Part II: Chapter 15

HOMELAND DEMAND RAISED

The terrorist violence launched through violence and carnage has been ravaging the State of Jammu and Kashmir without any visible let up as the culmination of secessionist movement pursued with resilience since 1947. Despite all campaigns of canard and disinformation inside and outside the country the world opinion is now thoroughly convinced that the terrorism in Kashmir in its fundamental motivations and inputs is a Muslim crusade and that is how Kashmiri Pandits as the first victims have been hounded out of their ancestral abode and hurled into a crisis situation of exodus and exile. Beset with pangs of destabilization and agonies of stupendous losses of assets and human life the entire community is on cross-roads and stands absolutely brutalised and disfigured, alienated and isolated. It is disrobed of its characteristic identity as an ethnic and religious minority and is equally bereft of its culture personality and existence rooted in the history and culture of Kashmir. The community as a debris of shattered illusions is not only sunk in the quagmire of trials and travails but is virtually frozen in time and space. Uprooted from its cultural and civilisational ethos it seems to have lost purpose and direction and can be compared to a rudderless boat adrift on the stormy and perilous waves. It was hunted and hounded and continues to be pounded and bludgeoned. It was on the run all the time and continues to be in the same oppressed state. Engaged in a grim battle for survival it is losing its nerve in face of harsh vagaries of climate, an apathetic populace and extremely cruel and inimical administration. The members of the community that have a proud record of decent and cultured life despite all manner of persecution and economic squeeze are reduced to penury, want and deprivation.

The greatest tragedy is that they have become exiles in their own country and aliens in their own land. Under the grip of an agonising and frustrating situation the community having no vote-bank clout is deemed as disposable Junk by the governments under the tight leash of unscrupulous and corrupt politicians who have made shameless attempts to conceal the genocide and hush up the plight and woes of the community and tag it with labels and pejoratives as an excuse to leave it in lurch. The absolute hostility of the Muslim government of the state being given, the central governments of varied shades have been classical in their postures of neglect, callousness and apathy unto the community in exile and Diaspora.

Kufra as a dominating factor of Muslim mental apparatus anti-Kashmiri Pandit hysteria was generated and whipped up to weld Muslim ranks to realise their externment and exile flaunted as a tangible achievement to cement the cracks in the secessionist movement. What was Hindu has been vengefully erased and dismantled whole hog. Rational argument deemed as inimical to the terrorist-cum-secessionist movement has been crucified to enforce uniformity through violent and ruthless methods. Rhythms of religion have been geared to reinforce and stimulate frightful orgies of strife and disorder, rape and masssacre. Untold physical sufferings have been perpetrated on the community and in the name of religion its dignity has been fatally wounded and Nizam-e-Mustafa is held out to the battling ranks of Muslim violents as a new dawn of promise and hope on the debris of hewn flesh of Kashmiri Pandits and spilt blood of their womenfolk and children. To achieve the ends of crusade said to be historically infamous the Kashmiri Pandits as Kafirs have been tortured, hanged, massacred, dismembered, tied with grenades and blasted, lynched and sawed into two halves and burnt alive into cinders thereby putting into shade the cruel pogroms of tyrants who have been tried and punished for their inhuman crimes under international law.

As a response to the formidable challenges that have plagued and staggered the Kashmiri Pandit community at large the demand for homeland has been voiced and articulated as a cogent and decisive remedy to mitigate the social, political and economic strangulation and existential plight of the community in forced galut and Diaspora caused by the Muslim crusaders motivated with the idea-force of revanchism.

It is not for the first time that the homeland demand has been orchestrated and projected as a viable alternative to the subjection that the Kashmiri Pandit community has been reduced to by the Muslim rulers owing allegiance to the Islamic guide-lines not to the democratic and secular constitution of the republic. The Kashmiri Pandits gave currency to and agitated the homeland demand in the wake of murderous and despicable loot of 1931 when they were scathed, looted and murdered by the hateful communal elements in league with British imperialists ensuring a raw deal for them by callous and arbitrary rejection of their reasonable and legitimate demands and concerns. Hard pressed by the communal scenario the Kashmiri Pandits with a discerning mind reiterated the demand for home. land with its echoes in 1890 in which they would feel safe and secure from the brutal Muslim aggression and implaccable enemies of civil society holding rights and values in contempt and to ransom through the construction of their own state. In the wake of Bread Movement the demand snow - balled into a new perspective and dimension when the Muslim majority was incited and harnessed to throttle the political right to dissent and protest and stonewall the Kashmiri Pandit mobilisation to champion their economic demands through generation of obscurantist and communal scenario. Now that the community as a whole has been expelled and externed by the forces of militarized Islam flaunting bigotry and myopic perspectives homeland demand is the apt response that hews close to the cause. As per the situation obtaining homeland demand is neither a dream nor a fall-back option; in reality it is the first choice, an effective political initiative and is to be pursued for hundred years with firm resolve and forceful vigour. Homeland demand is the crystal ball in which KPs are gazing the ruptures and continuities between their past and future.

