The two Sunni Muslim dynasties of the Kashmir Valley – the National Conference (NC)led by the Abdullah clan and People’s Democratic Party (PDP) Sayeed clan made good their threat not to allow a Hindu to become Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. It would of course be deemed to be politically incorrect if the same reasoning were to be used by Hindus from the rest of India – that no Muslim will be selected or appointed to any high constitutional post: Ministers and Chief Ministers, Judges and Chief Justices of High Courts and Supreme Court, Governors of states and President of India. Not one pulpit thumping news editor of English news channels raised this point. They did not even dare to stay on this point for one solitary minute, let alone a full hour at prime time news – that Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir declared that they will not allow a Hindu to become Chief Minister of the state.
The National Conference and the PDP chose to place the state under President’s Rule rather than align with the BJP to form a democratic government. The BJP polled the highest percentage of votes (but as much as 10% less than its share in the Lok Sabha elections) which however did not give them the highest tally of assembly seats, not even a simple majority which would have made the Sunni Muslims of the state irrelevant in government formation. The BJP has only itself to blame; instead of roaring Hindu nationalism it sang in high falsetto about corruption and development to please the Sunni Muslims of the valley instead of consolidating its respectable vote share in Jammu and Ladakh.
During the Lok Sabha elections in 2014, the BJP promised Union Territory status for Ladakh but did not reiterate the promise during elections to the state assembly and Ladakh punished the BJP for what Ladakh correctly perceived as BJP reneging on its promise. The BJP represents Ladakh in parliament but was not even a respectable second in the state elections; the BJP was punished in Jammu and Ladakh for the exact same reasons the BJP was punished in the Lok Sabha elections of 2004 and 2009.
The BJP forsake ideology for the promised land of good governance. Ideology matters; it is ideology and ideology alone which sets the BJP apart from the Congress, the Abrahamic so-called minorities and the Left. It is ideology which determines how the BJP will deal with growing Abrahamic religious demography across the country, with Muslim and Christian terrorism, with Abrahamic separatism and secessionism. The Jammu and Kashmir state assembly elections gave the BJP its best opportunity yet to loosen the Sunni Muslim stranglehold on the state’s polity; but casting its eyes on possible political alliance with the NC or the PDP and hoping to make a breakthrough in the Kashmir Valley as it had made in Ladakh during the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP pushed ideology and Hindus and Buddhists to the margins and instead pursued the Muslim voter in the state and Muslim political parties.
News X labelled the long stand-off between the BJP and the NC/PDP combine over government formation in Jammu and Kashmir a “trench war”. The label attests to the borderline anti-national proclivities of all English news channels without exception. Let us put it bluntly – any entity with an alien and borrowed sense of the Indian nation and basis of Indian nationhood, which denies or rejects or injures the Hindu identity, is anti-national. The Indian nation is coterminous with the Hindu nation.
This was no trench war; this was the Sunni Muslims of the NC and the PDP declaring in unambiguous language that they will not allow a Hindu to become the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. And Ghulam Nabi Azad, the Sunni Congress Muslim was cheering them on from the sidelines. This wholly explicit anti-Hindu nature of the polity of Jammu and Kashmir, expressed in the gross imbalance of political power and economic empowerment among the three major territorial segments of the state – Jammu, Kashmir valley and Ladakh, is rooted in the perverse character of the delimitation process in J&K. Notwithstanding the fact that the BJP polled the largest percentage of votes in the just concluded assembly elections, it was still only in second place with 25 seats behind the PDP which has 28 seats. The BJP can never hope to win any assembly election in J&K without first rationalising and correcting the existing delimitation of assembly constituencies in the state which has been determined by the state’s religious demography
Sunni Muslims of the Valley, who constitute 45% of the population in the valley and a mere 22% of the total population of the state, have nevertheless managed to reserve for themselves a stupendous 46 seats in the state legislature as against just 41 seats for Jammu and Ladakh (37 for Jammu and 4 for Ladakh), whose people together constitute the remaining 78%.
Not this alone, Sunni Muslims control the bulk of the trade and commerce in the state and corner a major portion of the benefits of higher education and of all employment opportunities created by industrialization. Sunni Muslims of the valley who occupy only 6% of the total territory of the state of J&K live off the resources of Jammu and Ladakh by virtue of the fact that after Maharaja HariSingh abdicated power, political power was transferred from Jammu to the valley – to the Abdullah and Sayeed clans, and effectively, to the Sunni Muslims of the valley. If this were not outrageous enough, the valley Muslims generally do not pay any revenue to the State. It is the regions of Jammu and Ladakh, which contribute over 90% to the state exchequer.
