Kashmir Terrorism-The National Response

The militant violence in Jammu and Kashmir, it must be admitted frankly and without any hesitation, is fundamentally communal in character and secessionist in its objective. The Muslim secessionist movements led by All Jammu and Kashmir Plebiscite Front, the Awami Action Committee and the militant youth organisation including the Youth League, were mainly aimed to disengage the state from India and unite it with Pakistan and to ensure the Islamisation of the State. A widespread campaign of disinformation has been in process to provide cover to the real face of Muslim communalism and secessionism in this State. Much of what has actually happened in Kashmir, right from 1947, has either been deliberately concealed or distorted by powers in authority in the Central government as well as the State government for their vested interests. The National Conference which governed the State, by ordinance and decree for three decades, including the most turbulent of the years which followed the Indira-Abdullah Accord in 1975, was avowedly committed to the exclusion of the State from the secular constitutional organisation of India, Muslimisation of its government and society and the obliteration of the Hindus and the other minorities in Kashmir valley and the Muslim majority districts of the Jammu province. The Congress rulers at the Centre acclaimed the Islamicisation of the State as a part of Indian secularism, which the Congress claimed represented parity of power between the special and separate identity of the Indian Muslims and the rest of India.

The war of attrition which is being waged against India in Jammu and Kashmir is a part of the militarization of pan-Islamic fundamentalism and its east-ward expansion in South-Asia. Its main objectives are:

i) imposition of a second partition on India to bring about the unification of Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan;

ii) destruction of the ethno-religious identity of the Hindus and the other minorities in the State;

iii) disruption of the stability of the north-Indian States to pave the way for the disintegration of the Indian State.

The national response to the tragedy in Kashmir has been self-defeating and determined by commitments to uphold Muslim resurgence, which the Congress leaders believed for a long time, to be a part of the liberal movements among the colonial peoples of Asia and Africa. The Congress failure to assess the impact of the Muslim movement for Pakistan on the Indian liberation struggle was also due to the inability of the Congress leaders to recognise the communal character of the Muslim political movements in India, including that of the National Conference in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir always enjoyed the freedom and the approbation of State government as well as the Government of India to promote communalism and separatism. The separate constitution for Jammu and Kashmir envisaged by Article 370 symbolised the Muslim separatism and virtually brought about the enslavement of the Hindus and the other minorities in the State.

The attempts made by the State government and the Congress in the Union government and outside it, the so-called secular and left flanks of the Indian politics and the mercenaries of Muslim communalism in India, to bail out the terrorists and the supporters of Muslim crusade in Kashmir, has led to disastrous consequences. By deliberate design or by error, the Congress government has throughout the last forty-two years of its rule in India, put its wrong foot forward and in effect recognised the rationale of the economic crusade without accepting the Islamic crusade itself. The Congress leadership has always balanced itself between the quest for unity of India and the Muslim opposition to the Indian identity. The Congress, true to its tradition, has always sought to use Muslims to consolidate its own power-structure in India. The Muslim communalism, on the other hand, has obtained its price, a fact clearly proved by what happened in India in 1947, and what is happening in Jammu and Kashmir now.

There will be no peace in Kashmir till the war of attrition, unleashed by the separatist and fundamentalist forces against the Indian civilisation is not brought to an end in Jammu and Kashmir. If the Indian nation seeks peace in a state of war, it will meet the same fate that it did in 1947.