In the post-independence era that began with Nehru's "tryst with destiny" the Kashmiri Pandits as a matter of policy and communal vengeance were put on the hit-list of the governments of all shades and hues. Blatant communal policies and measures were conceived and executed to sideline them from decision-making bodies and governance structures. Communal quotas were fixed in education to rob them of educational opportunities and attainments. Employment, postings and promotions were communalized to incredible limits. Quality, brilliance and academic affluence were cruelly sacrificed at the altar of quantity, gross mediocrity and academic poverty. The Muslim pre-eminence in all sectors of administrative governance was rapidly achieved through blatant violation and transgression of the legitimate rights and privileges of ethnic and religious groups not subscribing to the faith of Islam. To achieve the sinister objective of undiluted Muslim sway and precedence fraudulent manipulations were effected, irrational measures devised, communal directives issued and sectarian preferences unabashedly flaunted. All norms were violated and normlessness thus created was stuck to as a norm. To cap it all, posh Muslim localities abuzz with glitz and glamour were arbitrarily categorized as backward and stinking slums inhabited by Pandits as posh and developed areas to deprive them of a tap or a good paved - lane and other educational benefits. Remorseless and relentless purge of Kashmiri Pandits as the state policy many brilliant sons of the soil seeking jobs and admissions in government sponsored study programmes on the firm footing of merit and achievements were brazenly conveyed the whisper that they could shift to greener pastures outside Kashmir in India leaving Kashmir to Muslims. This policy-path was blazed by no less a person than Sheikh Abdullah, who was a prisoner of ghettoised mentality.

On the false and misconceived paradigm of backwardness and poverty blatant communalism was practiced to ease out contenders with remarkable academic records and achievements. To Islamise the services an unheard of practice was taken a resort to. Two seniority lists on the model of two-nation theory, one for Muslims and the other for Hindus, were prepared and duly recognised and considered for promotions. Not satisfied even with this cruel communal practice leading to the extreme polarization of the two communities what the rulers did was to destroy records, tamper and manipulate them. Restless to grab all levers of power for a bigger game-plan of secession the Muslim rulers declared as redundant the entrenched principle of upward mobility through normal processes and established channels for the Muslims, and devised and designed all means and methods of artifice, deceit and cunning to destabilise and marginalise the Pandits who as kafirs at war were to be reduced to the hewers of wood and drawers of water. The democratic and secular character of the state apparatus was metamorphosed into an Islamic mould to cater to and foster the Muslim interests. The measure of labelling 90% Muslim population of the valley as backward and poor and 10% population of Kashmiri Pandits, Sikhs, other Hindus even of Dogra origin as creamy layer caused surprise at all levels of Judiciary. A particular justice of the Apex Court was said to have remarked that it would have been better for the state government to declare 10% Hindus also as backward and poor. A backward class organisation with Saif-ud-din Soz as its kingpin was formed to coerce the Kashmiri Pandits not to pester for the implementation of Supreme Court orders which had quashed all promotions on the absurd rationale of backwardness and poverty.

Since 1947 when the messiahs of responsible government came to power rule of law as pillar of justice was sung out with the last requiem. It was banished for good from the land of Kashmir and shown absolute contempt and derision and was never allowed to prevail with its full sway and sovereignty. As a matter of result a new era of subjection and subjugation, denial and deprivation, fear and insecurity, persecution and oppression began for the Kashmiri Pandits as a minority.

