N. P. Upadhyaya, Kathmandu: His primary job and political function was to champion the cause(s) of New Delhi establishment on Kashmir.
Undoubtedly, Dr. Farooq Abdullah from the very beginning of his political career remained a ‘pro-establishment’ personality and he was not ashamed at all of his inclination.
Dr. Abdullah was the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir and even was inducted in the Union Cabinet as a minister for New and Renewable Energy.
It is said that he maintained a stoic silence when PM Modi abruptly changed the status of Kashmir on August 5, 2019.
It was a day when the people of Kashmir were hurt, but Dr. Abdullah had taken it in a normal manner only to come to his senses some time later.
Dr. Abdullah was with Pundit J. N. Nehru and his ties with PM Modi too continued unabated until Hindutva gang Chief PM Modi pulled the carpet from under his old feet.
Obviously, the Indian Congress proved to be more lenient towards Abdullah, however, the anti-Muslim gang of four distanced itself with the tilted Kashmiri political animal.
The dominant political party in India after the partition was the Indian national Congress which used to pick or lift a few selected vocal and popular Muslim leader(s) from among the saleable Kashmiris and Dr. Abdullah was the one among the teeming millions of the Kashmiris to have ever obeyed to the Delhi dictates on the Kashmir issue. Clever Abdullah remained ever in the good book of the Indian national congress.
However, with the advent of the Bharatiya Janta party practicing the RSS ideology in 2014 in the Indian establishment controlled by Prime Minister Modi (the heir apparent of the RSS ideology), the Muslim leaders of the sort of Dr. Abdulla refrained to entertain pro-Indian establishment Kashmiri-Muslims.
The BJP-RSS combine government led by fanatic Modi instead began to suppress the so called Kashmiri leaders having establishment bend, for example, like Dr. Abdullah and the Kashmiri lady political personality Mehbooba Mufti.
With the arrival of Modi in India, Kashmir has lost “Isaniyat, Jamhooriyat and Kashmiriat”, Dr. Abdullah stamped while talking to Karan Thapar last month end.
PM Modi almost hinted these two Kashmiri political stalwarts that their days have gone in Kashmir and Kashmir will henceforth be run under the whims of the Gang of four led by PM Modi himself.
Nehru had promised Kashmiri people that, “The fate of the State of Jammu and Kashmir is ultimately to be decided by the people. The pledge we have given, not only to the people of Kashmir, but also to the world”.
It was this Nehru pledge made then around the time of the annexation of Kashmir that had assuringly pleased Dr.
Abdullah who believed that Nehru and his successors will in all likelihood remain true to the pledge.
Dr. Abdullah kept on expecting the pledge taking a formal shape and in the process the Kashmiri politician wasted some good seven decades.
The pledge remained a pledge. And across the border Pakistan for all along these seven decades kept on championing the cause of Kashmir.
Apart from the Nehruvian commitment on Kashmir, there are numerous United Nations Security Council, UNSC, passed resolutions which guarantee the right of self-determination to the poor Kashmiris.
Finally, when PM Modi whipped the Kashmiri population including Dr. F. Abdullah then the old political veteran came to senses.
The August 5, 2019 steps taken by the Indian establishment brought Dr. Abdullah back from his day dreaming exercise.
And now the same Dr. Abdullah regrets and says that “he too should have complied with the way M. A Jinnah opted at time of the partition” and further emphatically opines that “Jinnah was right”.
Needless to say, Dr. Abdullah expressed his inner pain while talking to Karan Thapar, the WIRE, and ventilated in a roundabout manner of his political follies made in the past.
The pro- Delhi establishment political persona, Dr. Abdullah now says that he summarily failed to understand and visualize that the Hindu political personalities under the “secular” mask would twist the Nehruvian pledge to the extent that Kashmir is crying today out of Indian act of brutality and oppression. .
To boot, India’s occupying forces outnumber the Kashmiri population.
Each and every streets and lanes too are heavily patrolled by the Indian soldiers in Kashmir.
