As if it doesn’t Exist
There is something utterly reprehensible about the manner in which the metropolitan media has failed to locate Asom in its hour of crisis and turbulence in recent days. Take two events: (a) the oust-Bangladeshi campaign in the wake of Gauhati High Court judge Justice BK Sarma’s observation that Bangladeshis have already become kingmakers in Asom, and (b) floods that have ravaged several parts of the State, including the famed Majuli island. In both the cases the metropolitan media, by and large, has failed to project Asom’s problems or its tryst with times that are both cruel and precarious. But why? Is it because Asom forms part of a hinterland most underrated and disdained? Is it because problems in this part of the country do not jell with the so-called mainland discourse? Or is it because the metropolitan media has come to assume — of course due to ignorance or indifference — that ‘breaking stories’ from any part of the Northeast will not charm the country because the people of the mainland are least interested in anything related to the Northeast or are simply unconcerned about the plight of this region? Even if so, who has given the metropolitan media the right to assume what they do not intend to undo, which they can, given their resources and ability to spread out?
Contrast this with the metropolitan media coverage of Jammu and Kashmir, for instance, following the Amarnath land transfer row; or for that matter in the ‘exclusives’ on Bihar floods. There have been prime-time talk shows and panel discussions on the Amarnath imbroglio, and across the deluge in Bihar were spread TV crews discovering submerged villages, people, their stories, their endurance — all mixed with typical hype and emotionalism provoked by an uncanny show of sensuous journalism. Yet, we have no complaint but for the fact that Asom too was and is fighting the fury of Nature, and before that, a movement had already started to rid the State of illegal Bangladeshis who are a grave threat to national security as observed even by the apex court while abrogating the IM(DT) Act. So where are panel discussions in the metropolitan media? How many of them have come up with editorials on the matter — as serious as the proxy war in Jammu and Kashmir itself, given the commonality called ISI and its jehad blueprint? How many metropolitan media have bothered to report exclusively on the fast-changing demographic pattern of the State due to the influx of illegal Bangladeshis? Or should we ask as to how of them are even introduced to the Asom reality? However, wonder of wonders, they would still say they are ‘national’ media! That is a joke.
All it breeds is a sense of alienation, of being looked down upon as inconsequential entities in the otherwise happening country, of being separated on the basis of geography and ethnicities — despite being one country and one people, and despite the ban of democracy on such perverse categorization. The metropolitan media is being irresponsible — that is clear. But what is worse is its inability to introspect and reach out to people who do matter in every way, given especially the geo-strategic significance of the Northeast. An intelligent and truly national media would not need to be told any of these.
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The Truth behind the Jammu Revolt
MV Kamath
If the Hindus of Jammu have erupted in volcanic fury, it has nothing to do with politics, but it has everything to do with the anger of a people who have for years been feeling betrayed and hurt by an effete and spineless government in Delhi run by a foreign-born Congress president and a smug bureaucrat, both of whom seem indifferent to Islamic brutality. All that the Hindus of Jammu had asked for was temporary transfer of a little less than 40 hectares of land to the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board to enable the latter to provide accommodation facilities of a purely temporary nature to Hindu pilgrims who visit the Shrine every summer.
That land sought was unused forest land of no significance or material use. The plan was to set up temporary shelter to the pilgrims and provide them with water and toilet facilities during their brief stay near the shrine. And this was to last no longer than just two months. Instead of being graciously helpful, the extremists and jihadis raised a hue and cry spreading rumours that the Governor, Lt Gen SK Sinha, was trying to bring Hindus from Jammu to settle in the forest land that could change the demography of Kashmir and the eco-cultural character of the State. How the temporary and fleeting presence of a few thousand people will change the eco-culture of any land is best answered by the hate-ridden jihadis themselves. Besides, Kashmir is not the exclusive preserve of Muslims. Kashmir belongs as much to Kashmiri Pundits who were there even before Islam itself came into existence.
But what have the jihadis done? They
have ruthlessly driven the Pundits
from their ancestral homes. On January 4, 1990, Aftab, a Srinagar Urdu paper, published a press release issued by the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, set up by the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1989 to wage jihad in Kashmir. Notices were pasted to doors of Pundit houses, peremptorily asking the occupants to leave Kashmir within 24 hours or face death. Three taped slogans were repeatedly played all night from mosques. One said: Kashmir mei agar rehna hai, Allah-o-Akbar kehna hai (If you want to stay in Kashmir, you have to say Allah-O-Akbar). Another slogan said: Yahan kya chalega? Nizam-e-Mustafa (What do we want here? Rule of Shariah). A third unashamedly said: Asi gachchi Pakistan batao roas to bateney san (We want Pakistan along with Hindu women but without their men).