The "New Kashmir Manifesto" as an egalitarian and secular document was maliciously distorted to restructure and reorganise the entire state into a political system which openly betrayed a bias and partiality for the Muslims. The package of concessions and privileges followed by incessant flow of such packages showered on Muslims as a special breed of people have not flowed from the sources in constitution but from the religion that they harboured. Under the guise of communal amity, equality and opening up of opportunities for the under-dogs the governments from time to time in complete disregard of the constitutional principles of right to equality before law and safe-guard against discrimination on religious grounds promoted the cause of Muslims leaving diverse ethnic and religious communities high and dry, neglected and detested.304

Land reforms implemented with vengefulness against the Kashmiri Pandits proved as a prelude to their death and destruction. They were not effected to usher in an egalitarian socio-economic dispensation with the objective of founding a rational, sane and democratic society. As a weapon of destabilization thousands of Kashmiri Pandits were forced to migrate to various parts of India for a pittance as a result of economic squeeze and denial of rehabilitation opportunities. The National Conference rulers with ample resources of cunning and fraud figmented the idea of the appeasement of Muslim peasantry especially the richer sections through land reforms so that they belt wooed and enticed, nay bribed, to vote for National Conference in case a plebiscite under a foreign agency was held. The land reforms shabbily implemented with least ideological commitments to the restructuring of the entire politico-economic system on radical lines led to the creation and spawning of a class of Muslim kulaks who have emerged as the bastions of Muslim reaction and secession and as the mainstay of the detestable ideology and politics of Jammaat-i-Islami. In the form of a protracted war waged on the Pandits the said-reforms injected communal venom and virus into the average sections of Muslim peasantry. The 1989 - fundamentalist insurgency has drawn maximum recruits and vigorous support from the Muslim novo-rich of the rural areas who were offered land in a platter without paying a pie.

Conspiracies were hatched at governmental level to dispossess the Hindus of the industries which they had established through the mobilization of their capital and entrepreneurial resources. The Muslim workers in such industries were provoked for strikes and lock-outs thereby providing a handle to the plotters to interfere for fruitification of their designs. The match factory in Baramulla as an enterprise of a Hindu was grabbed when the Muslim labourers in the factory disrupted the productive processes through strikes and lock-outs at the behest of their Muslim masters. The Woollen Mills in Srinagar again as venture of a Hindu was put to the same orgy of labour trouble, throttling and lock-outs. The owner Divas coerced to hand over the factory to the government for a trice. The Pandits thick in the silk trade owned many a silk-weaving unit and under the guide-lines of the same conspiracy were ejected out of the industry through generation of communal rivalries, withdraw al of government patronage and starvation of raw-materials.

As a matter of reality all political regimes under the tight -leash of fundamentalist Muslims not only stoked and fostered Muslim communalism but pioneered measures and devices to snuff out the Kashmiri Pandit minority. It was subjected to unprecedented black-mail and intimidation. It was not only disenfranchised but its population figures were clandestinely manipulated and consciously suppressed. The constituencies where the community could assert and exercise its unfettered political rights were fragmented and Jerrymandered thereby divesting it of the right to elect a single legislator to reflect its yearnings and aspirations, grouses and grievances. As an essential part of Islamisation campaign the names of six hundred towns and villages rooted in the Hindu stream of culture were slated off through the imposition of unrelated Arabic and Persian names. Unable to transcend the narrow confines of Muslim conference politics and sunk in picayune and orthodox views Sheikh Abdullah launched frontal attacks on Pandits as his bete noir in 1978 and 1982 for the fact that he deemed in them a potential impediment to the Islamisation as part of total game-plan of pan-Islamism which he had been feeding and directing since his take-over in 1975. He set the trend for and reinforced the Muslim model of elimination of Pandits when he fascistically commanded his Hindu Minister from Jammu region not to recruit them in state level services and with a view to blotting out the community he mobilised and garnered the campaign for marginalisation of the Pandits from Central services on the twin planks of religion and population ratio and the same campaign was picked up by his minions and proxies who carried it to a logical end.

The Kashmiri Pandits thus disinherited by the Muslim politicals in their land of birth were assaulted and their residential and business premises invariabley looted and plundered mostly on days connected with events in the Muslim world especially Pakistan. The religious places of Pandits were the main targets and therefore ravaged and arsoned. A storm of hatred and vengeance was unleashed against them blaming and holding them responsible for a sell-out of Kashmir to India. The 1986 Muslim aggression on the minority, planned and pre-meditated, marked the tail-end of the total destabilization campaign and strategy.