The following facts demonstrate the perverted polity of the state of Jammu and Kashmir:
1. Though Kashmiris constitute roughly 22 per cent of the State’s total population, the mechanism cleverly devised by Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference Party in 1951 enables it to capture nearly half of the total Assembly and Lok Sabha seats. The trick lies in 46 Assembly segments having been created in the small Valley as against 41 segments combined in Jammu and Ladakhregions that are far bigger and more populated than the Valley. This mechanism is apparently contrary to the rules framed under the Indian Parliament’s Representation of People’s Act and those under the relevant State Act of 1957.
2. Kashmiris hold over 2,30,000 positions out of a nearly 2,40,000 positions in government and semi-government organisations in the Valley. In addition, they corner nearly 25 per cent of the jobs in the regional services of Jammu and Ladakh.
3. All the professional and technical institutions, universities and all the big public sector industrial units like the HMT, television, telephone and cement factories located in the Valley are the sole preserve of the Kashmiris. Besides, they manipulate for themselves more than 50 per cent of the seats in Jammu’s ill-equipped and under-staffed medical and engineering college, and the Agricultural University in R.S.Pura. No such institution exists in Ladakh.
4. The Kashmiris control trade, commerce, transport and industry, and own big orchards as well as landed estates. None of them is without a house. Likewise, the per capita expenditure on woollen clothes in Kashmir is perhaps the highest in the world. Till date, none in Kashmir has, unlike in UP, Bihar and Orissa, died either of hunger or cold.
5. Interestingly, yet not surprisingly, a vast majority of the Kashmiris don’t pay even a single penny to the State in the form of revenue due to it. It is Jammu and Ladakh that contribute over 90 per cent to the State exchequer, but a major part of this money is spent not in the extremely backward and underdeveloped Jammu and Ladakh but in the highly prosperous and developed Kashmir Valley
The origin of Muslim domination in Jammu and Kashmir
The State is vested with unsurpassed power only to protect and defend the territorial integrity of the nation and its nationhood. Kautilya more than two thousand years ago pronounced that the nation or rashtra is both territory and the people inhabiting the territory. The primary responsibility of the state therefore is to not only protect the territory by defending national borders, but to also keep watch over the people inhabiting the territory who may pose a threat to the sense of nationhood which binds the people into a nation.
By seeking to resolve the threat posed by Muslims to the territory and nationhood in J&K through the agency of seminar-hoppers, bleeding-heart human rights activists and Track II diplomats, the Indian state and the political class across the ideological spectrum can be charged with contempt of rashtradharma; they have rendered the authority and power of the state to eliminate national security threats null and void, and even dysfunctional. The Indian State’s inability to end the threat posed by the Muslims in J&K, even sixty years after 1947, is a Gandhian legacy going back to the Gandhi-Nehru duo’s criminal unilateralism with regard to J&K, and their warped sense of nationhood compounded by the Indian state’s acquiescence to the code of conduct imposed on it by the new world order.
Muslims had made their intentions abundantly clear from as early as 1905 when Bengal was partitioned, that they were working to return Islamic rule over India; failing which they were ready to use violence to create an Islamic state from the body of the Hindu nation. As demonstrated in the writer’s bookEclipse of the Hindu Nation, Gandhi’s INC set political freedom as its goal only in 1942. Even after 1942, Gandhi’s INC wanted political freedom only from British rule; rather than mobilizing the Hindus against Muslim intention to vivisect the nation, Gandhi’s bizarre sense of nationhood and his criminal unilateralism in deciding the fate of the Hindu nation drove him to consent to the return of Muslim rule over India if that would avert partition.
The greatest coercion is British coercion. And the Congress is impatient to get out of that coercion. My hope in desiring a Constituent Assembly is that whether the Muslims are represented by the Muslim League mentality or any other, the representatives when they are face to face with the reality will not think of cutting up India according to religions but will regard India as an indivisible whole and discover a national, i.e. Indian solution of even specially Muslim questions. But if the hope is frustrated, the Congress cannot forcibly resist the express will of the Muslims of India. Needless to say the Congress can never seek the assistance of British forces to resist the vivisection. It is the Muslims who will impose their will by force singly or with British assistance on an unresisting India. If I can carry the Congress with me, I would not put the Muslims to the trouble of using force. I would be ruled by them for it would still be Indian rule. In other words, the Congress will have only a non-violent approach to every question and difficulty arising. (March 17, 1940, CWMG Vol. 78, page 66)
If Indian Rule were all and to Gandhi it mattered little if Hindu India were to be ruled by Muslims, what were Gandhi’s objections to India being ruled by Subhash Bose and his INA? Unless Gandhi saw Bose as Nehru’s biggest stumbling block.
