Of Human Rights and Human Rightists                                                                                                            Home
Maharaj K. Kaul
(July 2009)

Kuldip Nayar, journalist and India’s High Commissioner to U.K. in 1990 recalls Mufti Mohammed Sayeed asking him in 1990, “Is there no Tarkunde for the Kashmiris?” [Restoring Rights by Kuldip Nayar, in the Hindu, November 25, 2002]. V.M. Tarkunde was a retired judge of Mumbai High Court who was also the Chairman of Citizens for Democracy, a human rights group. Mufti Sayeed was at that time the Home Minister of India in the V.P. Singh government.

Sayeed was apparently upset by the tough policies of Governor Jagmohan, his own appointee, who had found the administration in Kashmir paralyzed from fear and subversion when he assumed office in January 1990. Militancy and terrorist killings had increased many fold and the government was in disarray. Ironically, it was Sayeed, the commander of India’s law and order agency, who had contributed, in a significant way, to the chaos and killings in the Valley that made the state’s response inevitable.

A few months earlier on December 8, 1989, Sayeed’s daughter, Rubaiya Sayeed had been kidnapped by JKLF terrorists who held her hostage till their jailed comrades were released. The leader of the plot to kidnap Rubaiya was Yasin Malik, today’s ‘secular’ darling of India’s pseudo–leftists and liberals. A demand was made through a telephone call to Kashmir Times, Jammu based paper sympathetic to the terrorists, to release five JKLF terrorists in exchange for Rubaiya’s release failing which the girl would be killed. The five included Abdul Hamid Sheikh, an area commander of JKLF, and Ghulam Nabi Butt, younger brother of Maqbool Butt who had been convicted of murder and executed a few years earlier. Farooq Abdullah who was the Chief Minister was, as usual, away in London. When he returned, he met Sayeed and Prime Minister V.P. Singh who asked that the five JKLF terrorists be released to secure Rubaiya’s freedom as demanded by the kidnappers. Farooq declined the request pending consultations with his staff. In Srinagar, Farooq learnt that the kidnappers were bluffing and would not harm Rubaiya. He refused to meet the kidnappers’ demands but facing pressure from the Home Minister Mufti Syeed, the Prime Minister V.P. Singh, Foreign Minister I.K. Gujral, Cabinet Secretary T.N. Seshan, the five terrorists were released.

Here was the Home Minster of India caught between his personal loyalty to the family on one hand and loyalty to the country on the other. In this personal conflict he chose to abandon his responsibility of preserving country’s law and order by succumbing to the terrorists’ demands. The most honorable option for him would have been to resign his post and let others handle the kidnapping case. This is exactly what his colleague, Energy Minister Arif Mohammed Khan had advised him but Sayeed had refused. The consequence of his actions caused the loss of many lives immediately after but he seemed unabashedly unruffled. Instead he was asking Nayar to investigate the state’s firm response to an emboldened JKLF’s increased terrorist activities. This was not the only black spot in Mufti Sayeed’s political career. He also has the notorious distinction of being responsible for the first communal violence in the Valley after 1947, that took place in Anantnag in 1986. Fortunately no lives were lost then and the situation had quickly returned to normal due to prompt government response. The closet Islamist, Mufti Sayeed, is also infamous for bringing the Ghulam Nabi Azad headed state government down in 2008 on an invented controversy of Amarnath Yatra management, raising the communal fever in the state by many notches.

Ironically, it was Jagmohan’s head which rolled after Kashmir violence escalated rather than that of Mufti, the real villain of the early Kashmir drama.

Soon after Mufti Sayeed’s conversation with Nayar, a team headed by V.M. Tarkunde representing People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Citizens for Democracy, Radical Humanist Association and Manav Ekta Abhiyan descended on Kashmir to report on the situation there. The team visited Srinagar, Jammu and Anantnag in March 1990. Their Report on Kashmir Situation by the team was released in late April 1990.

Comparing the report with another one prepared three years later by Indian People’s Human Rights Commission (IPHRC) on the Bombay riots of 1992-93, the report is kindergarten stuff, devoid of any thoroughness or objectivity and swayed by what they wanted to hear. The Bombay report prepared by Justice S.M. Daud and Justice H. Suresh of the IPHRC, on the contrary, is a meticulously prepared document of painstaking data collection, corroboration of evidence and statistical analysis. The Kashmir report seems to have been prepared to justify the conclusions which its authors had already in mind. The objectives seem to have been to vilify Governor Jagmohan, demonize the minority victims of communal terror and romanticize Kashmiri Muslims as idyllic peace-loving citizens oozing with Kashmiriyat and devoid of any communal feelings whatsoever.

One of the more serious canards given legitimacy and currency by the report was that Kashmiri Pandits were “evacuated under a conspiracy to communalize the situation in the valley and outside too” and that “Jagmohan Administration was creating panic among Pandits that there was going to be a massive house hunting in combing operations of Pro-Pak militants, that Security forces will have to shoot down offenders and in such a melee it will be impossible to distinguish between Pandits and Muslims.” Not even one Pandit, tens of thousands of who were languishing in Jammu camps, was reported to have been interviewed by this august body of high profiled Indians to find out from them why they had left the Valley. Not even one!