The terrified, the caged, the oppressed and the tormented Kashmiris including Dr. Abdullah remained inside the biggest open air prison that has Kashmir become after the ‘unilateral’ steps taken by PM Modi and his Hindutva gang.
Dr. Abdullah was released in March from eight months long detention.
Dr. Abdullah has thus reasons to lament that encouraged him to admit that “Jinnah was right”.
Dr. Abdullah being the son of the Kashmiri soil perhaps may have better analyzed when he frankly admitted that Jinnah was right when he lobbied for the creation of Pakistan and time permitting Jinnah finally created Pakistan which stands tall among the comity of the nations.
But the question arises as why it took some seven decades for Dr. Abdullah to understand that Jinnah would prove himself to be right by asking for a separate State?
Is it that Dr. Abdullah took time to extract benefits from the Delhi establishment?
Or is it that Dr. Abdullah was cheating his compatriots and fellowmen for all along past seven decades as against his personal political gains?
“Kashmiris don’t feel they are Indian; would rather prefer being ruled by China”, is what Dr.
Farooq Abdullah had said to Karan Thapar, September 24, 2020.
This statement explains the inner pains of the Kashmiris.
The Kashmiri political man much ahead of his talk with Karan Thapar had already talked many a things on Kashmir on August 21, 2020, while talking to the NDTV, India wherein he said the following:
# I met the prime minister a day before the abrogation, he gave us no indication. When I met him, he didn’t say anything. We had no idea at all. It just came out of the blue.
# we were wonderstruck and I got to know only when I was told that I cannot go out any more. What did we do that we are put under home arrest?
We have always stood for the nation.
# this is the tragedy of the government of the day that they call the people who stand with the nation, separatists.
#I couldn’t get out of the door of my house. I had to beg to them when I needed to see a dentist, when I wanted to get my eyes checked. My phone lines were all cut. The only thing I had was a TV.
Being a member of the parliament, I am supposed to have a phone. I was (treated) like a criminal.
# Well, I would be glad if honorable retired judges could come and see whether Kashmiris have been brought closer or taken away from the nation. Yashwant Singh and Rahul Gandhi’s delegations
were sent back but they let their EU puppets visit Jammu and Kashmir. This is not Gandhi’s India.
More recently, Dr. Abdullah, the National Conference (NC) president October 6, 2020 said the objectives of peace, economic progress and development in Jammu and Kashmir cannot be achieved unless the Centre reverses all the decisions taken on August 5 last year, reports Press Trust of India.
This veteran pro-establishment politician at times is on record to have said that the Indian government is best advised to talk to Pakistan in order to sort out the Kashmir imbroglio for all time to come.
He talks sense.
Last month, to be precise on September 19, while speaking in Indian Parliament for the first time since his release from detention from the largest Jail in the world, the National Conference president and MP Farooq Abdullah advocated talks with Pakistan, saying that if India can talk to China to defuse their border row, it can also speak to its other neighbor to deal with the situation at Jammu and Kashmir borders.
But the Indian establishment under the fanatic Hindu leader PM Modi summarily dumps such propositions and claims on the contrary that “Kashmir is an internal matter for India”.
But the fact is that troubled Kashmir issue is an internationally recognized “disputed territory” so the Indian claims of internal matter stands null and void.
The Deccan Herald dated September 25 very pleasingly justified to what Dr.
Abdullah had said to Karan Thapar in the interview. The DC Says, “the reality in Kashmir today is exactly as he says it is. This is on account of the fact that after it ended Kashmir’s constitutional autonomy on the false pretext that this was encouraging terrorism and hindering development, the ruling dispensation put thousands in jail in Kashmir, including politicians of mainstream parties who waved the flag for India, unflinching in the face of terrorist attacks and assassination bids. There is no stabilizing center left in the Valley now, thanks to communal fanaticism being propagated, and this is a matter of the deepest worry”.
