Part I: Chapter 26

LOOT OF A KASHMIRI PANDIT GIRL

Kashmiri Pandits closed their ranks and fortified their fronts as one monolith to retrieve a Kashmiri Pandit girl, Parmeshwari by name, from the clutches of a Muslim abductor who virtually looted her as a prized booty forconversion and subsequent marriage. Despite plaints and pleadings, the government of G.M. Sadiq trapped by the Muslim fundamentalists and Pakistani moles manning vital levers of power brazenly flouted all canons of law and natural justice and treated the entire gamut of the issue in the fashion as was expected of Muslims. The Muslim police officers were in the lead-role and far from camouflaging their anti-Hindu prejudices they shifted the venue of investigations from the Police Station, Rainwawari where an FIR was lodged by the widowed mother of the abducted girl to the Police Station, Khanyar which has been a den of Muslim bigotry and reaction. When hard pressed by the public opinion, tile girl was recovered from Wazapore, a seminary of Muslim secessionism, but as presaged was not restored to the care of her natural guardian nor was the Muslim looter charged with abduction for punishment as required and stipulated by law.

The Kashmiri Pandits with an unabated history of harassment and religious persecution rose in open revolt against the rulers who refused to see reason and motivated by religious prejudices overtly showered support and encouragement on the Muslim abductor earning total sympathies from the Muslim majority. The Muslim rulers as a matter of design kept the Pandits at bay by not associating them with the procedural complications which were deliberately created to feed and arouse the demon of Muslim bigotry. What was infuriating that the aggrieved mother of the looted girl was permitted to meet her daughter only under police surveillance. No Kashmiri Pandit respectables were granted permission to meet the girl with a view to measuring her reactions to the situation in which she was trapped. The said-demand on part of Pandits was blatantly rejected lest the abducted girl interned in the Police Station should retract from the stand that she was doctored and coerced to take a resort to. The police officers, all Muslims, assigning Judicial powers unto themselves permitted the Muslim malefactor to take away the abducted girl ignoring the authenticity of the age-certificate issued by a competent authority establishing her credentials as a minor. As the case was virtually settled by the Muslim police officers, the Kashmiri Pandits were naturally pushed to the wall and launched a peaceful agitation against the questionable act of the government which had approved the handing over of the abducted girl to the comma.

Despite the soft statements of the Chief- Minister, the government of the day cracked the whip of barbarity against the Pandit community, which exhibited unique will and daring to put a stop to the forcible abduction and conversion of Hindu women. The Pandits courted arrests, held dharnas and staged peaceful demonstrations to ventilate their vigorous opposition to the beetle-chewing Chief Minister, G.M.Sadiq, who had facilitated and given a pushup to the sneaking-in processes of anti-nationals and Plebiscite fronters into the kelp organs of power structure.

Kashmir Police long infected of communal virus swooped on Pandits with the fury of a crusade. Indiscriminate arrests were effected, teargas shells were burst, bullets were tired and lathis were wielded to break the resisting force of Pandits. Searches without proper permissions were conducted prior to the effecting of arrests. Moneys and ornaments during searches were pilfered and looted. Women on a mass scale were humiliated, reviled and molested. Peaceful protectors were brutally hit on heads and other sensitive body-parts killing them instantaneously. Acid was hurled on protesting women and children. On 25th of August, 1967 alone, two hundred and two Pandits were seriously injured when the policemen brutally charged a massive Kashmiri Pandit demonstration though peaceful. Many of them died from their bleeding wounds. The injured were denied medical treatment in the government-run hospitals. The funeral procession of Maharaja Krishen Razdan and Lassa Koul Badam was stoned and was said to be the handiwork of policemen in plain clothes and Muslim bigots operating in tandem with the government agencies. Riots were engineered and business establishments and houses belonging to Pandits at Karan Nagar and other localities were vengefully looted, damaged and put to flames. Two Pandits were mercilessly beaten to death. A dead body retrieved from a stinking drain was buried without ascertaining the identity of the person killed. As muslims had suddenly found a new brother in G.M. Sadiq, they let loose a reign of terror against the Pandits. Two youngmen H.N. Mattoo and Avtar Kishen Khushoo were cruelly stabbed to death. Gopi Nath Handoo was gashed in chest and head and was done to death. Nine Kashmiri Pandits were killed by the frenzied Muslims or by Police bullets and hammers.

