Sankara Narayanan

Both the Congress and the RSS have one common trait: Indifference towards the Indian Muslims.

The Kashmir Files

In Jan 19, 1990, the Azaadi uprising in the Kashmir Valley led to the ethnic cleansing of an estimated 1,00,000 Kashmir Pandits. For some, this day heralded the rejection of Indian rule by protesting Kashmiris, followed by the bloody suppression of Kashmiri human rights by Indian forces (portrayed in the film ‘Haider’). For the Pandits, it heralded a reign of Muslim terror.

Official figures say 219 Pandits were killed in the valley. But the threat of violence was so great, and the chances of curbing it so remote, that Pandits fled. Most are still rotting in refugee camps in Jammu.

In 2015, an ex-general — also a Pandit — told journalist Swaminathan Aiyar that the Indian media had underplayed the tragedy of his tribe. Aiyar agreed, but added that the media has also ignored the earlier mass expulsion of Muslims from Jammu. This surprised the ex-general: I’ve never heard of that, he declared.

He is not alone. Although our media pride themselves on free and bold speech, they maintain a conspiracy of silence on some issues relating to the supposed “national interest.” This includes the mass killing and expulsion of lakhs of Muslims from Jammu in 1947.

The Jammu Files

Today, Jammu is a Hindu-majority area. But in 1947, it had a Muslim majority. The communal riots of 1947 fell most heavily on Jammu’s Muslims; lakhs fled into what became Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. That turned Jammu’s Muslim majority into a Hindu majority. In sheer scale, this far exceeded the ethnic cleansing of Pandits five decades later.

What was the death toll in the killing fields of Jammu? There are no official figures, so one has to go by the reports in the British press of that period. Horace Alexander’s article on Jan 16, 1948 in The Spectator put the number killed at 2,00,000.

According to a report published in The Times, London on Aug 10, 1948: “2,37,000 Muslims were systematically exterminated – unless they escaped to Pakistan along the border – by the forces of the Dogra State headed by the Maharaja in person and aided by Hindus and Sikhs. This happened in October 1947, five days before the Pathan invasion and nine days before the Maharaja’s accession to india.” Reportedly, as a result of the massacre/migration, Muslims who were a majority (61 per cent) in the Jammu region became a minority.

This story was originally published in clarionindia.net . Read the full story here