Kashmir: The Hindu Claim
By Dr. M.K. Teng
January 2011
The so-called composite dialogue
between India and Pakistan, aimed to find a
settlement on the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir,
has so far revolved round two main presumptions:
first, that the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir is
a Muslim problem confined to the valley of Kashmir
and secondly, a settlement on Jammu and Kashmir
must be acceptable to the Muslims of Pakistan and
the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir. A feeling has
been allowed to grow in this country and abroad
that the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir was never
so intractable that an agreement could not have
been reached between India and Pakistan and the
sufferings to which Muslims in Kashmir are
subjected to, mitigated. The presumption that the
dispute over Jammu and Kashmir is in its essence a
Muslim problem has its basis in the ideological
commitments of the Muslim struggle for Pakistan,
the All India Muslim League spearheaded. The
Muslim League claimed Jammu and Kashmir on the
basis of the Muslim majority composition of its
population. In Pakistan, at various levels of
public debate on Jammu and Kashmir, the issue is
not where Jammu and Kashmir belongs to. The issue
is how to bring the unification of Jammu and
Kashmir with Pakistan. People of Pakistan do not
entertain any doubt about the legitimacy of their
territorial claim on Jammu and Kashmir on the
basis of the Muslim majority composition of its
population. They insist upon a settlement on Jammu
and Kashmir, which is acceptable to them as well
as to the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir.
The claim, that Pakistan has made,
that the unification of Jammu and Kashmir with
Pakistan was an essential condition for the
completion of the partition of India is a primary
misnomer. That it was never contested by the
Indian political class, led in the long run to its
growing into a gospel of faith amongst the Muslims
in Pakistan and everywhere else, Jammu and Kashmir
and the rest of India being no exception.
Partition was confined to the British India and
the princely States including Jammu and Kashmir
were excluded from the purview of the partition.
More importantly, the composition of the
population of the States, Jammu and Kashmir being
no exception, was never recognized as a
concomitant condition for the founding of the
Muslim homeland of Pakistan. In fact, the severest
of the opposition to the recognition of the
composition of population as a factor in the
determination of their future affiliations, came
from Muslim League leaders-the founding fathers of
Pakistan, and the British who supported the Muslim
League in its struggle to divide India.
The Indian political class has
allowed another misnomer to become a part of the
Kashmir dispute and that is: the Valley of Kashmir
makes the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Kashmir
Valley is only a small part of the Jammu and
Kashmir State. The Jammu and Kashmir State, as it
emerged from the British Indian empire after the
British quit India in 1947, constituted of (a) the
province of Kashmir (b) the province of Jammu (c)
the frontier division of Gilgit, Baltistan and
Ladakh along with the Dardic Dependencies of,
Hunza, Nagar, Yasin, Punial, Ishkoman, Darel and
Koh Gizir. The province of Jammu was larger than
the province of Kashmir in area and population.
The frontier division of Gilgit, Baltistan and
Ladakh was larger than the two provinces of
Kashmir and Jammu put together, though it was
sparsely populated.
After the Truce Agreement and the
Cease-Fire which ended the fighting in Jammu and
Kashmir in 1949, more than forty percent of the
territories of the State remained under the
occupation of Pakistan. The fighting in Jammu and
Kashmir began with the invasion of the State by
Pakistan in October 1947. The occupied territories
included the district of Muzaffarabad and a part
of the district of Baramullah in the Kashmir
province, the district of Miprur, and a part of
the district of Poonch in the Jammu province and
the frontier region of Gilgit, along with the
Gilgit, Agency and the region of Baltistan and the
Dardic dependencies. The rest of the Jammu and
Kashmir State, which lies on the Indian side of
the cease-fire Line, now called the Line of
Control, constitutes of the province of Kashmir,
the province of Jammu and the frontier division of
Ladakh. It is not fairly well known that the
province of Jammu is larger than the province of
Kashmir in area and population.
In Pakistan there is no confusion
about the territorial content of the dispute. The
Government of Pakistan and the people of Pakistan
have never accepted the reduction of the dispute
over Jammu and Kashmir to the dispute over the
Valley of Kashmir. It will be of interest to note
that in 1947, when Pakistan invaded the State, the
invading army swept into the Jammu province and
Kashmir province simultaneously, breaking through
the borders of the state with Pakistan. On 1
November, five days after the airborne troops of
the Indian army landed in Srinagar, airborne
troops of the armed forces of Pakistan landed on
the airstrip in Gilgit opened for them by the
Gilgit Scouts, the force raised by the British
from among the local Muslim population to garrison
the Gilgit Agency. The Gilgit Scouts joined the
invading army of Pakistan and lost no time to
press eastwards into Baltistan. The Muslim troops
of the State army and their Muslim officers posted
at Bunji in Baltistan, mutinied and joined the
invading hoards. Remnants of the State army,
joined by the Buddhist population of Ladakh, held
the invading forces at bay till the Indian troops
marched up the Zojilla pass to relieve them.
