Bernie Sanders, if I have followed and comprehended US politics well, was shameless in his pandering for the Muslim vote bloc. Politicians doing that is not new. I have seen that happening in my home country — India — for 70 years now. Muslims are always an organized minority in every non-Muslim democracy, with a history of voting as a Muslim, in favor of whichever leader caresses their collective interests more against those of the country as a whole. And this very characteristic of the Muslim diaspora is what politicians such as Sanders tend to exploit the most.
To appease his Muslim vote bloc, Sanders occasionally vilified the Hindus, ignoring the sentiments of the Hindu citizens of the United States. To win political brownie points from the Islamic community, he evoked Kashmir in 2019 and the Anti-Hindu Delhi riots in February 2020. Disparaging India, and the Hindus especially, became a vital ploy in his Presidential plans. In an earlier article, I elaborated on the Anti-Hindu riots in India’s national capital, that the Democratic Socialist leader knavishly tried to capitalize on. Now, the world needs to know how Islamists outpopulated and massacred the Hindus in their own land, and are now playing the victim card, with the Bernie Sanderses of the world peddling their propaganda.
Believed to have derived its name from the Hindu sage Kashyapa, Kashmir was ruled by the Hindu King Hari Singh when India became independent and was coming together to form the Republic of India. On 26 October 1947, Raja Hari Singh produced the Instrument of Accession in favor of merging with India, after being hounded repeatedly by the militants of the newly-formed Pakistan. However, he stipulated one condition, which was later absorbed into the Indian Constitution’s Article 370 and 35A as a temporary provision. According to these articles, Indians from rest of India were banned from owning properties or settling in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
However, no such restrictions were levied on Kashmiris, who were receiving education in India’s top institutions, were free to pursue employment opportunities anywhere in the country, and had no laws stopping them from owning properties and running business in other parts of India. Do you get the absolute bias here? This is the bias Indians had been suffering from until the abrogation of Article 370 and 35A in August 2019.
Until 2002, a woman of Kashmir could lose her Permanent Resident (PR) status in Kashmir if she married a man from anywhere in India; this law was not applicable to the men. All the benefits resulting from the bias of this archaic rule fell in the laps of Muslims, as they formed the majority in Kashmir, before and after independence.
Again, though the law-abiding citizens of India silently gave in to the prejudiced Article for decades, the printed lines of the Indian Constitution weren’t potent enough to preclude Pakistani militants’ infiltration in Kashmir in mammoth numbers, turning the valley into their den of terrorism.
In 1947, Kashmir had a 77% Muslim population. It spiked to more than 90% around the end of the 20th century. With a declining Hindu population, and the Congress government at the center (which is known for its special love for India’s Muslim demography), the late 1980s proved to be the coveted opportune moment for Islamists to clear the land of the remaining Kafirs. 1989 and 1990 records the most shameful episode in the secular democracy that the Republic of India claims to be. Homes of Hindus in the valley were being profiled. Posters went up on their doors demanding they convert, flee, or perish. Prominent Hindu figures were murdered. The then-Chief Minister, Dr. Farooq Abdullah, ran away to London, abandoning his Hindu citizens. The Islamists back home had a field day as the pogrom unfolded.
On January 19, 1990, in the dead of night, Muslims mobs descended on the streets. The loudspeakers of the mosques blared out blood-curdling warnings. A harrowing slogan echoed in the mountains, “Asi gachchi Pakistan, Batao roas te Batanev san,” that translates to “We want to become Pakistan with Hindu women, not with their men.”
The Hindus who had enough means fled Kashmir the very next day. Those who couldn’t saw their homes looted; many of these people were killed and many women were raped. In April 1990, Sarla Bhat was beaten to death after being gang-raped by Islamists. In June, Girija Tickoo was raped by a pack of radicals, and then sliced at a sawmill while still alive. Close to half a million Hindus were forced out of their homes and off their land by June 1990, because they followed the “wrong religion.” 450 temples were razed to dust; over 10,000 houses were torn down in the subsequent years. The Hindus of Kashmir were brutalized by those they grew up around, played with.
Apologists often try to whitewash terrorism by citing the bad personal experiences of terrorists. Around 300,000 to 600,000 Hindus, plundered, having lost family and loved ones at the hands of Islamist barbarians, are living as refugees in the national capital of their own country, while those who wronged them roam around free and enjoy perks extended by politicians who share the iniquity of Bernie Sanders. But these Hindus didn’t resort to terrorism to take revenge upon their killers. They didn’t take a knife to their throats. Instead, they put together a respectable life with the remnants of their erstwhile savings. It has been three decades since the displacement of Kashmiri Hindus; they haven’t returned home, they are still in exile. This is the truth of Kashmir that politicians such as Bernie Sanders don’t want you to know.
What’s unjustified in the now-elected government’s honest attempt in finding the Hindus their lost glory? What’s wrong in undoing the wrong done by India’s previous Prime Ministers?