When moderates bowed before the Jihadis

: Last week as Jammu and Kashmir boiled over and the Prime Minister called on all political parties to come together and help calm the fires of hatred and violence, I waited to hear one Kashmiri politician speak in a moderate voice. I listened to the speeches of the Abdullahs and the Muftis in the hope that one of them would say that the protests in Srinagar, that started the trouble, were wrong. I waited to hear one of them identify rumours spread by Kashmir’s jihadi groups as the root of the problem. Rumours so absurd they talked of a plot to change the demography of Kashmir if Hindu pilgrims were allowed to stay in temporary houses in Amarnath during the yatra. If one ‘moderate’ Kashmiri politician had denounced the rumours as dangerous lies the fire may have gone out before it spread.

Nobody did. And, last week at the Prime Minister’s meeting they added more fuel to the fire. Farooq Abdullah reportedly said he would sit at his father’s grave and ask if coming to India instead of Pakistan was a mistake for Kashmir. Mehmooda Mufti announced on every TV channel that if the road remained closed to Jammu then Kashmiris would look for other roads. Our painfully politically correct TV anchors did not dare ask her what she meant or whether it was not true that her party was part of the Kashmir Government when the land was allotted. The former governor of Jammu & Kashmir, Lt Gen (retd) S K Sinha, has taken every chance to point out that he cannot be blamed for a decision that was taken by the J&K Government, but nobody listened to him. It suited everyone to make him the villain of the story, to blame him for ‘spreading Hindutva’ by providing basic facilities to Hindu pilgrims.

We now have Hindu Jammu and Muslim Kashmir embroiled in a civil war and it is because we have not heard a moderate voice from Kashmiri politicians. Yasin Malik kidnapped Mehbooba Mufti’s sister in 1989 and with that act started the violent movement for azadi. Are Mehbooba and her father not slightly ashamed to be batting on his side today? When he was taken to hospital in enfeebled state because of his fast unto death he told TV reporters that he was doing this because Muslims were being persecuted in Jammu and there was an economic blockade that...

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