JAMMU: Former J and K BJP Vice-President and Political Advisor Prof Hari Om on Wednesday told Prime Minister Narendra Modi that the term Kashmiriyat was not in vogue in J&K and elsewhere in India before 1975 and that it was coined only in Jammu by a Jammu-based commentator and NC functionary in 1976 to mislead the nation by giving it to understand that the then NC president and J&K CM Sheikh Abdullah was a secularist of secularists and Kashmiri Muslims highly tolerant people.
He was reacting to the PM Modi’s Tuesday Katra statement: “People of J&K had enormous faith in Atal Bihari Vajpayee…Very few leaders commanded such respect…He used to say ‘Insaniyat, Kashmiriyat and Jamhooriyat are key to progress of J&K’. We have to take the state to new heights through these pillars”.
Prof Hari Om said that the Katra statement of PM Modi on Kashmiriyat didn’t go well with the people of Jammu and added that the Dogras of Jammu had taken it to mean a taunt and deliberate insult.
“There is no reference to the term Kashmiriyat either in any piece of Kashmiri literature or in any history book that was produced before 1975,” asserted Prof Hari Om, who is also former Head of Jammu University’s History Department. He urged PM Modi to revisit Kashmir pre-1975 to see for himself that the term Kashmiriyat was not in vogue anywhere in Kashmir.
Prof Hari also revealed that he had asked Nirmal Singh, presently Dy CM, not to incorporate the term Kashmiriyat in the agenda of alliance, saying that “Kashmiriyat means Kashmiri Muslim sub-nationalism, intolerance and exclusion and persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, including Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Shiite Muslims” and that the “incorporation of the term Kashmiriyat in the agenda of alliance would be simply cause an affront to the self-respect of the Dogras of Jammu”. Nirmal Singh had rung Prof Hari Om up from Delhi in February 2015 to know what exactly “Kashmiriyat means?” “Nirmal Singh told Prof Hari Om that “it is not possible not to incorporate the term Kashmiriyat in the agenda of alliance”.
Appreciating his compulsion, Prof Hari Om then asked Nirmal Singh to “see to it that the terms all-embracing and liberal Dogariyat and Ladakhiyat are incorporated in the under-preparation agenda of alliance in case the party high command, at the behest of pro-self-rule PDP insisted on incorporating the term Kashmiriyat in the agenda of alliance,” but even this suggestion of the former J&K BJP vice-president was not accepted.
Prof Hari Om made another startling revelation. He said “he had also asked Nirmal Singh not to incorporate the terms of (non-existent) Chenab Valley and Pir Panjal region Valley in the agenda of alliance”, saying “the incorporation of these terms in the agenda of alliance would only help anti-Jammu forces in the Valley to dismember Jammu province and set up Greater Kashmir comprising the almost 100-per cent Muslim Kashmir and those areas of Jammu province where the Muslims were somewhat more numerous”. He bemoaned that even this suggestion of his was rejected by those who drafted and finalised the sinister agenda of alliance.
Prof Hari Om said that he made these revelations only to set the record straight and inform the people of Jammu province and Ladakh region and the nation as a whole that the intentions of the BJP high command were not pious as far as the people of Jammu were concerned despite the fact that it was they who returned 25 BJP candidates to the J&K Legislative Assembly.
“Why has been the BJP punishing and taunting the people of Jammu province?’, he asked, and added that the only crime that they committed was that they voted for the BJP ignoring its anti-Jammu stand on the February 2002 Farooq Abdullah government-moved amendment to the Constitution that banned delimitation of the assembly constituencies for at least three and half decades or at least till 2035. All the eight BJP MLAs had supported the anti-Jammu and anti-democratic amendment, asserted Prof Hari Om, adding that Himachal Pradesh CM Prem Kumar Dhumal did acknowledge this fact while addressing an election rally in the Jammu’s Raipur-Domana assembly constituency in 2008.
Prof Hari Om expressed the hope that PM Modi would revise his opinion on Kashmiriyat and direct the BJP not to perpetrate more injustices on the patriotic people of Jammu province.