Review By Harsimran Kaur
Why today Kashmir has become the honeysuckle of ‘International profiteering’?
It has for, Auld Lang Syne, and even today become a profiterole touching the tongue; the taste often a farrago of inconceivable entrenchment and precarious profligacy.
What is the Kashmir Issue? Bilaterally lodged between India and Pakistan, is it a sacred vow to let the apocalyptic past sniggle as the Machiavellian beast? Or political profanity inching the gallows for the antithetical has placed ‘Kashmir’ over the barrel. The hard-bitten truths lie in the shadow disinterring in the most ignominious ways; the truth now swims in a dewlap of extrapolations, to become an incendiary issue of conflict—a casus belli for the India-Pakistan priggishness.
One often asks:
- Why ‘Kashmir’ always remained a disreputable dredge?
- The carnivalesque of its beauty, the passerine of exuberant floral arpeggio is frequently savaged by fusillades of impolitic scrutiny. Who are these demagogues? And, who were those extortionists who tried to rip Kashmir of its constitutional carapsse?
- If the religious-political strife was not enough during the British dominion, leading to massacres and impugned battlements, what was the new derivative by the British that made Kashmir their cloud cuckoo land?
The triumphant blow of horns burling ‘freedom melodies’ on August 15, 1947 still had an imperceptible knot to be untied—the paramouncy of ‘The Princely States’ left to grind their own juice. What followed was a coup de maître by Patel, Menon and Nehru; a concerted effort to not let go off ‘Kashmir’ to the Pakistan’s cloak and dagger.
Polemics followed; what could have been an Independent sovereign state all by itself was now under the sheltering carapace of the Indian dominion. A cliffhanger for the world; a cock & bull story for the cloistered United Nations and a British contrive gone wrong, ‘The Kashmir issue’ became a cortege of conflagrated disagreements, and the people of state hanging like a naked wire from the dysfunctional socket.
There have been numerous books on the ‘Kashmir fiasco’, however, ‘Unravelling the Kashmir Knot’ by Aman Hingorani opens a crevasse of the British perfidy—The British saved the ‘Jinnah Jocose’ from the Indian National Congress and Jinnah saved the British from being the lonely lamprey; quod erat demonstrandum. A condescending concupiscence for power, the author expounds if Kashmir become a consommé of ‘Nehru’s impressionistic fervors’ or could have been the quid pro quo by the Muslim League to let British harness their political ambitions.
Amidst the bloody pogroms and mutilated conscience, the British came out as the cold Mackerel. What was Kashmir to them? –an unruly forbidden state that could be strategically and politically maneuvered to curb the Soviet expansion and thereby sustain their own interest in the Middle East & the Gulf! The British and their self-exculpating desires!! To them, Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan would be a bloom of resplendent flowers, the fragrance of which the British wanted to manipulate as a pyrrhic scent.
What we see through now at Present?
- The pernickety Pakistan with its iridescent claim on Kashmir.
- India trying to find an equipoise; the matters of the past still hangs as a prevaricate; plebiscite that never happened though ‘Nehru’ was the coxswain to take the ‘people pique’ to the United Nations.
- The tribal invasion in 1947 after partition was shameful; the thunder of acrimony teased the occupants of Kashmir. What was left for them? Inevitable set-backs and calumnies, irreversible and implacable.
Loud and clear, the book states FACTS!
- If the British indulged in political chicanery of letting the ‘Princely States’ decide for themselves, incogitant that Kashmir would eventually land in Pakistan, it all turned out to be a damp squib! Have you ever seen a coelenterate jelly fish crawling to go along the currents? The prejudiced and penitent British swam to their own shores with no bone of remorse.
- Were British hinting at another GREAT GAME? Wasn’t accession of Kashmir to Pakistan and the ‘two-nation theory’ a rendition to Britain’s GAME of using Afghanistan to restrict Russian advances in Central Asia in the 19th century?
Although the two dramas unfolded asynchronously, the result was an incendiary issue of political & religious unrest; time and again condescending as apparition energy.
The ‘British Statues’ conjured up, leaving both India and Pakistan with an astigmatism, contorting their idea of ‘freedom’. ‘What goes where’ was like cutting the scalpel into the flesh’. The instrument of accession was moistured, humidified to exfoliate the bedeviled rambunctious patterns. To think of, was the asperity of the British for all the schadenfreude at the expense of the Princely States?
‘Kashmir’ then blown in the cauldron of ‘angst’ and ‘aberration’; a hard-boiled plan to form ‘Azad Kashmir’ and persuade Nehru to bring the ‘Pakistan aggression’ under the aegis of the United Nations.
Contemporaneously, the book also looks for solutions. There are many questions that find resonance to the current imbroglio in Kashmir;
- Is it possible to put an end to the territorial invasion by extremist or a slugfest to capture the hill mound will always result in a faux pass?
- If Article 370 provided ‘Kashmir’ with a special status, are we trying to disregard the ‘Document of Accession’ duly signed by the then Maharaja Hari Singh? Was Article 370 incorporated to end the political squall; or it lead to an ‘identity fandango’ that now fibrillates in ambivalence?
Can the International Court of Justice disempower crude politicized cesspool in ‘Kashmir’?
Can we today think of ‘Kashmir’ as an independent entity? What did partition do to its political stability that it became an abattoir in the hands of Pakistan, and in resolute though India took the reign in its hands albeit could not bring in denouncement with a comprehensible logic?
The cotyledon of Kashmir thus became a mare’s nest and now is a marionette to suit one’s political contrivance and religious revivalism.
Nehru’s Indian Nationalism vs. Abdullah’s Kashmiri Nationalism still has its penetration in Kashmir. As Nehru rightly said,
“Kashmir would be finished if it had to join one dominion and thereby incur the enmity of the other”.
TAKE AWAY
BOLD NOTES ON BELEAGURED KASHMIR!