Bluff of Omar Abdullah, who claims the Islamist movement is a political movement
The Islamist movement in Kashmir is jihad. It is part of the jihad which divided India in August 1947. The Muslim theological precept doesn’t recognize any national boundary, state authority, or extra-religious obligations. Muslim political obligation is religious in content and they draw their inspiration from their scriptures. They have been seeking to Islamize Kashmir. This is the whole truth and can be ignored only at one’s own peril.
Princely states were not part of the partition plan of 1947. The partition plan was strictly confined to British India. The sovereigns of the princely states or the rulers of the princely states were left free by the Indian Independence Act of 1947 to accede to or join any of the two Dominions – India and Pakistan – considering the contiguity factor.
Before the sovereign of Jammu and Kashmir would have taken a decision on its accession, the Islamist jihad engulfed the state to swallow it and then turn to swallow Hyderabad and Junagarh. While the Indian political class, nay the Congress, which inherited power from the British and ruled India ran from pillar to post, the people of all three states defeated the designs of Islamist jihad. All three states acceded to India as per the constitutional law on the subject.
Islamist jihad, not having been able to achieve its objective of having a “South Pakistan” (Hyderabad) and “North Pakistan” in Jammu and Kashmir continued its line of Muslim-majority principles to claim Jammu and Kashmir. The Islamist jihad has for the last 75 years indulged in a war of subversion and taken recourse to terrorism to grab Jammu and Kashmir and create North Pakistan.
The Indian political class, on the other hand, did not either recognize the content and contour of the Islamist jihad in Kashmir or was not prepared to face it and fight it, evaded to evolve conceptual constructs to secure its boundaries and secure its territories, specifically Jammu and Kashmir.
The jihad in Kashmir is carried on by Pakistan, which is a cut-off territory of the Indian sub-continent and stands on the head of India with over 200 nuclear bombs.
The present struggle by separatists in Jammu and Kashmir, as said, is a jihad that is using all forms of subversive warfare to grab Jammu and Kashmir and has at its back the entire Muslim leadership in Kashmir, elements in India, and establishment sympathetic to the Muslim struggle and the Muslim International.
The jihad in Kashmir should not be misunderstood as it has been, by the Indian political class deliberately or otherwise a struggle for freedom or a struggle for self-determination or a struggle for “Kashmiriyat” or whatever nomenclature the jihad has invented.
Self-determination was confined only to the liberation of colonies from the colonial powers and it ended its course with the formation of the United Nations. To call the ongoing movement in Kashmir a struggle for freedom would be a misnomer. It would be a contradiction of sorts because no nation-state can be broken for the sake of a small minority who wants to separate from it.
The separatist movement in Kashmir and the jihad, the form it has taken, is a continuity of the jihad which foisted the first partition on the people of India in 1947. It is aimed to foist a second partition on the people of India. It seeks to extend the reach of the Islamic State of Pakistan to the border of Himachal Pradesh, on the one side, and the Sanskrit Himalayas, on the other. Its extension to the Sanskrit Himalayas will make China-Pakistan axis a force that will change the entire balance of power in Asia. More importantly, it will demolish the entire Northern Frontier of India and expose the whole of North India to invasions from the North.
Very vast parts of Kashmir have already been captured by jihadists whose leaders like Zakir Musa openly and unambiguously said that “their struggle is not for Azadi but for Islamic rule, Allah and caliphate”, which is the watchword and battle-cry of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Earlier, his predecessor slain Burhan Wani, a Hizbul commander, had repeatedly said that “their jihad is for Caliphate”.
Sadly, the authorities didn’t act in time to nip the evil in the bud. Contrarily, they virtually legitimized the hoisting of ISIS flags completely overlooking the fact that these flags were, in the words of former Professor of Kashmir University’s Political Science Department, M K. Taing, and former DGP, Jammu and Kashmir Police, M M Khajuria, “symbols of the most poisonous, brutal and dangerous Wahabi/ Salafi terrorist ideology” as well as that of Abu Bagdadi-led Pan-Islamic Islamic Caliphate spreading its deadly tentacles across the globe sucking in vulnerable Muslim youth”.
More significantly, the past several years witnessed the authorities in the South and North Blocks and Jammu and Kashmir in a state of retreat. The policy of retreat only further emboldened the jihadists and the result has been deadly attacks on the Army camps and convoys, attacks on police stations and attacks on the CRPF camps, and targeted killings of Hindus, including women. Besides, this policy of retreat has so emboldened the over-ground supporters of jihad that they did not leave any stone unturned to hamper the counter-terrorist operations with impunity.
The political class, policy planners, trouble-shooters, and opinion leaders have right from the beginning of freedom of India relied on conceptual constructs which are self-contradictory, illogical, unscientific, and destructive in nature. The meaningless concepts like “composite dialogue”, “stakeholders”, “back channel diplomacy”, “peace process”, “neighbors cannot be changed”, “South-Asian Peace Zone” and “India-Pakistan friendship” have only been fabricated by the political class because it has never picked up the courage to face the Islamist jihad and because it has never built the determination to fight it.
It is heartening to note that Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains, who constitute 43 percent of the population of Jammu and Kashmir and inhabit over 88 percent of its land area, have not allowed these jihadis to extend their tentacles beyond the Kashmir Valley. They appear determined to fight the jihad and, if necessary, also to fight the imbecility and pusillanimous character of the political class. But this is not enough. The Indian State has never ever acted like the states like the US, Israel, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and so on act.
However, things changed somewhat after May 2018, when the Narendra Modi government started acting to demonstrate the will of the Indian state. Thereafter, the nation witnessed several significant developments. Jammu and Kashmir was integrated fully into India by abrogating its special status in 2019 showing the Kashmiri Muslim leadership its place. Hostile and aggressive Islamabad was shown its place through a surgical strike in PoJK and an airstrike deep inside Pakistan. Besides, Ladakh was segregated from Jammu and Kashmir and granted Union Territory status, and the remaining Jammu and Kashmir was also converted into Union Territory.
To say all this is not to suggest that the Narendra Modi government has stemmed the whole rot. It has not. It has not fully diagnosed what ails Kashmir. If it really wishes to defeat Islamist jihad in Kashmir and break the backbone of jihadists in Kashmir, it has to, on the one hand, call the bluff of Kashmiri Muslim leaders, including Omar Abdullah, who terms the Kashmir jihad a political movement, and, on the other, grant state status to Jammu province to limit the area of jihad to Kashmir. Besides, it has no other option but to Indianise the whole administrative set-up in Kashmir and keep Kashmir under the control of the Union Home Ministry.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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