That there was another choice – that there would be neither partition of the Hindu nation nor return of Islamic rule after ending colonial rule, was not even envisaged by Gandhi or other luminaries of the INC. Sheikh Abdullah, who saw the ease with which Jinnah’s Muslim League walked away with territory, began to dream his own dream of converting J&K into his own grand fiefdom. He had observed how Gandhi from the 1930s decade had destabilized several princely states with his campaigns for democratic constitutions and temple entry programmes. In the year between 1938 and 1939, the Congress was stirring trouble in Mysore, Jaipur, Rajkot, Travancore and Cochin. Sheikh Abdullah had also observed how dismissively and even contemptuously both Gandhi and Nehru had dealt with the Deccan princes and other rulers of the princely states when they approached Gandhi to express their concerns about their fate when British paramountcy would end with end of colonial rule.
Sheikh Abdullah began to utilize the critical years after 1942 to realize his own manic ambitions. Sheikh Abdullah was another Jinnah already in the making, but typically, neither Gandhi nor Nehru or even Patel read the danger signals emanating from J&K in 1946. Even as the INC was in the midst of the make or break negotiations with the Cabinet Delegation, trouble erupted in Jammu and Kashmir. Sheikh Abdullah, a commoner from the Valley saw a great opportunity for himself in the generally troubled times, to fulfil his own towering Muslim ambitions in the turbulent years preceding 1947. Playing out the drama for civil liberties and ‘freedom’ that the INC had staged in Rajkot, Jaipur and other Hindu kingdoms, Sheikh Abdullah launched in May 1946, the ‘Quit Kashmir’ campaign.
Abdullah was promptly arrested and incarcerated. Nehru, playing the Great Democrat to the hilt, attempted to enter Kashmir and was also speedily detained by Ram Chandra Kak, the Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir.Gandhi jumped into the fray and in a passionate letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, pleaded with Nehru to return to Delhi with the promise that the Congress would make Nehru’s cause in Kashmir its own cause, and Nehru’s honour, its honour. The draft reply, drafted by Gandhi contained the ill-concealed threat to the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir that Nehru would return to retrieve his honour and fulfill his mission, a threat which however does not find mention in the official Congress Resolution.
I and all are of opinion that your presence here is essential above everything else. Remember that you are under an organization which you have adorned so long. Its needs must be paramount for you and me. Remember also that your honour is ours and your obedience to the Congress call automatically transfers to it the duty of guarding your honour. The Committee is also solicitous equally with you about Sheikh Abdullah’s case and the welfare of the Kashmir people. Therefore I expect you to return in answer to this. You will tell Maharaja Saheb that as soon as you are freed by the Congress you will return to Kashmir to retrieve your honour and fulfil your mission.
(Draft reply to Jawaharlal Nehru, June 21, 1946, Mahatma Gandhi—The Last Phase, Vol. II, p. 346, CWMG Vol. 91 pp 180-81)
Thusby 1946, not only had Gandhi declared that he would not be averse to Muslim rule over Hindu India, but had also signalled to the INC that Nehru and Nehru alone would deal with the affairs of J&K. Gandhi’s unilateralism gifted Nehru with J&K on a platter to do with it as he pleased.
Wanted, a resolute Hindu leadership
During the critical years of the nineteenth and twentieth century when the fate of the Hindu nation was being determined by Islam and the colonial British government, the Hindu nation woefully lacked a resolute Hindu leadership with both vision and courage to stay the course in the war against two powerful and well-organized enemies. Regaining state power to protect the Hindu nation was never the objective of the INC’s political adventure.
The imperial government in London allowed the INC to be led first by white British citizens and thereafter only by non-Hindus, non-ideologues or notional Hindus like Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath Banerjea, Gokhale, Gandhi and finally Nehru who piloted the INC till 1947 when colonial rule was brought to an end on terms determined by the Muslim League and the British Empire. The festering, gangrene-infected sore that is J&K today is a Gandhi-Nehru legacy.
The quality of the deracinated Hindu leadership is best gauged from the passivity with which Gandhi and the INC accepted without murmur the appointment of Mountbatten as last viceroy, the terms for transfer of power and their unwillingness to avert vivisection. Mountbatten as last viceroy, the Cabinet Mission document, creation of Pakistan as west-controlled territory and the problem of J&K were all components of one invisible whole; only neither Gandhi nor Nehru or any other leader in the INC really understood that they were being manipulated skilfully by London with the able assistance of the Muslim League.