The international observers who have been watching the plight of the Kashmiri population from day one of the occupation by the Indian military forces now openly claim that with Dr. Abdullah’s blunt assertion (mentioned above) while talking to Karan Thapar of the WIRE, it is now evident that the veteran political animal of Kashmir may have also “summarized the significant change in the public mindset in the valley” and that the Kashmiri pain under the Indian occupation is so intense and claustrophobic that the Kashmiri people enmasse wish to be “governed” by the arch rival of their own country-China.
Dr. Abdullah’s unsharpened statement reiterated at time of the interview with Thapar should be an eye opener for those in Delhi establishment which implied that the Kashmir problems are not an “internal matter” of the Indian regime but instead it is an international issue to be sorted immediately by the UN System.
The oppression inside Kashmir is so high in India-occupied Kashmir that the people living in the India’s open air jail prefer now to be ruled by the Chinese regime instead of Delhi.
That India is not that friendly with its minorities such as Muslims, the Hindu dalits, Parsis, Buddhists, Christians, the Sikhs and the Jains remain no longer a secret now.
India’s Islamophobia has internationally been deplored and condemned, however, the countries championing the cause of the minorities have so far miserably failed in screwing the Indian fanatic
Hindutva regime inspired by the RSS ideology-the brain child of the Nazi creed.
India’s latest chapter of minority oppression resulted in the violent deaths of two young Dalit Women from Hathras, Uttar Pradesh ruled by yet another rigid Hindu Chief Minister Aditya Nath Yogi of Nepali origin.
Upper caste Hindus of India use violence to assert their authority over social and religious minorities.
The ultimate idea is to declare India a Hindu Nation (Rastra) by 2024. This theory is being vocally advanced by BJP Scholar Subramanian Swamy as well.
Professor Swami claims that India is already a Hindu Rashtra.
The minority Muslims and the Dalits are the real targets.
The Muslims had the worst days in India during the Delhi riot early this year.
The Trump administration may have intimate ties with the expansionist Indian regime and may not prefer to impose sanctions on India, however, some independent organisations/institutions in the US may not necessarily support the Indian establishment for its excessive oppression of the minorities mentioned above.
A comprehensive report dated September 19, 2020, from the US has emerged which claims that at least “Fourteen US senators have signed onto a letter asking the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to consider the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF)’s recommendation to designate India a Country of Particular Concern (CPC). The senators went on to demand that “targeted sanctions” be imposed against Indian agencies and officials responsible for escalating religious intolerance and violence, foreign media reported”.
The term Country of Particular Concern (CPC) is designated only when a country’s treatment to its minority citizens exceeds the limits of brutality and cruelty which is how the Indian regime is treating with its minority citizens.
When enough had been enough, the US Commission for International Religious Freedom, USCIRF, has urged the US Secretary of State to impose stringent sanctions on India ruled by the RSS-BJP combine headed by Prime Minister Modi.
According to USCIRF, violations of the religious freedom rights of minorities have reached a level that India should be considered amongst the world’s worst violators. With a special note on India, the Commission has recommended that the US government should, among others:
#urge the BJP leadership to denounce RSS militancy that supports violence and discrimination;
#make clear its concern to the BJP-led government that virulent nationalist rhetoric is fueling an atmosphere in which perpetrators believe they can attack religious minorities with impunity;
#persistently press the Indian government to pursue perpetrators of violent acts that target members of minority religious groups.
The letter to secretary Pompeo, primarily endorsed by the Coalition to Stop Genocide in India (CSGI), has been signed by ten Republican senators and four Democratic senators, requesting the US Secretary of State that in case the Government decides not to accept the recommendations by United States Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), it must inform its reason in the US Congress within a period of 30 days.
So this is how India is perceived by the US senators both from Republicans and the Democrats.
But will India’s arrogant and the Hindu supremacist government comply with what the US senators have demanded through their appeals to Mike Pompeo?
Nevertheless, India this time has been hit hard by Dr. Abdullah and the far flung US senators. Pressure is being built on India for sure. That’s all.