The protection and safe-guards meant for ethnic and religious minorities as a meaningful practice pursued all over the world has no lessons for the Kashmiri brand of Muslim rulers who sadistically usurped the democratic rights and privileges of the Pandit minority. In India which is broadly wedded to democracy and secularism there is a duly constituted Minority Commission monitoring the rights and grievances of Muslims in particular even though the Muslims in fulfilment of their demand had their chunk of land at the time of partition. But in the state of Jammu and Kashmir where under the facade of secular constitution a Muslim state has been created with fundings from Government of India. There have been no safeguards and protective umbrellas for the minority and what has been astounding that all protections and safeguards have been culled and harnessed to fortify the Muslim interests by throwing secular ideals, democratic values and constitutional tenets to winds. Nor are there any operative channels that could envisage and ensure the full participation of the minority in over-all functioning of the politico-economic system and nation-building activities and processes. The Hindu minorities curiously dubbed as "amaanat"- trust, not valued as citizens with the same democratic rights and guarantees that have been enshrined in the Republican Constitution were squeezed, harassed, intimidated and finally liquidated grabbing not only the political and economic cake to feed the insatiable Muslim dianasaur but also their lands, properties and houses.

After the legal accession of the state to the Indian union was formalised Sheikh Abdullah vigorously and assertively sought for special status on the grounds of Muslim majority character of the state thereby protecting and subserving the Muslim interests of hegemonism and majoritarianism. But the congress leadership under the siege of Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru bartered away the vital concerns and interests of minority groups by placing them at the whims and tender mercies of Muslim majority which under no circumstances can ward off the pull of Islamic ethos of persecuting and oppressing the minorities not pinning their faith in Islam. In absence of political and constitutional guarantees with a heightened emphasis on the right to live and live with safety and an effective mechanism for their implementation Kashmiri Pandits were pushed out to the peripheries of the political and economic scenario, oppressed and persecuted, bereft and deprived, hounded and hunted.

How wrong was Pt. Prem Nath Bazaz when he in his communication to Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote that the native Pandits should not press for political and constitutional guarantees and safety valves as an effective shield against Muslim aggression and blatant trespass on and into their rights and privileges. In his response to Pt. Bazaz Nehru with the political sagacity of a Fabian socialist dittoed to the dot what Bazaz had communicated to him apropos political and economic safeguards and guarantees ignoring Muslim cultural model brazen in its contempt of a liberal frame allowing and ensuring the blooming of hundred flowers. Both Nehru and Bazaz despite tremendous signals from the changed political scenario in the wake of 1953-developments could not envision a moment in history when Kashmiri Pandits rooted in their commitments to the national unity, integrity and security would emerge as targets of gun and grenade for the Muslim majority for not committing themselves to the consorting with the Muslim majority for the agenda set by Islam heading towards militarization. Both of them were not perceptive in their historical evaluation of Islam with the result that they anchored their unflinching faith in the view that the Muslim majority despite the Hinduised Islam would perennially harbour goodwill and accommodation unto the Kashmiri Pandit minority and there would be no distortions and aberrations in the over-all ethos when ephemeral idealism in face of Islamic imperatives would get dimmed and quenched out. That Rule of Law was the frame upon which Justice hangs as the only guarantee against Muslim onslaught would be undermined and given a hamhanded and cosmetic treatment was not visualised by the brightest literatti of the period.

Despite persecution and discrimination Kashmiri Pandits played indisputably a frontal role in modernization of Kashmir and harnessed their mental and intellectual resources and initiatives to reconstruct the infrastructural foundations for a vibrant democratic order as part of mainstream politics. To dispel the darkness of illiteracy and backwardness as inhibiting factors forestalling any significant social change they invested their honest endeavours and resourceful energies to expand the network of universal education by encompassing the broad sections of Muslim society that had maintained distance from the light of education. Modernity and rationalism were what they disseminated for the establishment of a sane society, dynamic and buoyant comprising of the individuals cast in the mould of higher values adding charm and meaning to human life. Though the Muslim vested interests in tandem with religious lobbies had etched them as Muslim foes on the Muslim mindscape yet they reposed full faith in and were never repugnant to the democratic order and its sanctified institutions supposed to guarantee their maximum participation in the nation-building processes.