In the preceding months, 300 Hindu men and women, nearly all of them Kashmir Pundits, had been slaughtered. On September 14, 1989, a noted lawyer and BJP national executive member, Pandit Tika Lal Taploo, had been brutally murdered. Soon after that, Justice NK Ganju of the Srinagar High Court had been shot dead. About the same time, Pandit Sarwanand Premi, an 80-year-old poet, and his son were kidnapped, tortured, their eyes gouged out and hanged to death. A Kashmiri Pundit nurse was abducted, raped and sliced to pieces at a saw mill. And these people are not people from Kerala or Tamil Nadu, not even from a nearby State like Punjab or Haryana, but right from Kashmir itself. Their crime was that they were Hindus!
Much is made of the J & K Government spending “a huge sum of money” on deploying “thousands of security personnel” to give protection to the pilgrims round the clock for two months, as if a big favour was being done to Hindu pilgrims. How much is “a huge sum of money”? How much, may one ask, is spent on Haj pilgrims? In 2007, India sent 157,000 Muslim pilgrims to Saudi Arabia of whom 1,10,000 went through the Haj Committee and 47,000 through private travel agents. A pilgrim travelling through the Haj committee spends only Rs 12,000 for his trip, whereas the air fare alone is Rs 40,000. The government gives a subsidy of Rs 28,000 to each pilgrim. According to official figures, the Central government spent Rs 280 crore as subsidy in 2006. Now, with rising oil prices, the amount may go as high as Rs 350 to Rs 400 crore. For Haj 2007, the government sent a contingent of 115 doctors (including 63 specialists with postgraduate degrees) and 141 nurses and other paramedical staff, three coordinators, 46 assistant Haj officers, 165 Haj assistants and 186 others known as Khadimul Hujjaj, to provide assistance to our pilgrims during their stay in Saudi Arabia. Some of the facilities provided by the government include arrangement for polio, meningitis and influenza vaccinations for pilgrims before their departure, a 75-bed hospital and 12 branch office-cum-dispensaries in Mecca, a 15-bed hospital and 12 branch offices-cum-dispensaries in Medina, three medical teams at Jeddah airport to provide medical aid round the clock to Haj pilgrims in case of emergencies, and 17 ambulances in Mecca and Medina.
What does the Kashmir government provide for Amarnath pilgrims apart from physical security? There is a separate Haj Cell in the Ministry of External Affairs. And the Haj Committee of India has its own huge premises in Mumbai as it has in other Indian cities built not on unused forest land but on costly urban land provided by State governments. But in Kashmir, Indian pilgrims on a visit to a holy place in their own country cannot get temporary shelter even in unused forest land. It is difficult to miss the irony of it all.
The truth is that Kashmiri Muslims do not want anybody to stay in the Valley of Kashmir except, one presumes, certified Muslims. The Kashmiri Pundits have long ago been driven out cruelly from their ancestral properties now occupied by Muslims. There were Hindus in Kashmir long before Islam came into existence. But now those self-same Hindus are not wanted. How else can one describe the Kashmiri Muslim attitude except as an approach moved by greed, selfishness and gross inhumanity bordering on the despicable?
In Kashmir nobody other than Kashmiris can buy land and live there, while Kashmiris of whatever religion can freely buy land anywhere else in India and no questions asked. So what are Kashmiri Muslims afraid of, considering that Kashmiri Hindus have already been driven out and all the Valley is theirs? And who, among Indians, would want to live amidst an ungracious, self-centred people guilty of large-scale genocide? The unhappy truth is that our secularists have no inkling of what is behind the revolt in Jammu. It is not political. It is not communal. It is a revolt against injustice.
The fault is not of the people of Jammu. The fault lies squarely on the hate-filled communalism of the jihadis, openly supported by Kashmir’s Muslim political parties and the indifference shown by the cowardly, mindless and effeminate UPA government. |
Pakistan Needed a Cause in J & K
Anil Bhat
Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s last ditch attempt at peace with Pakistan in 2003 succeeded to the extent that guns fell silent on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) and at the international boundary (IB) for four years since 2004, while the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) sought new targets all over India for spreading terror. Apart from the United States’ pressure, following exposure of Pakistan Army-bred terror gone global, fencing of the LoC and upgraded surveillance proved to be most frustrating for jihadis of various Pakistani tanzeems.