In fact, by 1946 Gandhi had not only accepted partition but had actually endorsed Rajaji’s formula for partition as the best possible solution. Gandhi and the INC had always readily grabbed whatever political crumbs were thrown by successive viceroys but persisted with the lie that they were leading a freedom movement. Gandhi’s hubris did not permit him to see even in 1946 that the imperial government and the British Indian government knew Gandhi exceedingly well and knew how to play him along. Nehru, suffering as much from hubris as Gandhi, while he was determined to inherit Gandhi’s political mantle, had only grandiose woolly-headed fantasies for arsenal instead of hard-nosed and hard-headed political sense of international politics.
When World War II had drained London’s coffers and when Subhas Bose’s INA threatened to overrun India, and when the INA shamed Indian armed forces in the Royal Indian Navy and British Indian Army to revolt, the imperial government in London sent the Cabinet Mission to India in May 1946 to work out the modalities for transfer of power.
Gandhi’s INC should have refused to entertain the Cabinet Mission just as it had refused to entertain the Cripps Mission earlier in 1942. Unable to deal with an intractable Gandhi, the Cabinet Mission returned to London at the end of June 1946. The decision to send Mountbatten to India as last viceroy was probably taken after June, in the hope that Mountbatten who played a significant role in throttling Indonesia’s fledgling democracy, would be able to repeat his success in India.
If Gandhi and Nehru had understood Mountbatten’s role in Indonesia and had they been outraged at Mountbatten’s desecration of the war memorial in Singapore for Bose and the fallen soldiers of the INA, they would not have welcomed him as wholesomely as they had and nor would Gandhi have asked him to play umpire (that was Gandhi’s prescription exactly) between the INC and the Muslim League; in effect, Gandhi asked Mountbatten to play umpire between him and Jinnah. It is pertinent at this juncture to recollect that Gandhi had also welcomed the Cabinet Mission proposals as “the best document in the circumstances” while refusing to even consider the SapruCommittee report which had drafted the broad contours and contents of the future constitution of independent India. It is not overstating the obvious that the simmering cauldron of Muslim separatism in J&K was brought to boil by the Cabinet Mission proposals for transfer of power.
To hammer home the point yet again, the Sapru Committee report was an all-Indian draft constitution for independent India while the Cabinet Mission document was not only London’s blue-print for exit from India but was also consolidation of future geo-strategic interests which factored into its calculations an expanding Soviet Russia into Central Asia. Gandhi was the sole interlocutor with the British government in the negotiations while Sardar Patel and other Congress luminaries merely stood grimly on the side-lines; thus only Gandhi could have rejected the document had he wanted to. Instead he welcomed it within four days after the document was presented to the INC and the Muslim League without reading the fine print.
The INC, after Gandhi’s endorsement, never summed up the will to reject the proposals and went along with the Cabinet Mission document (henceforth referred to as Mission document), carrying the Hindu nation inexorably towards vivisection. Along the way to vivisection in 1946, Gandhi and Nehru sowed the seeds, nurtured and brought to full bloom the poison weed of separatism in &K with their endorsement of Sheikh Abdullah as the alternate leader to the King. One of the several troubling questions that haunts us is why, in the absence of any other Indian initiative in that direction, did Gandhi not submit the Sapru Committee proposals to the British government as the starting point for their withdrawal from India?
The Cabinet Mission document had carefully concealed the ticking time bomb of Pakistan and J&K in its proposals. It is not within the purview of this column to go into the details of the document with regard to the Provinces, but to connect the dots between Mountbatten, Gandhi-Nehru, Sheikh Abdullah and J&K. The Mission document concealed the time bomb of vivisection and Pakistan in the cleverly worded offer for maximum autonomy for the Muslim majority provinces “approximating to but not quite” Jinnah’s demand for a separate Muslim state.
The Muslim League while accepting the Mission document also declared that it would use the document to sow the seeds of Pakistan. Thus the creation of Pakistan was a certainty; Pakistan would be created either immediately if the negotiations failed or subsequent to British withdrawal from India.
So preoccupied were Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and the others with the imminent threat of the creation of Pakistan that they failed to perceive the real threat posed by the lapse of paramountcy in the Princely states which was linked to imminent vivisection. The threat lay in the unstated truth that J&K was a frontier region which would be contiguous with the still-in-the-future Pakistan. The Mission document yet again camouflaged the time-bomb of London’s intent for J&K by cleverly cloaking London’s approach to the Princely states in words of sweet reasonableness.
