NEW DELHI, Feb 3 (2000): Hindus and Buddhists from Kashmir on Thursday blasted the state government’s moves to wrest greater autonomy from New Delhi, arguing that they would lead to eventual secession from India.
Leaders from Kashmir’s Hindu-dominated southern Jammu region and the Buddhist-majority zone of Ladakh said Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah’s push for autonomy was a dangerous sign.
The state cabinet recently approved the recommendations of a special committee that proposed Kashmir be given full autonomy except in matters related to finance, defence and communications.
Panun Kashmir, a body of Kashmiri Hindus displaced by a Muslim insurgency drive that has claimed more than 25,000 lives in Kashmir since 1989, said India’s Hindu nationalist-led government should immediately reject the committee’s findings.
It said Abdullah’s government had proved its support for the “two- nation principle” — a reference to the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-dominated India.
“The minorities of Jammu and Kashmir have faced the brunt of Islamic fundamentalism,” Ajay Chrungoo, chairman of Panun Kashmir’s political affairs division said.
“Already 700,000 Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus) have had to leave their homeland because of the militancy. And we remember too well this theory of religious division.
“Before independence the Muslims wanted a separate area for themselves. It started with a demand for more autonomy and led to the creation of Pakistan.”
Tsering Samphel, a representative of the dominant Buddhist community in Kashmir’s Ladakh region, the flashpoint of a two-month conflict last year with Pakistan, said Abdullah’s government was suppressing minorities.
Pakistan, which administers a part of the divided state of Kashmir, wants a referendum in Kashmir to determine its future. India steadfastly rejects this stand arguing the state is its integral territory.
“The Buddhists have become the second target after the Hindus,” Samphel said. “We face the prospect of becoming an extinct Himalayan species.
“The Kashmir government is playing with our culture, tradition and our people. Our girls are being forcibly converted to Islam and our monasteries are falling apart because the government gives no funds for maintainence.”
Both leaders urged the Indian government to carve Kashmir into separate states or quasi-states called union territories. They called for a Moslem-dominated Kashmir Valley, a Hindu-majority Jammu state, a homeland for the 700,000-odd Hindu refugees and semi-statehood for Ladakh.
Kashmir was ruled by a Hindu king before Indian independence in 1947.
The monarch, Raja Hari Singh, acceded to India after Pakistan invaded the state shortly after partition.
