Beautiful Land; Beautiful People — Dawn of Radiance
It is difficult to say what is more beautiful in the land at the peak of India that touched first the Eurasian Continent in Laurasia, with a bang emptying the Tethys Sea into two parts which will be known much later as Indian and Atlantic oceans. Is it the land, the flora, the fauna or the people? For me, the author, it is the people. There are similar places, flora and fauna, though rare, on Earth, but not similar people. The people are beautiful to the core in behaviour and looks; Naïve and innocent in their approach to life. They deserve all protection by governance, not exploitation, to ascend to new heights in wellbeing much beyond the heightened altitudes they perch.
India touched base first on its head in its 250 million years (not quite) journey from the now Antarctica, floating on a plate over the molten magma below the crust. The bang left a small reminder near the spot on the country’s forehead as a tiara dot that the author may muse some other time. India berthed alongside the Eurasian Continent as an added but separate part on three segments later came to be known as Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, extending further to other directions and comfortably settled to accommodate travellers to come, board and merge with those already there. The northward push of India is still on along the tectonic plate exclusively Indian. It is for the governments to decide whether it has to be taken as a sign to press on north geostrategically also.
The outsiders who boarded India merged with the insiders. They didn’t want to go back. India was enthralling and caring. It is so even today. The entire population slowly became homogenous hybridders2 with exclusive traits by genetic compounding. India on the banks of the newly formed Indus River became the most populated and a never-even-once interrupted continuum in the world, aptly responsible and ready to lead the global human system apropos to its philosophy of the “whole world is a family” in every respect whenever the demand falls on it. That is the essence of “Sabke sath…”
The peak of India came to be known as Jammu, Kashmir & Ladakh, thousands of years later, with a kind of retained premonition of becoming closely bound with the rest of the territories and human systems of India, a motherland with a destiny of virtuous and exclusive people expected to show the path to the rest of the world in times to come. It is a long away, though; it will happen for sure. One in five humans who walk the Earth is an Indian for whom the entire Planet is India. They are everywhere, not in gated clusters but in assimilated human systems.
Time seeps through life faster than thought. Unlike thoughts, time doesn’t come back. But, for the people of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, time stood in apocalyptic silence.3 The turn in the life of J&K happened on 31 October 2019,4 exactly 72 years 2 months and 16 days after India became free from British rule, when the government of India decided to administer them as two separate Union Territories instead of a state so that the innocent and beautiful people can get out of the shackles their own country bound them with, ironically after being free.
The immediate events of independence was suicidal for the then state of J&K abetted and imposed by an incompetent and inhuman system of barbarian mindset of a few people with power to tie these beautiful people with selective temporary laws that canted as permanent. Thereafter it was exploitation and subversion of the land and its people by generations of opportunists that will shame even the worst colonisers, slave market brokers, sex peddlers, holocaust slaughterers, Crimes3 plus syndicates5, and inhuman peddlers of criminal injustice, all in human garb and name of freedom that was nothing but selective slanting of a powerful few. The people suffered as if there was no tomorrow. Many fled; many became subservient to the arrogant; many succumbed to eternal end. It was sad and agonising.
Indians suffered maximum violence in the history of the world; the people at the crown of India suffered more than the rest repeatedly and in a relatively short period.
The governments of the post-independent India didn’t know how to handle the external and internal invaders who raided the land and depredated its people directly or indirectly and covertly or overtly. There were also the powerful in and out of the governments who aided the exploiters for ever flowing benefits to fill their coffers of power and luxury. Nero never fiddled when Rome burnt. He never set fire to it.6 But the vultures of J&K did more than that to their people. Somehow the country as a whole could remain painfully resilient and patient. After all it had 250 million-plus years of life span reflecting on its people as a unified part of the Planet that is destined to guide the future as a model of human virtues.