Just as the Jammu and Kashmir State
cannot be identified with the Valley of Kashmir,
the people of the State cannot be identified with
the people of the Kashmir Valley, who are
predominantly Muslim. The dispute over Jammu and
Kashmir is a Muslim problem. But it is more a
problem of the Hindus, the Sikhs and the
Buddhists, who are living in the State and who
form more than forty percent of the population of
the State on the Indian side of the Line of
Control. The reduction of the dispute over Jammu
and Kashmir to a dispute over the Valley of
Kashmir, which is predominantly Muslim, is
deceptively simple and viciously aimed to project
the Muslim content of the dispute over Jammu and
Kashmir. The dispute over Jammu and Kashmir has a
Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist content as well, which is
more significant than its Muslim content. The
Hindus and the Sikhs constitute a dominant
majority of the population of Jammu province,
while the Buddhists form a majority of the
population of Ladakh. The Muslims form a majority
of the population of only the province of Kashmir.
No settlement on the dispute over
Jammu and Kashmir can be reached, so long the
dispute is treated as a Muslim problem confined to
the Valley. The right to life and freedom of the
Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists and their aspirations
are as factoral to a peace-settlement on Jammu and
Kashmir as the right to life and freedom of the
Muslims and their aspirations are.
The Hindus and Sikhs played a
decisive role in shaping the peoples’ struggle in
the State, for the freedom of India. Ideologically
committed to the unity of India, the Hindus and
the Sikhs in the State fought shoulder to shoulder
with the Indian people for the liberation of India
from the British rule. The Hindus and Sikhs in the
State joined the non-cooperation movement in the
Punjab in the aftermath of the Rawlatt agitation.
A year after, they joined the Muslims in the
Khilafat Movement which took Jammu and Kashmir by
storm. The Hindus and Sikhs joined the
civil-disobedience movement which followed the
Salt Satyagrah in 1930.
The Hindus and the Sikhs put
themselves in the forefront of the States Peoples
Movement. It may not be out of place to mention,
that the first plenary session of the All India
States Peoples Conference held in Kathiawad in
1926, was presided over by Shankar Lal Koul, a
Hindu of Kashmir. Shankar Lal Koul, along with
Lala Muluk Raj Saraf of Jammu, represented Jammu
and Kashmir State in the plenary session of the
All India States Peoples Conference. In his
presidential address Shankar Lal Koul called for
liberation of the peoples of the States from the
princely rule as well as the British Paramountacy.
Inside the state, the Hindus and
the Sikhs initiated the effort to forge a secular
peoples’ movement for constitutional reform. Of
the twelve signatories to the National Demand,
which provided the basis of a movement for
constitutional reform in the State, five were
Kashmiri Hindus, one represented the Sikhs and six
were Muslims. The National Demand formed the basic
structure of the All Jammu and Kashmir National
Conference which led the national movement in the
State till 1947. The National Conference committed
itself to the Indian unity and the Indian freedom
from the British Colonial rule and joined the All
India States Peoples’ Conference, due to the
indefatiguable efforts of its Hindu and Sikh
leaders. During the crucial years, after the
Second World War, when the British prepared to
quit India, the Secretary General of the All India
States Peoples’ Conference, Dwarka Nath Kachru, a
Kashmiri Hindu, initiated a vigorous movement to
integrate the States peoples Movement with the
National Movement led by the Indian National
Congress and forge a common front of the peoples
of the British India and the princely States
against the British and the Muslim League. Kachru
spared no efforts for the inclusion of the
princely States in the future constitutional
reforms in India, which proved to be decisive in
the integration of the States with India, when the
British quit India and left the princely States in
a state of disarray.
When Pakistan invaded the State in
1947, the Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists along
with the Kashmiri-speaking Muslims, who formed the
main support base of the All Jammu and Kashmir
National Conference, formed the core of the
resistance the invading army met with. However the
Muslim officers and ranks in the State army, about
45 percent of its strength, mutinied, massacred
their Hindu officers and comrades-in-arms in cold
blood and joined the invading columns as they
poured into the State across its borders with
Pakistan. The Hindu and Sikh officers and other
ranks of the State army, joined by the Hindus,
Sikh and Buddhists, fought to the last man, to
keep the invading army at bay, till the airborne
Indian troops reached Srinagar. In Gilgit, the
Gilgit Scouts mutinied on 1 November 1947,
imprisoned the Governor of Gilgit, Ghansara
Singh, killed the Hindu and Sikh military and
police officials and opened up the air-strip which
was built by the British for the airborne troops
of Pakistan to land in Gilgit. The fall of Gilgit
was followed by the mutiny of the Muslim officers
and men of the State army regiment posted at Bunji
in Baltistan, who joined the invading armies in
their advance into Baltistan and Ladakh.
