli Tanton say dartey hain..” quoting some Congress leader as having said. What attracted my attention then was on how “Militantun” was written in Urdu . It was Malli and Tanton with a small gap in between the two words though in fact, should have been written as one, perhaps due to forgetting to put ”zeair” or a slash beneath Malli to read it at least as Mili. So much confusion about how a terrorist should be called having been rife during Congress rule and Congress led UPA 1 and 2 does not matter as much as it definitely does seeing no change in it even during the last seven years of NDA rule at the centre.
About interpretation of Terror and Terrorism by Congress due to its ”compelling” reasons can be seen in many ways right from no befitting and retaliatory action by India against Pakistan on account of 26/11 Mumbai attack by its terrorists numbering ten killing more than 175 people and wounding double as much and devastating properties worth hundreds of crores of Rupees and virtually crippling the financial Metropolis of the country for three days. It was an invasion in disguise but damage apparent and huge. The “young” visionary leader of Congress perceives greater danger to India from Right Wing Hindu extremists than from so many notorious terror organisations operating from Pakistan. The party calling the names of top terrorists with suffixes and prefixes as “Ji”, and “Sahib” and now recently, one of its senior most but very “secular” leaders , former Union cabinet Minister having held various portfolios speaking the most pinching and deeply hurting but provocative words against Hindu-tva. This leader calls ”Hindutva” abuses of intolerable dimensions, not only unfounded , baseless and unwarranted but having no connect even remotely, not even in wild imaginations with the comparison made. Obnoxiously, this Congressi leader has compared Hindutav with dreaded and horrendous terror organisations like Boko Haram and ISIS and has disagreed with another Congress leader in his terming the silly and mischievous comparison as exaggerated as “it does not seem exaggerated to me”, is what the concerned Congressi leader is reported to have said. See the guts. Detailed analysis of such motivated observation, however, will appear next time along with the possible motive, through these very columns.
Likewise, the term “Migrants” used for hounded out, chased and persecuted Kashmiri Hindus is nothing less than an insult to their exodus and status as the term ”Migrant” denotes vastly quite different from what is construed by the successive Governments of Jammu and Kashmir and even the central Government. A ”Migrant” is used in the context of an International Migrant, by UN Human Rights Commission, to describe a group of people who have in common a lack of citizenship attachment to the host country and “any person who is outside a state of which a citizen or national, or in the case of stateless person, its State of birth or habitual residence”. Hence quite vague but never related to hounded out indigenous people of Kashmir. However, UNHCR defines “forced displacement” as – “displaced as a result of persecution, conflict, generalised violence and human rights violations”. Hence displaced within the home country as “Internally Displaced Person ” (IDPs) like Kashmiri Hindus for which the term “migrant” is a misnomer, if not an insult looking to heir undecided fate for 32 long years, needs a review by the concerned authorities and a rejection of the term by the victim IDPs too. Concluding both these terms – Militants and Migrants – need to be replaced with Terrorists and Internally Displaced Persons, respectively.

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