But unfortunately the carefully nurtured Muslimisation of total layers of state apparatus leading to the erosion of secular ideals and democratic principles shattered their cherished dream of basic freedoms, fundamental rights, unfettered opportunities for flowering and more than most security of life and assets from all manner of religion inspired vandalism and barbarity. They have been betrayed by the Muslims who were thick in the conspiracy that was brewed in the mosques and madrasas for their extermination and are harbouring genuine feelings of hurt, disillusionment and disenchantment. With the inaugural of Muslim terrorism the Kashmiri Pandits were reviled, humiliated, brutalised and slaughtered and to their utter shock and dismay Muslims suffered a total failure in sanity and rationality and were swayed by the waves of bigotry and hatred which emanated from the mushrooming mosques when in a typical boatman s fashion loud drums about the inaugural of insurgency were fiercely beaten threatening the kafirs to quit and vacate the land of Kashmir for an immediate Muslim take-over and consolidation.

The state government under the helmsmanship of Farooq Abdullah, traitorously simulating paralysis as an act of complicity failed to rise to the occasion to meet the challenges posed by the devastating forces of terrorism through flexing the powerful muscles of state power. The Kashmiri Pandits undergoing carnage and horror were first betrayed by his government which abdicated its moral and constitutional obligation to provide security to the victims under siege of Muslims gone berserk and added to their saga of disaster by virtual perishment from the scene. The undeniable fact is that his government was in the warm lap of Muslim conspirators and was fiddling when Rome was burning. The central Government is equally a culprit and cannot divest itself of the fair share of responsibility that it had in the brutalization and elimination processes that were wreaked on the Kashmiri Pandit minority. The trials and travails of the patriotic community that had assumed menacing proportions since 1975-Accord with Sheikh Abdullah were not monitored and measured and taken as ominous signals Wintering to an impending disaster with far-reaching consequences for the national security. To the consternation of nationalistic and patriotic forces the central government with a Muslim Home Minister having lubricated and stained his hands with the blood of Hindu minority in a panic reaction to douse the fires of insurgency absorbed Muslims in droves in Central Government institutions through extra-constitutional channels by flouting and effacing norms and stipulations thereby completing the unholy task of Muslimisation of the valley.

As a cover up operation for the communal and fundamentalist character of the so-called freedom struggle a virile campaign of disinformation was launched against the Kashmiri Pandits not only to malign them but paint them in the blackest hues. The canard that their exodus was touted by Jagmohan, the then Governor of J&K State, was floated, given widest possible currency inside and outside the country to conceal the forced exodus and communal carnage of the Hindu minority. The web of malicious canards as an instant product included the strands that Kashmiri Pandits as artful people had cornered and usurped maximum state and central government jobs which as a source of anger and irritation had impelled the Muslim youth to cross the borders and take to the gun culture and the Pandits through their merit and achievements, cunning and manipulation would usurp all trades, professions, educational institutions and government jobs in Jammu and elsewhere"'. As a spill-over effect of the villainous campaign the forced-out employees were not suitably adjusted, the scholars of the community who had abandoned portals of their educational institutions under severe terrorist threat were not enrolled in regular colleges in Jammu and elsewhere, the unemployeds were denied employment and the professionals belonging to varied fields made to vegetate and lose their acquired skills through dis-use. The strategy was to keep the cross-section of Kashmiri Pandit refugee population in panic, stress and on tenter-hooks lest they should organise and consolidate their numbers for a political act of demolishing and dismantling the decadent and moribund political culture of the country immured to drown and annihilate the patriotic people for the appeasement and pampering of Muslim rebels against national integrity and solidarity.

In galut and Diaspora the Kashmiri Pandits in a bird's eye view of themselves and their chequered history of persecution and massacre have come to realise the prime importance of asserting their political rights to a homeland in Kashmir where they will be free to conceive and construct a socio-political structure in tune with their cherished goals and lofty ideals with least interference and interruption from Muslim schizophrenia, backwardness and parochialism. The active political opinion that has emerged out of protracted deliberations, debates and polemics was crytallised in the Homeland Resolution adopted by Panun Kashmir in the Margdarshan convention held in December, 1991.