In the territories of the State,
which were overrun by the invading hordes, more
than thirty-eight thousand Hindus and Sikhs were
massacred. Thousands of women were abducted;
hundreds of them committed suicide to escape
capture. All Hindu and Sikh temples and shrines
were burned down or destroyed to erase the last
vestiges of the Hindu and Sikh culture and
religion in the occupied territories. The whole
Hindu and Sikh population of the territories
occupied by the invading army, which escaped the
holocaust took refuge in Jammu. The Buddhists in
Baltistan who escaped the onslaught of the
invading army took refuge in Ladakh. The assertion
that Jammu and Kashmir presented a heaven of peace
and brotherhood while the rest of India smoldered
in communal violence is a myth.
After the Truce Agreement,
negotiated by the United Nations and the
consequent cease-fire in the fighting in the State
in January 1949, the Hindus, Sikhs and the
Buddhists continued to fight against the war of
subversion, Pakistan waged from the occupied
territories of so called ‘Azad Kashmir’ to foment
Muslim distrust in the State. In 1953, the
Kashmiri-speaking Muslims who had supported the
accession of the State to India in 1947,
repudiated their commitment to the unity of India
on the ground that India had denied them the right
to reorganize Jammu and Kashmir into another
Muslim nation in between India and Pakistan. The
Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists arraigned themselves
with the forces which opposed to the Muslimisation
of the State and fell into a head on collision
with a new Muslim separatists movement led by the
All Jammu and Kashmir Plebiscite Front, which was
founded in 1955, to ensure the implementation of
the United Nations resolutions on Kashmir,
envisaging a plebiscite to determine the future
affiliations of the State. The Hindus, Sikhs and
the Buddhist formed the main resistance to the
Muslim struggle for self-determination, the
Plebiscite Front spearheaded till 1975, when the
Indira-Abdullah Accord was concluded and the
Plebiscite Front dissolved.
The Jihad which Pakistan launched
in Kashmir in 1990, to liberate Jammu and Kashmir
from the Indian hold, mounted its first attack on
the Hindus in Kashmir. The terrorist assault on
the Hindus in Kashmir commenced in the fall of
1989, and by the summer of 1990, more than seven
hundreds of them had been assassinated in cold
blood. Most of the victims were innocent people
who lived in poverty and persecution in the Muslim
dominated constitutional organization of the
State. Among those killed were people from all
section of the Hindu Society; teachers, lawyers,
political activists, media men, intellectuals,
errand boys and men of small means. The massacre
of the Hindus was accompanied by a widespread
campaign of intimidation and threat to drive out
the Hindus from the Kashmir province, burn their
temples and religious shrines and homes and loot
their property. By the end of the year 1990, the
whole community of the Hindus in the Kashmir
province was driven out of their homes and
hearths. For the last two decades, during which
the terrorist violence in the State has continued
unabated, the Hindus have been living in exile in
improvised refugee camps in Jammu and elsewhere in
the country.
The interests and aspirations of
the Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists, who
constitute nearly half the population of Jammu and
Kashmir, are central to any settlement reached
between India and Pakistan. Muslim separatist
forces insist upon negotiations which lead to a
settlement, acceptable to the Muslims in Pakistan
and the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir, raises three
basic questions: (a) which principles of nation
building and international law, past or present,
sanctify the territorial claim made by the Muslims
In Jammu and Kashmir to the secession of the State
from India and its unification with Pakistan?; (b)
Why should India accept a Muslim- centric
settlement on Jammu and Kashmir and accept
negotiations which also are Muslim-centric?; (c)
why should India not insist upon a Hindu- Sikh –
Buddhist centric settlement of Jammu and Kashmir
on account of its commitment to secularism and the
right to equality of all communities irrespective
of their religion? If the British foisted the
Two-Nation theory on the Indian people in 1947,
and divided India on the basis of separating the
Muslim majority provinces of the British India to
constitute the Muslim homeland of Pakistan, why
should the Indian people, now six decades after
British quit India, accept the Two Nation theory
again to concede the second partition of India.
And if the Indian political class finds itself
helpless in the face of Jihad in Jammu and Kashmir
being waged by Pakistan and the Muslim Jihadi
forces in Jammu and Kashmir, why should the Indian
government not insist upon the breaking up of
Kashmir valley to secure Hindus their territorial
claims as well as the breaking of the occupied
territories of Jammu the so called ‘Azad Kashmir’
to secure the Hindus and Sikh refugees of these
areas, who are more than a million people, their
territorial claims.
The Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists
have as sacrosanct a right to Jammu and Kashmir,
as their Muslim compatriots have. An exception to
the right to equality may be acceptable in the
Islamic Republic of Pakistan where the rights of
the Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists to their
homeland may not be recognized as sacrosanct as
the rights the Islamic Republic bestows upon its
Muslims subjects. India is a secular state and no
government in India can consign the Hindus, Sikhs
and the Buddhists to the servitude of a Muslim
state of Jammu and Kashmir.
Source: Kashmir
Sentinel
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