To add to the ISI-jihadi combo’s woes, normalcy began returning to the Valley. And as a result, tourism began pumping life back into crumbling hotels and capsized houseboats. The bus to Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), uniting Kashmiri families separated for decades, and proving that “India-held” Jammu and Kashmir had, indeed, developed well beyond comparison, came as a further blow to this combo, which had now developed into a larger one with Taliban and Al Qaeda driven out, at least partially, from Afghanistan.
Further problems came with General Pervez Musharraf, in his earlier avatar as Pakistan’s fourth tinpot Army chief-cum-dictator, needing to continue hunting with the hounds. And by March 2008, what became the proverbial last straw was that despite the murder of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan People’s Party and Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League — bitter rivals throughout the 1990s — agreed to form a coalition, succeeded in winning over practically all politicians and the control of Pakistan’s provinces with a solid two-thirds majority in Parliament.
On April 17, 2008, the Guardian reported that the US, as part of a joint counter-terrorism strategy agreed with the new civilian government in Islamabad, promised to curb air strikes against suspected militants in Pakistan, and “redefine” the bilateral relationship by supporting the government with an aid package potentially worth more than $7 billion (£3.55 bn), triple the amount of American non-military aid to Pakistan. According to US officials, Pakistan would also be given a “democracy dividend” of up to $1 billion, a reward for holding peaceful elections and forming a coalition government. The aid package, put together by Democrat Senator Joseph Biden (also the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nominee) marked a decisive break in US policy on Pakistan, which for the past nine years had focused on Musharraf and the Pakistani military as Washington’s primary partners in the “war on terror”.
The Guardian quoted a US administration official saying: “Each day Musharraf’s influence becomes less and less. Civilians are in control. People aren’t meeting with Musharraf any more... we are very pleased with the new civilian government.” And stated that Pakistani officials said much of the new counter-terrorism aid will be spent on civilian law enforcement institutions such as the interior ministry, the intelligence bureau and the federal investigation agency, rather than being channeled almost exclusively through the Army and the military-run ISI.
Pakistani Army, desperate to re-establish its original cause for existence, switched back to old tactics of firing to induct terrorists across the LoC and IB in J&K. The first violation in April 2008 became two in May, seven in June, 10 in July and 10 in August, leading to the Jammu hostage situation of August 27. Two earlier serious ones were in July 30, in which one Indian soldier and four Pakistanis were killed, and on August 22 in which Colonel J Thomas, two soldiers and two terrorists, trying to cross the LoC, were killed.
It will be worthwhile to juxtapose events in J&K to those in Pakistan during the same time-frame. Also suffering from severe indignation on this side of the LoC was Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the financer and organizer of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in J&K. Former Jammu and Kashmir governor Lt Gen SK Sinha had proved to be an irritant not only to him but also to Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and his daughter Mehbooba Mufti. Governor Sinha’s first sin, in their eyes, was to make a bid for the Amarnath Yatra to be extended to two months instead of one.
Addressing the first Sam Manekshaw Memorial Lecture, organized by the Conclave of Defence Services Veterans, recently, Lt Gen Sinha said: “...I established a Centre for Kashmir Studies in Kashmir University for research and study of Kashmiri philosophy, history, literature, art and so on. We held a highly successful international seminar on Kashmiriyat in which scholars from Pakistan and Central Asian republics participated on May 25, 2008… The following day we had the world-famous Janoon, a Sufi pop music band, perform in Srinagar. The United Jihad Council had asked Pakistan government not to send this band to Kashmir, but their request had been ignored. The terrorists held out death threats and we arranged special security. Some 10,000 people assembled near Dal Lake and were enthralled by the music… Pakistani Dawn, in its editorial on May 28, wrote that music knew no boundaries. Kashmiri people expressed their anger against religious militants and their violence… separatists and fundamentalists were too rattled and this time, instead of issuing a fatwa, chose an innocuous issue to arouse communal passions… the government order regarding diversion of the 100-acre plot of land at Baltal to the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board. The shrine board had asked for this land for putting up temporary prefabricated accommodation for Amarnath pilgrims in 2005. It took the government three years to take a decision on this request. The two ministers who processed this case and recommended it to the Cabinet were from PDP…” The rest is history being made!
(The writer is a Delhi-based security analyst)
(Khushwant Singh is indisposed. His column will appear next week) |
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