The Homeland Resolution Interalia demands:

a) The establishment of a homeland for the Kashmiri Hindus in Kashmir valley comprising the regions of the valley to the east and north of river Jhelum.

b) That the constitution of India be made applicable in letter and spirit in this "Homeland" in order to ensure right to life, liberty, freedom of expression and faith, equality and rule of law.

c) That the homeland be placed under Central administration with a Union Territory status so that. it evolves its own economic and political infrastructure.

d) That all the seven lakh Kashmiri Hindus which include those who have been driven out of Kashmir in the past and yearn to return to their homeland and those who were forced to leave on account of the terrorist violence in Kashmir be settled in the homeland on equitable basis with dignity and honour.

Kashmiri Pandits through the concept and content of Homeland Resolution underscored the crying realities that they have been deprived of a homeland and their generations are facing a precarious and perilous future and the double-edged sword of Islamic communalism and Diaspora has exposed their community to degenerating experiences of deprivation, insecurity, depression and estrangement. The historic Resolution clinically analyses their prevailing position of insignificance and non-entity to which they have been reduced and are bartered as sacrificial goats and disposable commodity and more than most are on cross-roads and have ceased to be the citizens of their own state and the country as they have lost the protective shield of fundamental rights and other constitutional guarantees which virtually sustained them through the post-independence era of denial, discrimination, subjugation and blatant religious persecution. The 1989-exodus grave in nature and formidable in scale has shaken them to roots as it was a reenactment of their tryst with Muslim ferocity and bigotry in contemporary Kashmir which political managers claim to be a part and parcel of India wedded to democracy and governed by a sovereign constitution.

The political scenario in Kashmir has undergone a seachange by the replacement of normal political culture even though tainted by unhealthy Muslim domination and precedence by a new breed of Muslim terrorists who are avowedly for the elimination and decimation of the Kashmiri Pandit minority through the ushering in of Islamic sociopolitical structures envisaging imposition of Jazia (poll-tax) and disenfranchisement as its well-defined stipulations for the non-Muslim minorities. Terrorism has not only led to their exodus from their birth-land but has also diminished and nearly sealed their chances for a safe return to their native homes which have been brutally destructed and disfigured through acts of abysmal vandalism. A minuscule minority scattered all over the valley where their cultural presence too has been effaced out does not see any cogency and logic in living the same fashion in their scattered clusters as they lived prior to their exodus and that is how they are face to face with a grim reality and cannot like ostriches go on pinning faith in the shattered myths of secularism and coexistence. The only star that they gaze at is a homeland where they can unify and galvanise into a force of resistance against the terrorist onslaught and brutalities.

Catholic and modernistic in outlook, upwardly mobile and defiant of communal curbs, Kashmiri Pandits refuse to live in a socio-political dispensation, which has been the creation of politicians who are self-servers and in face of their political failures they wield the stick of Islam and to upgrade their popularity graph they resort to rabble-rousing for plebiscite and myth of autonomy and swayed by whims of vacillation and dreams of sultanate they spurt out venomous sputum against Kashmiri Pandits and back in the seat of power they initiate subversion and swear allegiance to the forces of insurgency and in honest confessions they nonchalantly spill the beans that they had dispatched National Conference activists across the borders for arms training and strategic guidance. The Kashmiri Pandits abhor and detest the socio-political order dominated by such dishonest and dubious politicians who are deft and artful in double-speak and hypocrisy and can stoop to abysmal depths of moral eclipse in diverting the Muslim frenzy against the minority by blaming them for the ills they are responsible for and for the failures in nation-building processes they have pooh-poohed and never viewed from angles positive. Kashmiri Pandits refuse to chain themselves to a system which is alienated and isolated from the currents and cross-currents in the country through building of political barriers to cater to their needs of bigotry, parochialism and religious schism. They uphold and subscribe to a world - view and work-culture which do not cage and stifle their faculties and creative impulses in the straitjacket of cosmic hatred and obscurantism and are votaries of healthy and wholesome trajectory of growth and development for stupendous successes and glittering attainments. Nizam-e-Mustafa projected as the Islamic destination as replacement of the sovereignty of Indian Constitution is an anathema to Kashmiri Pandits who are wedded to liberalism, fairness, equity and egalitarian societal structures and feel, therefore, forced to carve out a niche for themselves.