G.M. Sadiq, the then Chief Minister, proved an utter failure to meet the thrust and strength of the Kashmiri Pandit agitation which earned tremendous support and deep sympathy from broad sections of Indian populace. He as a last resort played the time-tested card of Muslim bigotry as a counter-feint to the pressures mounted by the Pandits for handing over the abducted girl to a third party till the relevant records including the age of the victim were thoroughly looked into. Money and liquor were generously and plentifully distributed among Muslims for their mobilisation against the Pandits and in the mobilisation campaign two ministers, Peer Qiasud-din and Noor Mohammad, and a close relative of the Chief Minister were seen in the lead-role. With a view to neutralising and debilitating the Pandit thrust, a massive Muslim demonstration was staged in Srinagar ostensibly against the utterances of Balraj Madhok who had aired the same views on Kashmir as the Chief Minister himself would harp on day in and day out. Pitting the violent Muslim bigotry against the Pandits though a micro-minority was only to silence their protest against the loot of a girl which in the eyes of Muslims was a sanctified act.

The genie of Muslim bigotry and fanaticism when aroused and let loose from its corked bottle is destined to search for its victims in Kashmiri Pandits and though the agitation was called off yet a Jehad was launched against the Pandits. Rumour mill was lubricated and a violent disinformation campaign launched to arouse the religious frenzy to an unprecedented pitch. Pandits were accused of burning a mosque at Baramulla in complicity with the security forces. The pro-pale goons from S.P.College, Srinagar pounced on the Kashmiri Pandit students demonstrating against Miss Mahmuda Ahmad Ali Shah who was said to have hurled foul invective on the Hindu girls of her college and Kashmiri Pandit professors on staff of the college As a part of the whole nefarious game against the Pandits fuelled by Congress government, a copy of the religious text was found cast into a filthy pond of a particular school in Srinagar and Pandits were squarely blamed for the misdeed. Kashmiri Pandit teachers, headmasters and professors were reviled, humiliated, cursed and physically beaten. Some of them though not involved in the fury of the agitation were detained and put in jails. Muslims inured to the loot and plunder of Kashmiri Pandits subjected Hindu shops and houses at Ganpatyar and Habba Kadal localities of Srinagar to a ruthless loot and plunderbefore setting them to flames. The dailies, weeklies and monthliespublished by the Kashmiri Pandits and issued by the Kashmiri Pandit organizations focussing on the tidal deluge of violence and loot sweeping the Pandits were banned in a Nazi fashion with a view to gagging the community. Pandits were maligned for having received arms from Jan Sangh rabids. A memorandum submitted to the then Home Minister, Y.B.Chavan, by the Muslim respectables, all sponsored by the Congress bigots and Pakistani moles and saboteurs, accused the Kashmiri Pandits of stock-piling arms and ammunition in their residential houses and temples with the purpose of waging a war on the Muslim majority. Mosques as usual were converted into centres of disinformation campaign against the Pandits. Prayer was diluted and replaced by disinformation for loot and plunder.

The then Home Minister, Y.B.Chavan, proved deft at prevarication and finally under severe pressure from Public opinion in the country paid a visit to the valley perhaps for an on-the-spot assessment of the tense communal situation that had assumed grave proportions by the Muslim intervention as was manipulated by the communalists and Pakistani subversives donning congress robes. The minister must have felt elated at the withdrawal of the peaceful agitation, but had lost everything to the stalwarts of bigotry operating at the state level to the end of ouster of the Kashmiri Pandit minority from the soil of Kashmir. The posters flaring the Pandits to quit Kashmir for its annexation to Pakistan signalled a triviality of no political import for the Minister who carried two of them to Delhi and consigned them to the dust-bin. Had he taken the cue and wrought a stitch, Kashmir would not have witnessed the euphoric rise of the demon of Muslim fundamentalism and bigotry fed by the natives and abetted by the Umma.

Rajeshwar Rao with a scintillating history in Communists with a view to ingratiating themselves with the Chief Minister and his cohorts proved no better in assessing the invidious role of disruptionists, secessionists and communalists serving as the storm-troopers of the Muslims in corridors of power for stifling the Hindu protest. Enjoying government hospitality on a lavish scale, he could not but ditto to the dot the government version of the political and communal scenario that had in reality received a heavy hammering by the pursuit of the same strategy as was devised to batter and frustrate the Roti Agitation launched against the British conspiracy against the Pandits. In a statement in Srinagar he washed out what was fed to him by the Chief Minister with whom he was enjoying a fairly good rapport. His use of critical faculties which were expected to have tempered through the study of dialectical works of Marx should have normally guided him to the Pandits harbouring a genuine grouse against the Muslim rulers in particular and Muslims in general who suddenly lose rationality when a Hindu girl is lifted for conversion and nuptial knot. Had he cross-checked with Pandits and known the facts of their story, he would learnt that the Muslims manning the Police Stations initially refused to file an FIR which was lodged soon after the Kashmiri Pandit girl was abducted and when under terrific public pressure, an FIR was filed and the girl recovered, she was not handed over to her widowed mother, but to the Muslim abductor thus settling the whole issue and in contrast a Muslim girl, major by all proven evidence, was recovered from the clutches of her Hindu abductor and without any prevarication restored to the protective care of her natural parents. Incensed at this, the Hindus were more than justified to launch a peaceful agitation against the denial to them of the right of equality before law and also against the hamhanded treatment that was meted out to them by the fundamentalised law-enforcing agencies.

