by NYLA ALI KHAN
Poster at a protest against the execution of Yakub Memon PHOTO/Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images/The Guardian
The increasing communalization of Indian politics is a juggernaut that seriously questions the myth of secularism in India, and the increasing religiosity in Pakistan is just as damaging. As a poignant reminder to the student of Indian history and subcontinental politics, I would like to point out that Jawaharlal Nehru observed in the Constituent Assembly of India that the greatest danger to India will not be from Muslim communalism but from Hindutva which could potentially become expansionist and communally belligerent.
The Kashmir imbroglio has worsened partly out of disillusionment that was generated by perceiving the hollowness of Indian secularism, partly out of the ignominy that Kashmiris felt in being tied to a government and a polity that is getting increasingly religionized, and partly out of the shallow Pakistani propaganda of Jihad. The insurgency in Kashmir grew into a low intensity warfare made lethal by the firepower of two nation-states. The backcloth has remained the same for the past several years, which is a recipe for disaster.
Some of the current problems in J & K can be traced to the surging Saffron wave in India. From the 1970s onwards, the effective generation in the Kashmir Valley came to be the new educated middle class which was witness not to the tremendous work of their predecessors toward communal amity traceable to hundreds of years of collective zeitgeist, but found themselves victims of unemployment and a decrepit infrastructure.
They were witnesses to the rising Saffron wave in India. They were witnesses to an All India Party struggling to capture power at the centre and foregrounding in their election manifesto their aim of demolishing a mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh. Kashmiri Muslims, getting central government jobs in a ratio not in proportion to their demographic percentage, compounded this feeling. I find it pertinent to point out that Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s arduous attempts to pull Kashmiri Muslims out of the morass of illiteracy and servility were misinterpreted as his communal and divisive politics. He would probably have been lauded for his efforts if he had been a revanchist member of the majority community.
Nyla Ali Khan is a visiting professor at the University of Oklahoma and can be reached at nylakhan@aol.com