THE Kashmir problem owes its origin to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who under the (sinister as it turned out) advice of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the first Governor General of Independent India (and the spell of Lady Pamela Mountbatten) took the case, much against the warning of Sardar Patel, to the United Nations, complaining that Pakistan committed aggression on India and seeking from the UN, the vacation of that aggression in 1947. When the Indian forces were making the Pakistanis run and were on the verge of total victory, the UN ordered the “cease-fire”. (We ceased fire but Pakistan has not ceased-recall the 1965 war and the 1999 Kargil war and the unceasing ingress of Pakistan-injected jehadis and the insurgency of the locals incited by the jehadis since 1991).
Article 370, a “temporary” provision in the Constitution granting special status to J&K has been keeping up the “Kashmir is not Indian but separate” movement of Muslims there. No Muslim body (like the Indian Union Muslim League or Majlis-ittehadul-Muslameen, MIM or the All India Muslim Personal Law Board) has counseled Muslims of Kashmir not to be separatist and harbour jehadis. India has lost over 40,000 civilians, soldiers and para military personnel, trying to prevent Kashmir from seceding from India; India has given over Rs. 2,00,000 crore in “packages” and otherwise to J&K in the last decade alone; in return, “secular”, “Kashmiriyat”-proclaiming Kashmir Valley Moslems have brought about the exodus of 400,000 Hindu Pundits from their ancestral homeland for millenia and there are the unceasing jehadi terrorism and demand for self-determination, accession to Pakistan and autonomy.
The UPA government (which includes for the first time since Independence includes Moslem Leaguers) appointed Justice Sahgir Ahmed to head the Prime Minister Working Group on Kashmir’s autonomy. Without holding a single plenary meeting of the Working Group, Js Ahmed wrote a report and submitted it not to the Prime Minister of India but to J&K’s Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah! That is, Kashmir affairs are primarily for decision of its Moslems only? J&K has 35 per cent of its population as Hindus and Buddhists. Not once in these 62 years, could one of them become the Chief Minister of that State even as Moslems could be Chief Ministers in Rajasthan (90 per cent Hindu), Bihar (88 per cent Hindu), Assam (67 per cent Hindu; Maharashtra (88 per cent Hindu), not to speak of Delhi and Pondicherri. Kashmir’s Moslems (and their supporting India’s communists, “seculars” in Congress and the regional casteist proprietary parties) demand autonomy for J&K; but they deny it to Hindu Jammu and Buddhist Laddakh! The BJP-led NDA carved out Chattisgarh; Jharkhand and Uttarakhand but dared not to carve out Jammu and Laddakh as separate states or give them the same measure of autonomy which Moslem-majority Kashmir enjoys! The withdrawal of Indian forces from J&K under pressure of the USA and the separatists in J&K is an invitation to Talibanis, jehadis and Pakistani “irregulars” to over-run Kashmir and for the UN to declare another cease-fire, “permanentifying” the loss of Kashmir to India but consuming more of India’s wealth and finances.
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