Believe it or not, but the larger truth is that the Congress (of “termites”) has never considered Jammu & Kashmir an integral part of India in the real sense of the term. That’s the reason it has been considering Kashmiri Muslims as a race apart ever since October 26, 1947, when Maharaja Hari Singh, who alone had the power under the Indian Independence Act of 1947 to decide the State’s political future, acceded his kingdom to India. Pakistan came into being under the same Act.

In October 1949, the Indian Constituent Assembly at the behest of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, a very close friend of the then National Conference president and Jammu & Kashmir Wazir-e-Azam and bitter critic of Hari Singh, adopted Article 306–A (Article 370) that accorded a status to the solitary State of Jammu & Kashmir within the Indian nation on purely religious grounds.

Nehru hated Hari Singh from the core of his heart because the latter had got him arrested at Kohala (J&K) in 1946. The Indian Constituent Assembly adopted this atrocious, divisive, anti-democratic and anti-people Article 370 completely ignoring the sane counsels of Dr. BR Ambedkar and one of the Muslim members of the Constituent Assembly, Maulana Hasrat Mohani. Under Article 370, which empowered the State to have a separate Constitution and separate flag and exercise residuary powers, no Central law is automatically applicable to the State of Jammu & Kashmir unlike other States of the Union. Central laws can be extended to the State with the concurrence of or on the request of the Jammu & Kashmir Government. 

When Jawaharlal Nehru asked Sheikh Abdullah to convince Dr. BR Ambedkar, Chairman of the Constitution Drafting Committee, of the need to accord a differential and preferential treatment to Jammu & Kashmir State on the ground that it was a Muslim-majority State, Dr. Ambedkar candidly told the Sheikh that he could not endorse his perverted view. Essentially, Ambedkar said: “You want India and Indians to defend Kashmir. You want Kashmir and Kashmiris (read Muslims) to exercise all rights all over India, but you do not want India and Indians to exercise similar rights in Kashmir. I am Law Minister of India and I cannot be a party to such an act of betrayal of the national interest”.  As for Mohani, without mincing words, he told the Constituent Assembly on October 19, 1947 that the “grant of special status to Kashmir on the score of religion would enable it to assume independence afterwards”.

Notwithstanding the grave evils such as the rise of communalism, separatism and persecution of the non-Muslim minorities that followed on the incorporation and strict enforcement of Article 370, successive Congress Governments at the Centre continued to treat Jammu & Kashmir differently. So much so that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi not only brought down the Congress government in Jammu & Kashmir in February 1975 and installed as Chief Minister the deflated Sheikh whom Jawaharlal Nehru had got arrested on August 9, 1953 on the charge of “sedition”, but also permitted the Sheikh to review the Central laws extended to the State after August 9, 1953 and seek withdrawal of laws which he considered harmful for the State and the so-called distinct identity of Kashmir.

Sadly, even Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, who could be described as one of our two best Prime Ministers, the other being Atal Bihari Vajpayee, treaded the path the Nehru-Gandhi family had charted as far as Jammu & Kashmir was concerned. At Burkina Faso, he said “Sky is the limit” (read maximum possible autonomy to Jammu & Kashmir.)

The present dispensation of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and Manmohan Singh, whom she appointed as Prime Minister in May 2004 invoking the 1880s anti-democratic Kimberley clause (read selection, appointment or nomination and not election), has gone several steps further to ensure that Kashmiri Muslims are not only held aloof from the national mainstream, but also help Pakistan accomplish its cherished goal of break-India by having a real and effective say in this part of the State.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is on record saying that he is for a “non-territorial” solution to the Kashmir issue (read supra-state measure that would entitle Pakistan to exercise co-equal sovereign powers with India in this part of Jammu & Kashmir). In other words, the present dispensation at the centre has no hesitation in compromising Indian sovereignty in Jammu & Kashmir, which is legally and constitutionally Indian like other States. It has failed to implement its non-territorial solution because the national mood has not permitted it to play with the territorial integrity of India.

But the hotchpotch, minority and roundly condemned Congress-led “most corrupt” UPA Government is not only more than willing to accommodate the Pakistani pernicious stand on Jammu & Kashmir, but is more than willing to appreciate and accommodate the Chinese stand on Ladakh, an integral part of India. I am not exaggerating. This is a fact which can be easily verified from the unsettling statements Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde and External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid and the Congress party have made in the wake of the April 15 provocative and utterly unacceptable Chinese intrusion into Indian territory in Daulat Beg Oldi (DBO) sector in Ladakh. The heavily-armed intruders from the People’s Liberation Army erected five tents deep inside our territory, deployed Molosser dogs which are best for keeping vigil in these high-altitude areas, and fixed a banner outside the illegal camp that read in English “you are in Chinese side”.   

It would be appropriate to quote verbatim what they have shamelessly said in order to put things in perspective and establish that the Congress-dominated minority UPA Government is not only allowing Beijing to affront the self-respect of the 1.25 billion-strong Indian nation, but also willing to yield to the Chinese bullies and expansionists. While talking to reporters on the sidelines of the defence investiture ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhawan on April 27, the Prime Minister said: “We do have a plan. We do not want to accentuate the situation… It is a localised problem”.

The same day, Home Minister told reporters at Daman, “I have personally been to that area and it is a ‘no-man’s land’, but it is also a disputed area” and that “our people sometimes go there and so do theirs”. And just a day before the Foreign Minister told reporters that “these disputes occur because there is variance of perception about the demarcation of the Line of Actual Control (LAC)”. The stand of the Congress party has also been the same. In fact, it went several steps further and accused the BJP of creating a situation that could provoke Beijing to declare war on India. This was what Congress spokesperson Rashid Alvi said while talking to reporters in New Delhi.

What Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid said in Beijing on May 10 while talking to reporters establishes beyond doubt that he went to China to identify New Delhi with the Chinese anti-India cause in Ladakh. He told media persons that he did not raise the issue of the Chinese intrusion into Ladakh with the Chinese Premier and his Chinese counterpart and that he would want to live in Beijing some day!

All these statements only serve to prove that the present dispensation in Delhi is playing havoc with the country and undermining its sovereignty and territorial integrity. It is not statesmanship. It is political debauchery. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was right when on April 27 he dubbed the UPA Government “weak”, said it has suffered a “total blackout” in its foreign policy and urged the nation to decimate the Congress. Indeed, the Congress is negating the nation itself.