Prof Hari Om
On October 24, the Conservative Party of UK, which misgoverned, looted, drained and exploited India for 200 years; destroyed India socially, culturally, religiously, economically and politically; created among Indians a class of collaborators through Lord Macaulay’s atrocious education policy; went on perpetrating barbarities on the patriotic Indians and mercilessly torturing, lynching, killing and hanging them on a daily basis; and changed the political map of India in collaboration with its India-based lackeys, created a history of sorts. That day, almost 200 Conservative MPs supported the candidature of Rishi Sunak of Indian origin for the top executive post of UK, post of Prime Minister. They swung solidly behind Sunak not because he’s a devout Sanatani or an ardent worshipper of Bhagwan Krishna and cow but because of his merit and his spectacular performance as UK’s Chief Secretary to the Treasury and UK’s Chancellor of Exchequer (Finance Minister) between 2019 and 2022.
What the Conservative Party did was an internal affair of the party as well as UK, notwithstanding the fact that Rishi Sunak was a practicing Sanatani. Of course, the landmark decision of the Conservative Party to select a practicing Sanatani is UK PM led to jubilations across India for reasons not really difficult to fathom. After all, UK had converted India into its colony and did what it did to India and Indians, especially the Hindus, for 200 years and Sunak will occupy 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the British PM since centuries, on October 28.
It bears recalling that it was on March 28, 1892 that the then Under Secretary of State for India Lord GN Curzon, who later became Viceroy of India, dismissed the Indians as voiceless millions. Opposing the bill seeking introduction of elective principle in India in the House of Commons, imperialist Curzon, inter-alia, had said: “The people of India are voiceless millions. They are not universally aware that the English are in their country as rulers. The people of India are ryots and peasants, whose life is not one of political aspiration but one of mute penury and toil”. In other words, Curzon contemptuously dismissed the Indians as mere British subjects not fit for any say whatsoever in the administration and governance of and law-making processes in their own country. Such was the nature of the British contempt for the Indians, especially Hindus, who and whose religion and culture were at the receiving end since the seventh century. No wonder then that the Sanatanis in India took the elevation of Rishi Sunak to the post of UK PM as a great moment.
Sadly, however, a number of India-based leaders, including senior Congress leaders and former Union Ministers P Chidambaram and Shashi Throor, used the rise of Rishi Sunak on the political horizon of UK as a tool to question India and its political system and tried to create a nasty narrative that India was ill-treating the minorities, especially Muslims, and the majority community has been ruling the roost in India. They conveniently overlooked the fact that three Muslims – Zakir Hussain, Fakhrudin Ali Ahmad and APJ Abul Kalam — rose to become the Union President; Hamid Ansari served as VP and chairman of RS for 12 years; Manmohan Singh, a Sikh migrant from Pakistan, served as Indian PM for 10 long years; AK Antony, a Christian, served as Defence Minister for years; Salman Khurshid served as Minister for External Affairs and Preneet Kaur (Sikh) and E Ahmad of Muslim League as MoS in MEA; Syed Akbaruddin served as spokesperson of MEA for years; PJ Kurian (Christian) and K Rehman Khan as deputy chairman of RS; Altamas Kabir served as Chief Justice of India; Goolam Essaji Vahanvati served as Attorney General of India; Syed Asif Ibrahim served as Director Intelligence Bureau etc etc. They also ignored the fact that AR Antulay, Barkatullah Khan. Abdul Gafoor and Anwara Taimur were chief ministers of the overwhelming Hindu-majority states of Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Bihar and Assam, respectively.
In the Union Territory of J&K, Peoples Democratic Party chief, an ardent believer in the concepts of self-rule, demilitarization, Indo-Pak joint-control over J&K, porous borders and dual currency and former J&K CM Mehbooba Mufti, whose father – Mufti Sayeed– served both as Union Home Minister and J&K CM twice, and National Conference, protagonist of greater autonomy, bordering on virtual sovereignty, also took the plunge and denounced PM Narendra Modi, of course, without naming him for making invidious distinctions between Hindus and Muslims. Mehbooba Mufti was more critical and her tweet read like this: “Proud moment that UK will have its first Indian origin PM. While all of India rightly celebrates, it would serve us well to remember that while UK has accepted an ethnic minority member as its PM, we are still shackled by divisive & discriminatory laws like NRC & CAA”.