The Mission document laid out the road-map for the future of the princely states in unambiguous language. Paramountcy over the princely states which was vested in the British Government would be allowed to lapse and not passed on to any future post-independence government or governments. The lapse of paramountcyand the British refusal to pass on paramountcy to any future government rested on London’s covert determination, notwithstanding the fact that vivisection was not envisaged in May 1946, that no matter how the tripartite negotiations progressed over the Mission document, they would end only in vivisection of what was known as British India.
Before putting forward our recommendations we turn to deal with the relationship of the Indian States to British India. It is quite clear that with the attainment of independence by British India, whether inside or outside the British Commonwealth, the relationship which has hitherto existed between the Rulers of the States and the British Crown will no longer be possible. Paramountcy can neither be retained by the British Crown nor transferred to the new Government. This fact has been fully recognized by those whom we interviewed from the States. They have at the same time assured us that the States are ready and willing to co-operate in the new development of India. The precise form which their co-operation will take must be a matter for negotiation during the building up of the new constitutional structure, and it by no means follows that it will be identical for all the States. We have not therefore dealt with the States in the same detail as the Provinces of the British India in the paragraphs which follow. (STATEMENT OF CABINET DELEGATION AND VICEROY May 16, 1946, CWMG Vol. 90, pp 441-42)
For an empire on the retreat it ought to have mattered little if the five hundred odd princely states acceded to India or Pakistan, declared independence or descended to chaos. And when the negotiations did fail and when vivisection became a certainty, in a move calculated to distract the attention of the INC away from their real intent, the British government constituted two Departments of states – one for India and another for Pakistan to oversee accession of the princely states to their respective countries. While Sardar Patel was made head of the Department of States for India, Abdur Rab Nishtar, a Muslim League leader and minister in the Interim Government, was the head for the Pakistani DoS. The Departments of States came into being on June 27, 1946 and even as late as June 1947 the issue of the princely states remaining sovereign independent entities was still undefined and open-ended.
Amid the chaos of vivisection, communal riots following Direct Action Day and the frenetic activity arising from Mountbatten’s decision to advance independence from June 1948 to August 1947 on the one hand, and the highly volatile and surcharged issue of accession of the princely states on the other, Nehru with the full backing of Gandhi was meddling in the affairs of J&K. With no thought to the grave danger and the imminent instability that he was causing to the shape of the emerging post-independence India, Nehru convened the State People’s Conference in the first week of June 1947. Nehru convened this conference of the people of the princely states, thus pitting the people against their rulers at a time when the support of the Hindu rulers would have been critical for the shape of the emerging independent India.
Unmindful of the consequences of antagonizing the rulers and encouraging a peoples’ uprising in the princely states against the rulers, particularly in J&K where the so-called peoples’ movement was only a Sunni Muslim movement led by Sheikh Abdullah and his All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference (later National Conference) against the Hindu king, Nehru declared, on June 8, 1947, before the delegates of State People’s Conference “Sovereignty must reside in the people and not in any individual. The State people’s claim to represent for themselves is justified and will see to it that they are heard. And certainly their rulers cannot speak for them”. Nehru’s unilateral proclamation begs the question – what if the Hindu king of Jammu and Kashmir wanted to accede to India and the Muslims of the kingdom wanted to accede to Pakistan?
Amidst the chaos, Patel as head of the department of the states for India, with characteristic wisdom went about the task of winning the trust of the Hindu princes and kings with the same quiet wisdom that he had demonstrated earlier when he went out of his way to apply balm to Ambedkar’s injured self-esteem by inviting him to join the Constituent Assembly and making him Convener. Patel assured the rulers that beyond surrendering Defence, Communication and External relations to the Union, the rulers would continue to exercise sovereign control over their kingdoms and could send their representatives to the Constituent Assembly to work out the nature and extent of their co-operation with the Indian Union.
After the initial assurance, Patel persuaded, with iron determination not only to discourage ideas of independence of individual princely states but also persuaded the rulers to give in to total constitutional integration with the Union. Except J&K. Gandhi and Gandhi’s INC remained mute spectators as Nehru kept J&K out of Patel’s jurisdiction and insisted on handling the affairs of J&K single-handedly. The result of this unchallenged claim to J&K as Nehru’s personal domain to do with it as he pleased created the bloated parasite called J&K which is living off the blood it continues to suck from the body of the Indian Union.
