It’s Jammu vs Kashmir --- finally

Arvind Lavakare

Arvind Lavakare may be 71, but the fire in his belly burns stronger than in many people half his age. The economics post-graduate worked with the Reserve Bank of India and several private and public sector companies before retiring in 1997. His first love, however, remains sports. An accredited cricket umpire in Mumbai, he has reported and commented on cricket matches for newspapers, Doordarshan and AIR. Lavakare has also been regularly writing on politics since 1997, and published a monograph, The Truth About Article 370, in 2005. When several of our mainline English dailies recently splashed what they thought was the novel headline, “Jammu vs Kashmir”, on account of the unprecedented angst and anger in the Jammu region of J & K state over the denial of land to the Amarnath Shrine Board, I was amused. Jammu shutdown extended till Aug 31 I was amused because as many as seven years and 11 months ago a major web portal had posted an article of mine bearing the headline “It could finally be Jammu vs Kashmir”. My forecast then was not based on astrology or prescience but on a study of the past agonies of Jammu that had run over into the present. And study is something that current bred of “Breaking News” journalists hardly do, if at all. UN monitoring Kashmir situation It did not require meticulous research, but just some serious reading, to know that Jammu’s troubles had begun soon after the monarch of J & K, Maharaja Hari Singh, from the Dogra community of Jammu, chose to sign his princely state’s accession to India, rather than to Pakistan, in October 1947 under the British Parliament’s Indian Independence Act, 1947. The troubles emanated from Sheikh Abdullah, the towering National Conference leader from the predominantly Muslim populated Kashmir Valley, who, for reasons as yet unclear, was the pet of Jawaharlal Nehru, our first Prime Minster among several Congress ones who believed that the Hindu community was a danger to free India. It was just a matter of time therefore that Nehru coerced Maharaja Hari Singh to hand over the reins of the J&K state to the interim government of Sheikh Abdullah and his National Conference Party --- the first time that Muslims, not Hindus, became the rulers in J&K.