Amit Kushari (IAS Retd)
When the first Kashmir rebellion broke out in 1990/91 the situation was very, very grim at that time also and J&K had to remain under President’s rule for six years at a stretch. Curfews continued for one or two weeks and street battles went on, sometimes with rockets and grenades also, in addition to AK 47 guns. The Kashmiri homes are usually well stocked with food because of prolonged harsh winters and so they could manage their kitchen even if curfew continued for ten or twelve days. Early morning some vegetable vendors would secretly arrive to do some brisk business and some meat and chicken shops would also open for an hour or so. The Masjid Committees in the mohallas also arranged for cheap rice, dal and wheat. So the Kashmiris were not totally stranded. Now the curfew is continuing for almost two months. The people have also started feeling the pinch now. Not so much for running the kitchen but for children’s education which is suffering tremendously. Health problems are also rising. Although the hospitals are functional and some medicine shops in the vicinity of big hospitals are open, most of the local medicine shops remain closed.
There is total lawlessness in the rural areas now, in contrast with 1990 when lawlessness was confined to mainly urban areas. In the rural areas only a few police stations are properly functional now a days. Army guards the police stations. Hundreds and thousands of people , including women and children, old and young, roam around the streets chanting “aazaadi, aazaadi”. It seems as if the entire Kashmiri population has now become “azaadi ke diwaney” and not only the urban people as in 1990. In those days also Kashmiris, specially the urban Kashmiris, were dreaming about azaadi and mostly they were 90% sure that azaadi was round the corner. In May 1991, when the winter secretariat at Jammu was shifting to Srinagar for the summer, many Kashmiri employees withdrew all their provident fund because they were almost sure that in the coming winter they would not have to come back to Jammu which was likely to remain in India. Many who had bought Indira Vikas Patras in Jammu post offices sold them off at cheap prices to Jammuites because they presumed they would have no access to Jammu post offices the coming year. The Maamu (mother’s brother) of a friend of mine was chairman of a militant organisation called Jamiat ul Mujahideen. He told me that his Maamu had disclosed to him that by March 1992 Pakistan had assured complete independence of Kashmir by active intervention and ” by April 1992, Inshallah, Kashmir would be a free nation”. When that did not happen they were very disappointed. Some asked me,”Do you think Allah is annoyed with us and has refused our independence?” I used to tell them that Kashmiri Pundits are your own Kashmiri brothers. While fighting for independence you should have kept them by your side. Rather you drove them away being instigated by Pakistan. According to the Quran, Allah is “Rab ul aalameen” (God of all communities and not God of only Muslims). Allah is the God of Pandits also and when they were running away with tears in their eyes, Allah must have been extremely annoyed with the Muslims and He must have withheld the order granting independence.
This year the Kashmiri uprising seems to be even more grave. The Mirwaiz of Kashmir, Maulvi Umer Farooq, has appealed to the United Nations, European Union, Pope Francis, Dalai Lama, The Organisation of Islamic countries to intervene actively against the so called ruthless oppression of the Kashmiris by the Indian state. He alleged that Indian soldiers had fired pellet guns on Kashmiris at point blank range 1.2million times, as per their own admission. Seventy Kashmiris have been killed and hundreds have been maimed for life.
The international community has remained a mute spectator so far. It is not difficult to understand the reason for this silence. Both India and Pakistan are nuclear weapon countries now and so nobody would like to meddle in their affairs. After the terror attacks of 9/11 in USA and subsequently in London, Brussels, Madrid, Istanbul, Dhaka, Mumbai, and after the activities of the ISIS in Syria, Iraq and a few other countries, the whole world is mortally scared of Muslims. There is a lot of Islamophobia in the whole world. No body wants to employ or rent out an accommodation to a Muslim. After Osama Bin Laden was caught red handed in Pakistan, the USA and the entire Western world is now hesitant to speak up for Muslims. It is an additional misfortune for the Kashmiris. If they had been Christians or Jews they could have got more sympathy from the world. In the 1990s there was no Islamophobia in the whole world and Pakistan was quite a darling child of the USA, which often irked India. Today the West is firmly with India . Only China is Pakistan’s friend but they are also doubtful friends. China had recently banned Muslims from observing fast during Ramzan because that affected work efficiency in offices and factories.
In this gloomy situation the only silver lining is that the present Central Government has slowly started understanding the realities of Kashmir after being in power for two and a half years. They must have realised some fallacies and fault lines in some of their cherished ideologies. They must have realised by now that Article 370 can never be abolished ( rather it may have to be strengthened ten times) and that Kashmiri pandits can never be sent back to the fiery cauldron of Kashmir unless the dispute is sorted out permanently. Let us now hope and pray that the Centre initiates a meaningful dialogue with the Hurriyat Conference, lawyers, professors and all intelligentsia of Kashmir. The elected MLAs and MPs of Kashmir as well as the Kashmiri IAS, IPS officers should actively help the Home Minister of India to achieve a break through. I wish Delhi had taken this initiative of dialogue two months earlier.
(The author is former Financial Commissioner J&K
Feedback to the author at 09748635185 or amitkus@hotmail.com)
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