Five days before transfer of power, on August 10, 1947, Maharaja Hari Singh dismissed his Prime Minister Ram Chandra Kak and appointed a military man, Gen. Janak Singh as Prime Minister. Subsequent to unconfirmed news about Pakistan sending in its army into J&K in the guise of a tribal invasion on around 2nd or 3rd September, Gen. Janak Singh asked to be relieved of his new responsibility to enable him to assume charge of active military service; Maharaja Hari Singh then nominated an advocate, Mehr Chand Mahajan as Prime Minister. Mehr Chand Mahajan later became the Chief Justice of India in 1954.
Within a week of news of Pakistani intrusion into J&K, Maharaja Hari Singh for some inexplicable reason decided to release Sheikh Abdullah from prison and within a month made his arch-enemy the Head of Emergency Administration. Our history books have never told us about Ram Chandra Kak, his dismissal or anything at all about this unheard of Emergency Administration. Even more strangely, Sheikh Abdullah in democratic independent India re-surfaces as Prime Minister of something called the Interim Government in J&K, when no elections had taken place! The Hindu nation has to assume that Nehru had handed over his personal fiefdom on permanent lease to Abdullah. Gandhi must have been delighted at the political empowerment of Muslims at least in one part of what was non-Muslim, but un-Hindu post-vivisection India.
When the Instrument of Accession was signed by Maharaja Hari Singh as a pre-condition for India sending in her army to fight Pakistan’s aggression into J&K, one version of history written by a Kashmiri Hindu (Ram Krishen Kaul Bhatt) states that Sheikh Abdullah too signed the Instrument of accession in his capacity as Head of Emergency Administration while another version of Kashmiri Hindu account of the same history (By Prof. Mohan Krishen Teng) says he did not sign it.
But Kashmiri Hindus – those continuing to live bravely in an India which has let them down or those who chose to run away to foreign lands for a life of comfort, have not recorded in a verifiable or corroborative manner the untold political history of their homeland in that critical 1940s and 1950s decade which sealed their fate. Kashmiri Pandits have been guilty of endorsing the cancerous Kashmiri sufism as they happily chewed on the lemon called Kashmiriyat sold to them by the wily sunni Muslims of the valley. And because there is no detailed account of the events of these two decades, the following questions and thoughts simply beg themselves –
§ Why was Ram Chandra Kak removed as Prime Minister?
§ Did he lose the Maharaja’s trust or did someone powerful from outside the state exert pressure on the Maharaja to sack him?
§ What advice was Ramachandra Kak giving the king? Not to accede to India or Pakistan and declare independence or to accede to India or accede to Pakistan?
§ Declaring independence would have worried Nehru because he would have wanted to retain some form of control over J&K
§ Accession to India would have worried Mountbatten. It would have been easier for the British to control J&K via Pakistan because control of J&K via India would have been impossible
§ J&K as an independent kingdom leaning towards Hindu-majority India for sustenance and security would have been an equally abhorrent possibility for Mountbatten
§ Maharaja Hari Singh’s dilemma must have been the most tragic. Accession to Pakistan would never have been an option while accession to India would have been just as unviable knowing that Gandhi and Nehru had no respect for the Hindu rulers and both wanted Hindu monarchies to disappear
§ So what advice was Ram Chandra Kak giving the Maharaja?
§ Why did the Maharaja release Sheikh Abdullah knowing that he was just inviting more trouble for himself when he was being told that Pakistan had intruded into his kingdom?
§ Under whose pressure did Hari Singh release the known trouble-maker Sheikh Abdullah and make him Head of Emergency Administration?
§ Why was Mehr Chand Mahajan removed as Prime Minister with Sheikh Abdullah taking his place?
§ Why did J&K alone need an interim government with a Prime Minister?
§ What role did Gandhi, Nehru and Mountbatten have in these decisions beginning with the sacking of Ramchandra Kak and culminating in Abdullah inheriting J&K as his fiefdom?
This writer has noted with alarm the penetration of foreign women in to the lives of very important Hindu leaders in the twentieth century – Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, Nehru, Bose, Farooq Abdullah and finally Rajiv Gandhi. Sheikh Abdullah married the lady who was earlier married to Lawrence of Arabia! His son Farooq Abdullah married a British nurse; so what should Hindu nationalists make of Omar Abdullah’s statement that to align with the BJP will be political suicide for the PDP and that the National Conference was not willing to partner the BJP in governance on the BJP’s terms which was appointing a Hindu Chief Minister?