Four years later another group of human rightists – Women’s Initiative -- made up of four ‘feminists’ from Mumbai – produced another report in which they portrayed Kashmiri Pandits in camps as greedy, selfish and insensitive people. The self-styled feminist authors of this report went so far as to justify, albeit implicitly, obscurantism and fundamentalism amongst Islamist women’s organizations in Kashmir.

“After the arrival of Jagmohan, about two lakh Kashmiri Pandits were evacuated overnight,” said the Report by these ‘feminists’, “Many people – teachers, doctors, neighbors – told us how the forces escorted the Pandits using military vehicles to move their luggage.” And this during curfew hours! “This was done so that Muslims could be killed without Hindus getting hurt,’ said a journalist bitterly.”

Over two hundred thousand Kashmiri Pandits evacuated overnight with military escort in the dead of winter! This Himalayan falsification continues to this day and has taken many colors. A ‘leftist’ once asked the author if it wasn’t true that Governor Jagmohan had arranged special trains to evacuate Kashmiri Pandits, completely unaware of the fact that the Valley did not have any railways! Fifteen years after this canard was spread, another journalist from Mumbai responds to a letter from a Kashmiri Pandit in Asian Age in the following words:

“the Pandits’ plight is not only the doing of the militants. Besides, the Kashmiri Pandits cannot be called refugees because they chose to leave. And in that they had governmental support. As recently reported, Mr. Jagmohan, as governor of Jammu and Kashmir, helped the Pandits to leave the Valley. He even gave them air tickets and provided them with transport, and organized financial help. … From 1947 to 1989, the Pandits had pretty much say in government matters. They are mainly professionals, not artisans or small businessmen. They have a great deal of support from abroad.”   (Asian Age, June 20, 2005) 

So the Pandits chose to leave and they were even given air tickets by Jagmohan – over two lakhs of them! And for their plight, they are themselves to blame because of the heinous crime they have committed – they are professionals, not artisans or small businessmen! There is no shame left with these people.

Kashmiri Pandits left the Valley because they were the first victims of fundamentalist terror initiated by JKLF, and then by other jihadi organizations which mushroomed in the Valley within months. People left in the middle of night with minimal household belongings because they had received threatening telephone calls, or because there had been inquiries about them from unknown persons, or because a threatening note from one of the many terrorist organizations was posted on their doors or because their Hindu neighbor had been killed. People left in trucks, taxis or buses and the exodus continued for months. By November 1990 almost 40,000 families had left almost cleansing the Kashmir of its largest minority.

Those who did stay back paid for their mistake with their lives. The worst massacres took place in the rural areas such as Wandhama on January 25, 1998 where 23 people were gunned down, and at Nadimarg on March 24, 2003 where 24 people including two children, twelve women were mowed down by about a dozen terrorists. There were scores of other gory massacres between 1993 and 2003 by which time there was hardly any trace of Kashmiri Pandits left in the Valley except in very small pockets.

Many of the early killings have been documented in Manoj Joshi’s book, The Lost Rebellion: Kashmir in the Nineties.

On January 19, 1990, the same day Governor Jagmohan assumed office, almost all mosques in Srinagar broadcast taped messages from loudspeakers continuously without a break for three days. Some of these messages and others spread through newspapers and posters in the valley during early 1990 were

Kashmir mein agar rahna haiIf you want to live in Kashmir
All-O-Akbar kahna hai            Say Allah-O-Akbar (Allah is Great)

Yahan kya chalega        What will rule here?
Nizam-e-Mustafa            Islamic rule.

Musalmano Jago, Kafiro Bago         Wake up Muslims, Run away infidels
Jehad aa raha hai           Jehad is coming.

Azadi ka matlab kya      What does Freedom mean?
La Illaha Illal Allah          Islam.

Pakistan se rishta kya    What is our relation to Pakistan?
La Illaha Illal Allah          Islam.

Asi Gachhi Pakistan       We want Pakistan
Batao ros ta bataneo saan      With Hindu women but without Hindu men
(in Kashmiri)

This was the announcement of much heralded Azadi of JKLF fondly talked of by Indian liberals and pseudo-leftists who ascribe to this organization all kinds of virtues, amongst them their ‘secularism.’ The JKLF has yet to produce a political, social and economic program for a free Kashmir other than Nizam-e-Mustafa! The only record they have is that of kidnapping, rape and murder. Yet, its present leader has been elevated by Indian liberals to the status of Gandhi!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A word about Governor Jagmohan, much maligned by the ‘secular’ intellectual terrorists. In his 1990 appointment as Governor, Jagmohan faced a extremely onerous task of restoring an effective civil administration to Jammu & Kashmir, an administration which had been paralysed by subversion and fear. It was a tough task and Jagmohan handled it the way he believed was right. But the escalation of protests and violence and an unsympathetic Center led to his scapegoating. The same person had been appointed Governor on March 7, 1986 under Governor’s rule and he was much admired by the people of the state for his competence and fairness. His popularity was so widespread that Muslim women in Srinagar sang his praises as part of contemporary folklore (wanwun). Farooq Abdullah, his political adversary, was so impressed with his achievements during his short tenure that he publicly stated in Jagmohan’s presence that the Governor “has the right to pull his ears if he made a mistake.” The same Abdullah admitted years after 1990 that the Governor’s reported encouragement and support to the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits was a myth despite the fact that he was a virulent opponent of Jagmohan when his government was dismissed in 1990.