Witch-hunt in IOK

India claims to be the world's largest democracy - a democracy fully soaked in Gandhian socio-cultural and ethnic coexistence. But how that claim plays out in today's India, let us hear Bashir Ahmed, a Kashmiri trader in Patna. "They raised slogans. I didn't even know about the Pulwama attack then. But they destroyed the goods and beat me and the workers". He was talking about the saffron-shirted Hindutva extremists who are having a field day against ethnic Kashmiris in today's India. If lynching Muslims by the cow-protection vigilantes was order of the day last year thrashing Kashmiris is in vogue now. Be the Kashmiris students, professionals, or traders they are liable to receive punishment as 'reward' for the deadly suicide attack by a Kashmiri youth on a paramilitary convoy resulting in the killing of some 40 Indian paramilitary soldiers on Jammu-Srinagar highway last month. (Was New Delhi in picture as to what was going to happen at Pulwama? An answer for this profound question is for another day.) No doubt there are a few voices in India condemning violence against Kashmiris. But more loudly heard are the voices that call for cleansing India of Muslims, and this call comes from high offices as well as from so-called independent sources in media and civil society. "Skip sundry lynching and go for large-scale violence instead", was the call a day after the Pulwama by the CEO of rightwing website OpIndia. Justifying violence against two Kashmiri fruit sellers in Lucknow, the other day a top Vishwa Hindu Dal (VHD) leader Ambuj Nigam said "why we should tolerate them when Kashmiris pelt stones at our soldiers and wave the Pakistani flag". Such calls have been made even from high offices, as was the case of a state governor who called upon Indians to stop using water of rivers that flow in from Kashmir. Perhaps, a less punitive campaign would not have provoked even the pro-India former chief minister, Omar Abdullah, to ask New Delhi why all this against residents of the so-called "atoot ang".
What is happening to ethnic Kashmiris in India should not happen, but if history is any guide it does. To shift blame of their defeat on external front, a sitting leadership may well accuse a section of his own people of subversion. The Nazis put blame on the resident Jews for Germany's defeat in the World War I, and subjected them to the Holocaust. For minorities in India, particularly the ethnic Kashmiris, the Nazis of today are the goons nurtured by rightwing extremist outfits like Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Bajrang and Vishwa Hindu Dal. And no wonder, they go unpunished - because that kind of mindset had earned electoral victory for the Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It is highly unlikely that the Modi government would give up on anti-Kashmiri witch-hunting anytime before elections in May. On the other hand, it is likely all the more that the BJP would persevere in that mode now that India has suffered a spectacular debacle in clash with Pakistan.
There may a few faint voices condemning anti-Kashmiri campaign from within, it is for the international community, particularly the United Nations, to show up at the scene and oblige New Delhi to give up on its policy of hunting and hounding the Kashmiris who happen to be in India. Unfortunately, so far, the United Nations has done nothing in crass negation of its own resolutions upholding Kashmiris right of self-determination. And not very different is the case of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), which met the other day in Abu Dhabi to hear what Shasma Swaraj thinks of Islam. There may be speeches and resolutions supporting the Kashmiris' struggle for freedom, but all of it appears to be sheer cosmetic because there is nothing in terms of action and delivery. Let it be so, because no freedom movement of the scale we have now in Indian-Held Kashmir ever lost to use of extreme force. The Algerians won against major power France and the Vietnamese against superpower America. The Kashmiris' struggle has now graduated to the second and final stage, from which there would be no turning back. It must succeed.