The Kashmiri Pandits refuse to tether themselves to a system which is wallowing in the shades of medieval darkness and is shamelessly devoted to the Muslim commune' interests and in the process bares its fangs of bigotry and communalism and as a part of Muslim conspiracy suddenly collapses to a heap of mangled material under the weight of propaganda shit blurred out by Pakistan and avidly lapped by the Muslims. It is a system which has lost its human face and where wise counsels failed to prevail, harmony and co-existence could not bloom and good-will and tolerance were a far cry.

Kashmiri Pandits as an educated and cultured community and by all parameters poor but civilised section of Kashmiri society have been for a vibrant and democratic society which they helped to take birth and shape out in its broad features and contours through the spread of literacy levels for temper formation and value enhancement. By introducing the Muslims to the language primers and initiating them in 3 R's the Kashmiri Pandits despite religious differences and world-view variations humanised and aculturised them for a new constructive role in world and life drama and equipped them with new cultivated ideas and ingenuities, perceptions and awakened creativities. But tragically the advance that they had registered on their intellectual slates previously not so unclean and medieval for leading an emancipated life on a higher plane of values, surely not Islamic, was reversed and rubbed off by swashbucklers and dot-busters who dressed their destructive plans under religious garb and religious terminology resulting in their eclipse and death on 19th/20th January,

1990. Common sense took an immediate retreat. Rationality developed a tumour. Hallucination was at its high noon. That what was taught to them by their detestable teachers as nebulous appeared shaping into the form of reasonable credibility. New hopes even though dim and amorphous made them frenetically feverish and hysterical. With loss of discretion "Azadi" and "annexation with Pakistan" started twinkling like twinkling stars and what was worse they lent their vociferous support to the barbarous acts and ignominous lechery which startled if not the world but the Pandits on the scene. It was a culture shock to Pandits who failed to reconcile to the enveloping darkness and marched out to establish their own claims and rights to an El Dorado in the valley which they have lovingly nomenclatured as 'homeland' stipulated to be free and liberal in theme and concept excluding those myopics, parochials and fanatics responsible for death of reason and crucifixion of an ethos. Azadi-seeking and Pakistan-dreaming Muslims have fortified the Kashmiri Pandit determination and resolve to establish their prior rights to their ancestral homeland which will be a scintillating model of liberalism, democracy, humanism and culture suffused with the vitalising spirit of Indian Constitution.

The Kashmiri Pandits are justifiably apprehensive of the Constitutional changes that are sought to fortify the state agamst the currents and cross-currents of the mainstream life of the country. The pre-1953 status of the state in theory and praxis keeps the state outside the purview and pale of the Indian Constitution. The constitutional provisos of the fundamental rights, citizenship rights, jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, Directive Principles of the state policy et al were not applicable to the state on the plea that these were not listed in the Instrument of Accession. The incorporation of Art. 370 misnomer as an enabling provision but actually as an article of limitations constitutionally cognised the Muslim character of the state thereby rendering diverse ethnic and religious groups to the status of subjugation and servility in a Muslim state. It is an indisputable fact that Art. 370 has generated and unleashed the negative alchemy for separatism, divisive forces, parochial trends and Muslim majoritarianism and has limited the sovereignty of the Indian constitution thereby facilitating the push-over of the state into the vortex of terrorism and insurgency. The cunning politicals inside and outside the corridors of power have exploited the said-Article to the hilt as an instrument of black-mail to which the central power in the capital has been constantly succumbing through its reiteration of continued support despite it being a weapon of Muslim reaction and fundamentalism. In its basics the Homeland Resolution is bitter in its opposition to the Article 370 which is primarily responsible for the banishment and uprooting of Kashmiri Pandits. The homeland as envisaged by the Pandits will be unflinching in its faithfulness and fealty to the country and its fundamental concerns and will emerge as an oasis of democracy and humanism in the desert of Muslim insurgency and terrorism. It will have full flow of Indian constitution and will not be put to limitations and mutilations, restrictions and trimmings to feed Muslim insularity based on religious bias.

