Opinion

Salahuddin And The Mob

All this mob lynching should stop. When a scuffle turns communal or when religion is del­iberately brought in to settle silly scores, it gets added to the national narrative...

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Salahuddin And The Mob
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The United States government’s decision to designate Syed Salahuddin as a global terrorist is a great victory for Indian diplomacy and the country’s pos­ition on Islamic secessionism in Jammu and Kashmir. Many Indian obs­ervers have always believed that it was US endorsement and moral support which helped Pakistan to sponsor Islamic separatism and keep pushing foreign mercenaries into Indian soil. Even the creation of the Hurriyat Conference in 1993 is attributed to the genius of the then US Assistant Secretary of State, Robin Raphel. All this when Prime Minister Narasimha Rao was assiduously realigning Indian diplomacy to embrace the US as an unequal partner. Now, for the US to stamp Salahuddin or Yousuf Shah, a homegrown militant from the Valley, as a global terrorist marks a dramatic turn in the Indo-US relations. It is undoubte­dly Modi’s moment of triumph.

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But is this enough to stamp out religious separatism in J&K? Sure, there is alw­ays a military solution to a militant uprising. Sri Lanka conclusively proved that it is possible for a determined State machinery to crush a terrorist army, however well-trained or well-armed. But there is an easier way out. Separatist militancy in Kashmir has not attained critical mass and there is no LTTE-like killing machine in the Valley yet. The stone-throwers and their cousins who take up arms can still be counselled. They can still be convinced that we are one nation. But there are some preconditions.

All this mob lynching in the name of the cow should stop. Forget about Kashmir, as a nation hurtling towards Mars and seeking out Mammon, we cannot afford to turn crowded local trains into communal cauldrons. There is no doubt that there are fights happening over seats everyday in our trains, and getting stabbed, beaten, raped or thrown out of moving trains isn’t something unheard of. But when a scuffle turns communal or when religion is del­iberately brought in to settle silly scores, it gets added to the national narrative. Then, we start losing the argument over religious secessionism.

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The success of a composite nation is the confidence of its minorities. Interestingly, in India almost everyone is in minority one way or the other. For instance, a north Indian is an alien of sorts in south India. A Marwari who had enriched his city can still be called an outsider in Calcutta. And the Gorkhas do not want Bangla to be imposed on them. Even in a village any caste group can be normally counted as a minority if you take all the other castes together. Religion is not the only key differentiating factor in our lives. In fact, the killer and the victim of Ballabhgarh would have had more in common with each other than with someone like me, a rice-eater who puts coconut oil in the fish curry and on my head.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a letter from a reader. He was a retired army officer talking about a boat ride he had on the Dal lake, soon after the first Indo-Pak war in 1947. The teenaged boatman was a Kashmiri who had lost his family to the murderous raiders unleashed by Pakistan to capture Kashmir, and his sole ambition in life was to become an Indian soldier. Even today, many Kashmiris want to join the pol­ice and the army. Let us not make them feel unwelcome to fight the forces of religious separatism. After the US decision on Salahuddin, there is no legitimacy for separatist militancy any longer on the world stage, unless we let the lynching go on.

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