Hindu nationalists must begin to look at this phenomenon fearlessly. If Kashmiri Hindus fail even now to render their history from the perspective of the Hindu Nation, then Maharaja Hari Singh and Ram Chandra Kak will remain history’s villains instead of Mountbatten, Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah.
Reclaiming the Hindu nation in Kashmir
Gandhi’s megalomaniac presumption that his definition of this nation and sense of nationhood was binding upon the INC and would prevail uncontested, is the one single cause lying beneath Indian polity’s continued pampering of Muslims and Christians in ways that pose the biggest threat to the territory of the Hindu nation. Islam and Christianity are inherently antithetic to dharma because at the core of these two religions is the predatory intent to conquer territory not their own and to annihilate other religions, cultures and peoples who do not submit to their jealous god. They are antithetic to dharma because diversity is the essence of dharma; and these two monotheisms homogenize all human life within a single intolerant paradigm.
The God of the Muslims and the Christians has an avaricious appetite for territory. Islam and Christianity are therefore inimical to the Hindu nation and the dharma which permeates this nation. This has to be kept firmly in mind when the Hindu nation will finally summon the resolve to deal with J&K in a manner that fulfils the objectives of rajadharma and rashtradharma. The Hindu nation is paying the price of Gandhi’s description of this nation when he declared that this nation belonged equally to Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsees and Beni-Israelis; and Nehru’s megalomania which made J&K his private dunghill. When and if the religious tenets of Muslims and Christians, Sikhs, Parsees and Beni-Israelis pose a threat to the territory and nationhood of the Hindu nation, it behoves the king or the state to annihilate the threat.
Kautilya’s definition of nation as being both territory and the people of that territory is the most accurate and concise so far. The Abrahamic religions spread their tentacles across the globe conquering continent after continent not only by conquering territory by the sword but also by converting non-Abrahamic peoples to their faiths, also by the sword. They posed a threat to the nation not only by threatening the territory but also the nationhood by de-rooting the people from their civilizational, dharmic roots.
This is how Hindu Kashmir became Muslim-majority Kashmir; the change to the religious demography was effected not only when Kashmir’s rulers became Muslim through the agency of Muslim queens and concubines but also by the sufi cancer. What Islam was doing to Hindu Kashmir, it was doing to Hindu and Buddhist Indonesia around the same time.
The challenge posed to the Hindu nation in Kashmir is the state’s Muslim population. If Hindu leaders would only pay heed to Kautilya, they will know that at the core of resolving the problem of J&K is to dilute its Muslim identity and re-arranging assembly constituencies in the three major segments fair and equitable. If instead of pandering to jihadi Muslim demands by maintaining silence over the separatist J&K state constitution and Art.370, and belittling the army to make music for Muslim ears, the BJP will summon the will to moving in this direction, the road to our objective will reveal itself.
While Gandhi had an un-Hindu and politically suicidal-for-Hindus understanding of this nation and of who was a national, Nehru had no sense of nationhood. Between them, they led the Hindu nation to vivisection in 1947 which injected the poison of Muslim separatism and Christian aggression into the body politic of post-independence India.
As pointed out earlier, the Cabinet Mission document concealed in its cleverly worded proposals not only the ticking bomb of Pakistan but also the ticking time bomb of J&K. Mountbatten (read London) did not care if Cochin, Bhopal, Hyderabad and Kurundwad acceded to India or to Pakistan or declared independence. The energy and the seeming sincerity with which Mountbatten applied himself to the task of persuading the rulers to accede to India or Pakistan actually concealed his real interest – the frontier province of J&K, which at its northernmost tip adjoined both Afghanistan and Central Asia. Indian rulers of princely states declaring independence would have feared Nehru’s antipathy more than distant London. The following points deserve to be reiterated –
§ Jinnah’s Muslim League shrewdly favoured independence of princely states s the second option after total constitutional integration because some of the Muslim states in what would soon be post-independence India, were rich beyond belief and Jinnah wanted nothing better than Muslim thorns and splinters in the bleeding flesh of the body of the vivisected Indian nation
§ Nehru’s INC was strongly opposed to independence for precisely this reason but foolishly favoured accession to India surrendering only Defence, Communications and External Affairs to the Union government
§ The Muslim League, with a far superior understanding of politics and the future implications of such a limited control over the princely states, rejected the idea and the Instrument of Accession drafted for the princely states by Pakistan was completely different from that which was drafted by India
§ The Muslim League insisted on total constitutional integration of the princely states acceding to Pakistan with all sovereignty vesting with the Center; therefore none of the princely states acceding to Pakistan had the right to constitute their own constituent assemblies
§ Thus all princely states acceding to India, and not just J&K, as envisaged in July 1947 planned their own constituent assemblies which would draft the constitution for each of the princely states as they desired
§ The princely states of Cochin, Mysore and the Union of Saurashtra did indeed constitute their own constituent assemblies but finally conceded to total constitutional integration with India
All except J&K. Nehru retained the right to handle J&K affairs with him and the nation may never know what transpired in private between Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah, what deals were struck and what promises were made. We can be certain of one thing though; nothing would have been recorded in writing and this too would have been at Sheikh Abdullah’s behest.