The Homeland Resolution is the product of the failure of the secular experiment in the valley. Despite attempts to camouflage the ground realities in Kashmir the facts speak that Kashmir has degraded into a wild Muslim ghetto, it is being governed by the Muslim terrorists and their cohorts through their writs and fatwas and it is the Islamic law that is enjoying precedence and supremacy and more than most Kashmir has emerged as a theocratic state which is being funded and guarded on its frontiers by Government of India. The people of India who appear to have been manipulated through propaganda engineering have belatedly come to realise the secular experiment meeting its disaster in Kashmir. Even Nehru himself was sceptical about the success of his experiment which had floundered on the Indian plane but was giving it another trial in Kashmir. In his letter to P.N. Bazaz he writes," The real problem in Kashmir is whether it continues as a secular state as the rest of India or not. This affects the whole of India because secularism in India also has not got such a firm foundation as I would like it to have. Anything happening in Kashmir will undoubtedly affect the rest of India with its vast Muslim population." In such an uncertain and menacing situation when Kashmir is already in the Jaws of Muslim communalists the Kashmiri Pandits have asserted their rights and claims to the homeland in valley wherein democracy and catholicity with thrive and flower for the deviants to emulate. If Melapuram in Kerala was carved out for Muslims to thrive and expand, why can't homeland in Kashmir be carved out for Kashmiri Hindus to thrive and expand? Homeland emerges as an imperative to retain as much of area as is possible with a view to consolidating all humanistic and democratic forces who are willing to settle in it for patriotic considerations and demands. Homeland will emerge as a pocket of stiff resistance, not as a pocket of compromise and acquiescence, against the Muslim frenzy that has been let loose to realise another partition.

The Homeland Resolution envisages in unequivocal terms that the Kashmiri Pandits with their firm commitments to the doctrine of live and let live and social unity cannot accept to live in a state which is governed by Muslim preceptors openly preaching and propagating intolerance and religious hegemony. As bitter enemies of religious fanaticism and myopic perspectives they abhor the Muslim majoritarianism which fetters freedoms and shackles opportunities for growth and development on religious grounds. They detest that state which is riddled with fanatics and enemy agents at every step of the total structure assigned the role-model of decimating the remnants of the land of learning and wisdom that Kashmir once was long ago. Kashmir is not Kashmir if it is denuded of Kashmiri Pandits who are a vital link between the past and present of Kashmir. The opinion that has been floated by the Mushm vested interests and picked up at many levels that Kashmiri Pandits can be sacrificed and murdered to retain Kashmir is lacking in political sanity and prudence. Kashmir without Kashmiri Pandits is virtual acceptance of its status as a Muslim state and another partition of the country with a deferred date.

The Homeland Resolution sums up:

They (Kashmiri Pandits) have not reacted to Muslim communalism, instead they have faced the rigours of Muslim dominance with the fervent hope that the thrust on universal education and the scientific progress in the state would pave way for the full flow of democratic thought, recognition of human rights, the genuine urges and aspirations of Kashmiri Hindu minorities, religious tolerance, equity and justice. This hope is now shattered. Neither his Muslim brethren in Kashmir nor the Indian Government which swears by secularism came to the rescue of Kashmiri Hindus at the time when they were butchered and hounded out of their homes and hearths, nor at this moment when they have been uprooted and thrown into wilderness to face a life and death struggle for survival. All the constitutional guarantees for the protection of their limb, life, property, their status and dignity have been trampled with impunity Kashmiri Pandits have as much right to live in Kashmir as any other religious group.

The Kashmiri Pandits faced with the Muslim tyrannical order were neglected and hurled into the backwaters of Kashmir political scenario which fact is conceded by a highly partisan writer like Gautam Navlakha. He writes, "It goes without saying that the absence of a clearcut policy towards non-Muslims is a shortcoming of the political leadership in Kashmir. It has seldom bothered to go beyond the generalities, which only assuage the insecurity felt by Kashmiri Pandits."

As a result of intensified vilification campaign against Kashmiri Pandits and politically sponsored blatant communal aggression launched upon them, a Jewish anthoropoligist Isaac Shamoun was obliged to remark:

"This community is suppressed to the extent that its dignity as human beings is disfigured and its personality debased making the community its worst enemy. Only such a community deserves to be lifted upto the level of proud and dignified human beings.

As a response to the banishment and externment of the entire community the Homeland demand puts, "Because of their equal rights to the land of their birth they stake their claim to be an equal partner to any future deliberations in the process of normalization and ultimate solution of the problems."