It would be only appropriate to catalogue here some of the instances to lay ware the disparities between what Mehbooba Mufti and all others of her ilk, without any exception, in Kashmir said and did in J&K between October 26, 1947 and June 2018. They never considered J&K an integral part of India. They considered Kashmiri Muslims a race apart. They considered only discriminatory Article 35A, seditious Article 370, separate J&K constitution and separate J&K flag “secular” and Indian Constitution, Indian Laws and Indian Institutions “rightwing” and “anti-Kashmir”. They converted Jammu and Ladakh into Kashmir’s two colonies and rendered the people of these two provinces unreal and ineffective for all practical purposes. They consistently dubbed all the non-Kashmiris, including Hindu-Sikh refugees from Pakistan languishing in Jammu since 1947 and members of Valmiki Samaj and Gorkhas living in Jammu since decades, as foreigners and denied them even the basic civil and democratic rights, including the right to own property. They consistently dubbed the Indian Army as occupying forces. They converted Kashmir, which was once 100% Hindu, into 100% non-Hindu in January 1990. They, including Farooq Abdullah’s brother Mustafa Kamal, openly said that “J&K is a Muslim-majority state and the CM of J&K has to be a Muslim”. All the Wazir-e-Azams/CMs of J&K between 1948 and June 2018 were non-Hindus from Kashmir and they all belonged to one particular religious sect. They all converted the Civil Secretariat, the seat of Government, into a one-region and one-community institution and in a most brazen manner. They rigorously excluded Jammu and Ladakh from all sectors, including the vital service and engineering and medical education sectors. This can be seen from the fact that the number of Kashmiri employees is over 4 lakh out of over 5 lakh; the rate of unemployment in Jammu is over 69% as against less than 30% in Kashmir; and the number of students from Jammu province in the technical and professional institutions is not even 30%. They left no stone unturned to change Jammu’s demography, particularly after 1996, when the NC again recaptured state power. They settled almost one lakh Rohingyas and Bangladeshis at strategic locations in and around Jammu city to create a Kashmir-like situation with a view to causing non-Muslim migration. The memory of what the Mehbooba Mufti government did in Jammu on February 14, 2018 to further change the Jammu’s demography is too fresh to be forgotten. That day, she openly encouraged certain sections to occupy the state and forest lands in Jammu, Kathua, Samba and Udhampur districts and directed the police and revenue magistracy to not disturb those who would illegally occupy the state and forest lands. They consistently batted for Pakistan, China and subversives in Kashmir. The memory of what they said after the abrogation of Article 35A and Article 370 still lingers in the nation’s mind. They had said that they would take back these Articles with the support of China.
Not just this, they opposed tooth and nail the recommendations of the new delimitation commission despite the fact that it gave more representation to Kashmir (47 seats) as compared to 43 seats to Jammu. They dismissed this recommendation plus creation of 6 more seats in Jammu as deliberate attempts of the Narendra Modi Government to change Kashmir’s demography. They opposed tooth and nail the inclusion of non-Kashmiris in the voters’ lists, dismissed them as aliens and termed their inclusion in the voters’ lists a sinister conspiracy.
But these constitute only a few of the several such examples which only serve to expose Mehbooba Mufti and others of her ilk in Kashmir; which expose their nasty and flawed concepts of India and on India, ethnic minorities, secularism, diversity, pluralism, democracy, state, nation, sovereignty, borders and the Indian defence machine. Sadly, the “secular” governments in Delhi always sided with these Kashmiri leaders. It was only from June 2018 that the Narendra Modi Government started stemming the rot and it has to do much much more to end the menace of separatism and communalism in Kashmir. It’s a matter of satisfaction that the now-awakened-nation and sections of objective mainstream media have been tearing into those who are shamelessly striving to use the rise of Rishi Sunak in UK as a tool to defame India and hurt the majority community by communalizing everything.