1. Why was J&K special and why did Nehru not permit Patel to totally integrate the state constitutionally into the Union?
2. While the Instrument of Accession signed by the rulers of the states was acknowledged to be binding upon the people of the states, why did Nehru allow the people of J&K alone the right to ratify the accession signed by their King?
3. Why were the people of J&K more special than the people of the other princely states?
Verbal promises made, assurances given and deals struck in private have no witnesses and are not binding; thus Abdullah could and did renege, retract and resile with impunity. What we do know however is that Nehru assured Sheikh Abdullah that J&K would receive special treatment. And so while all princely states acceding to India gave up their right to convene their own constituent assemblies, Sheikh Abdullah demanded that J&K would not surrender its right to have a constitution of its own. Art. 370 is the cancerous outgrowth of the separatist state constitution of Jammu and Kashmir.
Gandhi and Nehru both subscribed to the idea that this was not a Hindu nation; therefore they made common cause with Sheikh Abdullah even after he had issued the ‘Quit Kashmir’ call to the Hindu king. Gandhi and Nehru made common cause with the Muslims of the kingdom against their Hindu ruler. It is not surprising that the Congress cannot and will not set down the coffin of the political legacy of Muslim separatism in J&K bequeathed to them by Gandhi and Nehru; but the Hindu nation is not obliged to carry this coffin.
When Gandhi did not question Sheikh Abdullah’s call to the Hindu king to ‘Quit Kashmir’, he conceded that the Hindu ruler had no place in Kashmir. By implication, Gandhi also conceded Sheikh Abdullah’s right to give that call; in effect Gandhi conceded Abdullah’s claim to the territory of J&K. Gandhi’s megalomania and Nehru’s monumental hubris combined with his monumental ignorance of geopolitics is matched only by the Himalayan greed of contemporary intellectual mercenariesparading as human rights advocates who endorse that J&K is disputed territory and that only the sunni Muslims of the state can speak for all the people of the state including Kashmiri Hindus, Jammu Hindus and Ladakhi Buddhists.
If the Muslims of J&K who constitute just 66.97% of the state population think they are special and a class apart from the rest of India and are therefore entitled to the Hindu territory in Kashmir, then the 85% of Hindus across India cannot be standing on the sidelines watching Muslims and Christians carving up their bhumilike so many vultures on carrion. If the Hindu nation is not carrion for Islam and the Church then Hindus must steel themselves to reclaim the Hindu nation in Kashmir not only for the Hindus of the valley but also for the Hindus of the Hindu nation. The BJP can begin by restoring its identity as Hindu nationalist party.
Tail piece: This is how one very angry Hindu analysed the J&K state election results:
“Almost one lakh votes were lost in Jammu and Ladakh compared to the LokSabha polls. That accounts for almost 10 per cent of the votes polled by the BJP in these two regions in the Lok Sabha polls. In Ladakh, which BJP represents in the Lok Sabha, on the promise of delivering the UT status, BJP not only lost all, it was not even in the reckoning in three out of the four seats there. In the Jammu region, the BJP came third in Udhampur, the second largest town of the region, and lost two seats to, of all the parties, the NC. t had won all these three segments in the Lok Sabha polls. Besides the 25 seats won by the BJP, it came second only in 7. Of these 5 were in Jammu region and one each in the Valley and Ladakh. In this Mission 44+, the BJP was actually in serious contest (top two positions), only in 32 seats. And, for all the bending over backwards for the Muslim vote in the Valley, it earned a grand total of a little over 50,000 votes and lost its deposit in 33 out of the 34 seats it contested there. For every single vote gained in the Valley, the BJP lost two in Jammu/Ladakh. While the votes gained in the Valley were not good enough to save the deposits, the votes lost in Jammu/Ladakh cost the BJP several winnable seats”.
(This article was written in January 2015 immediately after results of J&K assembly elections were announced in the last week of December 2014)
Radha Rajan, 3rd August, 2016JAMMU
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