The Rediff Special /B K Nehru
'Indira Gandhi told him that Farooq was more dangerous than Jinnah'
The war on Farooq which started even before the election
was intensified after it. The lies they told Indira Gandhi and
the media blitz they unleashed were quite preposterous. They accused
Farooq of being a secessionist, a member of the Jammu and Kashmir
Liberation Front, printed an old photograph from his London
days shaking hands with Amanullah Khan, called him a Pakistani
agent and an anti-Indian, accused him of being communal and anti-Hindu,
and gave the impression through the press that in the Valley of
Kashmir there was chaos and total absence of law and order.
The facts, on the other hand, were that Farooq was
the first honestly elected leader of the Kashmiri people who was
totally Indian, who was not neutral about Pakistan but
definitely anti-Pakistan, who, unlike his father, repeated ad
nauseam to audiences in Kashmir the fact that the accession of
the state of Jammu and Kashmir to India was final, that Kashmir
was an inalienable part of India and anybody who did not like
it could lump it for he had no place in Kashmir and was welcome
to go to Pakistan.
As for his communalism, the fact is that (in spite of his foolish
electoral alliance with the Mirwaiz) religion
to him was totally irrelevant. His ignorance of the beliefs and
practices of Islam was the subject of jokes in the valley. He
was totally unaware of even the prejudices from which his co-religionists
often suffer. He once visited a temple in Srinagar and took part
in the aarti ceremony, an act which among Muslim fundamentalists
would have immediately caused him to be declared an apostate.
Once he went to Vaishnavi Devi, came back with a bag of prashad
and a stock of roli, then went to the Jammu secretariat
in the morning and as the people came in to work, decorated everyone
of them -- Hindus and Muslims alike -- with a teeka and presented
them with prashad.
His only son, Omar, was at school in
Sanawar in a totally non-Muslim atmosphere instead of going to
school in Kashmir or in England. This latter was in spite of Farooq's
wife being English, and unlike the practice of many of our superpatriotic
netas. Omar among other things was studying Sanskrit. To
cap it all he eventually married a Hindu girl.
To call such a man communal was to utter a Goebellian
lie but it is sad to relate that the prime minister believed it.
I was told by one of our former ambassadors of the conversation
he had with the prime minister when he called on her on his appointment
in February 1984 to a European country (which had
nothing whatever to do with Kashmir). Instead of talking about
the relations of India with the country of his accreditation,
she gave him a half-hour lecture on Kashmir.
She told him that
Farooq was more dangerous than Jinnah, that he had boasted that
he would be responsible for the second partition of India and
that the governor had no idea of what was happening in that state.
Is it not ironic that this same second Jinnah is our chief spokesman
on Kashmir at all international gatherings?
Excerpted from Nice Guys Finish Second, by B K Nehru, Viking, 1997, Rs 595, with the publisher's permission.
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