leftists at Jawaharlal Nehru University and elsewhere who favour self-determination for Kashmir must realise that if India loses that region, there will be wide-ranging consequences for Muslims across the country
On December 21, 2014, Ikhlas Ahmed aka Roosi was hanged along with three other convicts at Pakistan’s Faisalabad central jail for attempting to assassinate former President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf on December 15, 2003. Though General Musharraf survived the suicide attack on his motorcade, 14 people lost their lives.
Ikhlas Ahmed was called Roosi on account of his Russian mother who was also Kashmiri. His father, Akhlaq Ahmed, was a medical practitioner from Haripur (Pakistan-occupied Kashmir). Ikhlas Ahmed did not coordinate the attack or participate in it, but was engaged in a conspiracy to traduce some military personnel from their allegiance to the Government.
However, Ikhlas Ahmed’s execution was not deplored as a ‘judicial hanging’. Nobody organised a cultural evening or a protest rally. This may be due to one of the three reasons — there is no Jawaharlal Nehru University in Pakistan; there are no Brahmins left in the country so that the execution can be conveniently blamed on a ‘Brahmanic collective conscience’; the civil society and students are mature enough not to idolise a terror convict.
Indeed, there are certain things that happen only in India. A planned cultural evening to pay homage to Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru and terrorist Maqbool Bhat (dead for more than 30 years) poetically titled, ‘The country without a post office’, escalated into an anti-India, pro-Pakistan demonstration. The poster of the event specifically stated that it was ‘against the Brahmanical collective conscience’ and in solidarity with the Kashmiri people for their democratic right to self-determination.
Interestingly, among the organisers and sympathisers, this writer detected several Brahmins who are probably all leftists. It is quite possible that some of their forefathers had come from East Pakistan as Hindu refugees. Such people are excellent specimens of Islam’s useful idiots; they remind us of Iran’s leftist spectrum — the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, the Tudeh Party of Iran, the Fedayeen e-Khalq, the Komala Party and the Rahe Kargar. These parties had played a major role in the downfall of the Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi regime in 1979, thus contributing to the success of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution.
But these left parties also became the first political victims of the Islamic Republic. Many of their leaders fled to France, and some of them, more determined but less fortunate, were executed as political prisoners in 1988. While the world remembers Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie, it has forgotten his deadly fatwa, dated July 28, 1988, that led to wholesale extermination of political prisoners, mostly leftists.
The organisers of the event at JNU have made much out of the right to freedom of speech and expression. Such freedom is indeed guaranteed by the Constitution of India — the country immoderately abused in the slogans raised on the occasion. But Article 19(1) giving freedom in matter of speech, assembling, forming unions and moving throughout India also imposes reasonable restrictions on that right by Article 19(2).
Nothing challenging the sovereignty and integrity of the country and that is prejudicial to the security of the state can be peddled in the name of right to freedom of speech and expression. The students perhaps overlooked the fine print, that conditions apply to every constitutional right.
The organisers might feel that Kashmiris have the right to ‘self-determination’. I would not be surprised if most Kashmiris also feel like that. Some of them are radical Muslim and their antipathy towards Hindu-majority India is not unnatural. It is for this reason that Hindus (ie Kashmiri Pandits) were massacred in Kashmir during the 1980s. They realised that the allegiance of Kashmiri Pandits, will always be towards India.
Hindu gods were the first to disappear from Kashmir. Venerable temples were attacked and deities vanished or desecrated. Why did it happen in the ancient land of ShaivismIJ This is because Kashmiri Muslims defied their original collective self and decided to live by the tenets of a religion that came from Arabia. India is accused of militarily occupying Kashmir. But one should contemplate if Kashmir, the springhead of Indian spiritual tradition, is being occupied by an Arab imperialist ideology.
Any separation of Kashmir from India will have wide ranging repercussions on Muslims in India. If Kashmiris, despite enjoying Article 370, and disproportionate allocation of resources in their favour, choose to secede from India, it will undermine the position of the Muslims in the rest of the country. The separation of Kashmir can plunge India into serious communal trouble. Third-party leftist advocates must be wary of these things.