Had he minded an inter-action with Pandits, Rajeshwar Rao with ample grains of earthiness in him would have come to as to how the vicious processes of subverting rule of law and brazenly discriminating Pandits purely on religious grounds were initiated at the state level by the Muslim rulers of all shades and persuasions and continued unabated without any let up. He would surely have felt dismayed had he known the sordid details as to how the rabid communal elements operating with unrestrained freedom with the entire Congress government at the fuelling end repeated history for the Pandits subjecting them to loot, murder and arson and also as to how historical reality in Kashmir was in the processes of being tailored and re-shaped for the establishment of a Muslim ghetto at the behest of his Communist sympathiser who was perceptibly seen as the prodigal having returned to the ranks of Muslim rebids. The massive anti-Hindu demonstrations would have given him a jolt and a shock as the rabid Muslims manning the vanguard, rearguard and flanks of such demonstrations yelled out their lungs for Jehad against Hindu Kafirs for their extirpation and indulging in ruthless loot and arson of Pandit properties in broad daylight hoarsely screamed that Sadiq was a Muslim brother and that was the message they had received thus testifying to the pact that he had clandestinely formed with the Muslim bigotry, frenzied and cruel, through the mediation of Plebiscite fronters and Jamaat rabids only to push the religious enemies into an irretrievable limbo of oblivion.

As the Pandits had plunged head long into the peaceful struggle, they threw off the cloak of reticence and were forthright and minced no words in drawing the attention of the Central authorities to their chequered history and to the pile of grievances that had accumulated as a result of blatant discrimination and marginalisation that the Muslim rulers feigning dubious secularism had subjected them to all through post-independence era. The Home Minister was informed in crystal - clear language that the government was assiduously pursuing the policy-path of establishing the Sunni Muslim precedence at the expense of other ethnic groups which in ultimate analysis would surely push the state into a jeopardy with no means to retrieve it. This stand of the Pandits was cunningly exploited and misrepresented to generate resentment against them and were accused of having abandoned and betrayed the cause of the abducted girl for seeking jobs. Slogans were raised and posters distributed at the instance of some individuals in Jammu with patronage from Dr. Karan Singh in thick cohorts with the vested interests in corridors of power and the mischievous and derisive content of the chauvinistic campaign was designed in all malafide to drift away the tremendous Hindu support to the Pandit agitation which pointedly reflected the deep-seated resentment against and disapproval of the Muslim hegemony in the state allowed to be crafted as part of an over-all appeasement policy of anti-nationals artful in dubious politics.

Whether P.N. Bazaz was justified in his mordant opposition to the Kashmiri Pandit agitation or not, but the fact remains that he despised though in a low key the glaring discrimination that was perpetrated on Pandits by all shades of Muslim politicals motivated to perpetuate their Muslim credentials among the Muslim populace, thus throwing to the winds the constitutional guarantees ensuring rights of. all segments of population transcending perspectives of caste, creed, colour or religion. The Constitution of India, to the surprise of all, has not been the political Bible of the Muslim rulers, but the Glancy Commission set up as an off-shoot of British conspiracy buttressed in later years by the Plebiscite Front Resolution has not only been the seminary of guide-lines for recruitments to public services, promotions and selections to the professional trainings, but has been the Magna Carta for Muslims who have shown it an unflinching adherence as an article of faith. The Glancy Commission capturing the texture of a time is inviolable, sacrosanct and incontrovertible even now when Jammu and Kashmir state has the supervening sovereignty of the Indian constitution with a well-defined list of Fundamental Rights. KashmiriPandits as the religious "Other" have to be edged out,  merit is to be scaled down, and Muslims are to be accommodated on the support-plank of Glancy Commission and "population ratio" thesis of Plebiscite Front, a secessionist outfit tothe core. Merit, academic impeccability and excellence, to the Muslims, are a red rag to the bull.

Exposing the Muslim rulers who have pawned their souls to the stinking Glancy Commission and taking the lid off the cruelties inflicted on the Pandits for ethnic cleansing, Bazaz writes :

"Whatever justification there may have been for giving preference to Muslim candidates of inferior merit in recruitment and promotions in public services or in admission to technical and educational institutions in the past. I was a strong advocate of this as member of Glancy Commission, the time has come when the policy of discrimination should come to a stop. Those Muslim politicians who continue to insist upon its maintenance are wittingly or unwittingly accentuating communal discord. It is amazing that those who shout for complete freedom should in the same breath oppose the criterion of merit in recruitment to public services. Mark the absurdity: Muslims are most progressive and backward at one and the same time. Muslims should try to appreciate the feeling of those Pandits who are discriminated against. Political expediency might have dictated to "appease" Muslims in the past, but that argument can no longer assuage the wounded feelings of aggrieved Pandits."