It is more than nine plus months now, if reckoned from November 2019, after the two union territories formed and lived most of the time in secure silence preliminary to an endowed future. There are signs that trepidation of the past is not likely to come back at least in similar form. India and its people should move cautiously as the entire machinery of the ante force7, natural to a world within a world (WIW) like India, is working hard to topple the apple cart literally.
This is the time to meet the living among the thousands of victims of Article 35 A and its fallouts.8 They are in thousands—specific communities, refugees from erstwhile West Pakistan, some of them living as living dead for the past seven decades with families under total denial of any rights of civility, beautiful girls married to outsiders with no rights to own properties, brilliant students denied scholarships, people evicted forcefully and inhumanly from their residences, people whose land and properties were grabbed by the powerful, descendents of Gorkha soldiers who protected the land from invaders, entire population of Ladakh who almost lost hope in their future, people discriminated in employment, the selectively haunted and displaced Pundits of Kashmir…
The ground is soaked with a lot of blood and tears that is not easy to explain or feel. It was a saga filled with stories of pain, agony and anguish that the rest of the country has no knowledge except for hearsay. If they know and are humane, they will never excuse the harbingers of such cruelty to fellow humans. It is a shame on all of us, Indians, impossible to wash away.
World’s longest written and most powerful Constitution couldn’t wipe the tears of these victims just because of an articulated flaw on its pages. Like a dead fly sandwiched between the pages of an accountant’s heavy ledger, the two articles masked the rights of citizens and gave universal power to a few dynastic families and connected associates to hoodwink the country allying with externals. The right of the beautiful people of the two UTs became clear and equal to the rest for the first time after the dead fly was scraped off from the Constitution.
Things are getting rectified. Constitution of India applies to all Indians for the first time. The change reflects in the smiles of the people. Anyone, if in doubt, could go and witness it for clarity of mind.
Of course, the changes are only beginning to germinate. That makes it tender and vulnerable. The biggest task for the government and people is to protect the change and bring cohesion. People are optimistic and believe in their country and Constitution. Interestingly this has generated hope among the people of Gilgit and Baltistan also. There is an ambience of anticipation. But their problem is different. They are barbarically ravaged by China with the blatant permission by the occupier—Pakistan. That is why India has to push northerly like the tectonic plate. It is time the adversaries realise Indians possess the most powerful weapon of all time—freedom.
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1 Dr. Prabhakaran Paleri is former director-general, Indian Coast Guard. Presently Emeritus Resource Faculty, School of Maritime, Air and Space Studies, Raksha Sakthi University, Gandhinagar.
2 Term by author. Used instead of hybrids in exclusive sapien sense as a mixture of two or more differential Homo sapiens. Especially those who mixed with the original insiders with outsiders. The word hybrid is recommended to depict others species other than homos.
3 Author’s view from heuristic observations, and experience
4 After the resolution was adopted by both houses of the parliament, the president issued Constitutional Order 273 on 6 August 2019 replacing the extant text of Article 370 with the following text: “370. All provisions of this Constitution, as amended from time to time, without any modifications or exceptions, shall apply to the State of Jammu and Kashmir notwithstanding anything contrary contained in article 152 or article 308 or any other article of this Constitution or any other provision of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir or any law, document, judgment, ordinance, order, by-law, rule, regulation, notification, custom or usage having the force of law in the territory of India, or any other instrument, treaty or agreement as envisaged under article 363 or otherwise.” The two UTs, UT of Jammu and Kashmir and UT of Ladakh came into existence on 31 October 2019.
5 Authors term for the combo of transnational crimes (TNC) in trafficking (not specified here)
6 Author’s studies.
7 See author’s views an explanations to ante force in his book National security: imperative and challenges, Tata McGraw-Hill,(2007) on th term ante force.
8 Article 35A (along with article 370) of the Indian Constitution empowered the Jammu and Kashmir state’s legislature to define “permanent residents” of the state and provide special rights and privileges to those permanent residents.
The views expressed above belong to the author(s).
