Jammu and Kashmir Dilemma of Accession (A Historical Analysis and Lesson)

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Pandit Ramchandra Kak was the Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir during the period leading up to the State's accession to India in October 1947. He left behind a document that records the devious political game played to transfer authority over the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir from Hindus to Muslims, specifically to Sheikh Abdullah. Unsurprisingly, this document is barely noticed in a minority-appeasing "secular" India, and its only known public copy is in England. In Jammu and Kashmir Dilemma of Accession Radha Rajan presents this document in full, analyses the communal political game of the Indian National Congress leadership and especially of Gandhi and Nehru that converted Kashmir into a festering sore in the Indian polity. Radha Rajan's book places Prime Minister Pandit Ramchandra Kak's immeasurably important first-hand narrative of the events of 1946-47 for the first time in the public domain within the country.

Radha Rajan is a political thinker and author who writes extensively on Indian polity from a Hindu nationalist perspective. She is the editor of Vigilonline, an information website. Her previous books include NGOs, Activists and Foreign Funds: Anti-Nation Industry (Bharat Prakashan, 2006) which she jointly edited with Dr. Krishen Kak, and Eclipse of the Hindu Nation: Gandhi and His Freedom Struggle (NAPL,2009). Radha Rajan is also passionately involved with animal welfare and has worked for the welfare of Chennai's street dogs for the past 24 years.

In the pantheon of intellectual kshatriyas, distinguished in contemporary time by stellar luminaries such as the late Ram Swarup and Sita Rain Goel, one of the brightest stars today is Radha Rajan. Fearlessly truthful, with a razor-sharp intellect, she minces no words as her weapons in the cause of the Bharatiya rashtra. She soldiers on many fronts, and most valorously on the subcontinental battleground that is the politics of Indian secularism. Those who define us as heathens or kaffirs do so employing abrahamically self-conscious political action against us with our dhritarashtra-like sanction. It is Radha ji who makes us aware that there can be no protection of the rashtra, and therefore of the dharma, without Hindu political self -consciousness.

"Pantheon" has no antonym, but among those who wittingly subordinated the dharmic ethos to the abrahamic one, Mohandas Gandhi, inasmuch as he has been constructed into the "Father of the Nation", must surely lead the others. Many of us, at home and abroad, have pointed out his sanctimony and duplicity; such was occasionally noted by his own political colleagues too; but none has demythologised him as perceptively, comprehensively and devastatingly as Radha Rajan. Her Eclipse of the Hindu Nation: Gandhi and His Freedom Struggle razes the mahatma myth so assiduously built up by official and other hagiolaters.

Through a fortuitous circumstance, Radha ji came into possession of a photocopy of a paper which led her to writing this monograph. This paper is an insider's account of the events leading to the accession of Kashmir to India, the insider being the Prime Minister of Jammu & Kashmir from June 30, 1945 to August 11, 1947. His name-Ramchandra Kak, and he was also my grandfather.

No copy of this document-described by Radha ji as one of national significance-is known to be available in India. A copy is in the India Office Library in London, where it reached apparently amongst the papers of Richard Powell, the then Inspector General of Police. While it is in the public domain, obviously it is not easy to access by those in India. A scan of the original has been uploaded to the web, thanks to Lila Bhan and Radha ji, and will be readily accessible in print form as part of this monograph, courtesy Voice of India.

If Radha ji' s book on Gandhi buried him, with this monograph she erects his gravestone.

But a gravestone needs an epitaph, and for the epitaph most apt for carving on Gandhi's gravestone, we need look no farther than to Gandhi's acknowledged favourite, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Fittingly Jawaharlal Nehru, because not only did Gandhi profess "a union of hearts" with Nehru but he also selected him as his own heir: "You are my son .....I have therefore named you as my heir", he wrote to Nehru in 1924. Gandhi was infatuated with Nehru, deviously positioning him to become our country's first prime minister.

So, here then, in his own words, is this son and heir's pithy summation of the character, ideology and politics of the father, and here too in his own words is India's first Prime Minister's pithy summation of the Father of the Nation.

Nehru said of Gandhi:

"You know, he really was an awful old hypocrite."

Radha ji's monograph centres itself around a contemporaneous account that features this "awful old hypocrite", whose hypocrisy still costs India so dearly. Both as a politically self-conscious Hindu and as Ramchandra Kak's grandson, I must point out that Ramchandra Kak foresaw in 1947 that Sheikh Abdullah wanted his own independent principality, the continued existence of which would be guaranteed by the Indian armed forces and the solvency of which would be guaranteed by the Indian treasury. Abdullah's Kashmir would give nothing in return. Nothing at all. That is exactly what happened then, thanks to Gandhi-Nehru treachery. And that is how it has remained for the almost 70 years since then.

It is a tragedy for Kashmiri Pandits that the course of events which Gandhi-Nehru and the Indian National Congress initiated in J &K by deliberately raising up a Sunni seditionist against the kingdom inevitably moved to no Hindu prime minister of Kashmir to no Hindu king in Kashmir to no Hindus in Kashmir and now to no Hindu (or even non-Sunni) chief minister at all for the State since the last one about 70 years ago. It is a tragedy for Kashmiri Pandits that no Indian government so far has had the political will to even want to restore to Kashmiri Pandits the land of our ancestors.

It is a tragedy for Hindus that Gandhi-Nehru and the Indian National Congress consciously delivered over Kashmir to Hinduism's self-declared enemy which, there, has gone from strength to strength against us, dispossessing us of our civilisational heritage and roots in Kashmir. It is a tragedy for Hindus that no Indian government so far has had the political will to even want to restore to Hindus a wellspring of our civilization.

It is Ramchandra Kale who asked, "If the Jews could get back Israel after 2000 years of exile, why should it be considered extraordinary if India wanted to retain Kashmir which was already in its possession?"

The Sunnis got Kashmir because they are an aggressively politically self-conscious belief system. The Jews got Israel because, all through their persecution and exile, they carefully preserved their politically self-conscious identity.

Radha ji concludes her monograph drawing a parallel to the Kaurava Court. We Hindus have forgotten the lessons of the Mahabharata. The Pandavas foolishly let the Kauravas dispossess them of everything, and when they were reduced to begging for the pittance of just five villages, Duryodhana hit back to Srikrishna (adapting it to Kashmir):

Take my message to your kaffirs, for our Sunni words are plain,
Any portion of the Koran's empire Bharata's sons seek in vain,
Nor town nor village, nor mart nor hamlet, help us Allah in heaven,
Not even a spot that a needle's point can cover unto them will be given!"

It was thereafter that the Pandavas, still unconvinced, were made by Srikrishna to understand another lesson of the Mahabharata:

ahimsa paramo dharma
dharma himsa tathaiva cha

In our democracy, we Hindus too must learn to exercise power as a politically self-conscious electorate.

Nehru assumed "you know". He knew, but he did nothing to let the rest of us know, and the vast majority of us still do not. It is the intellectual kshatriya Radha Rajan who most and best demonstrates the accuracy of Nehru's assessment of Gandhi. It is she who, knowing, most and best educates us about why and how we must cease to worship this false god that is Gandhi.

The statue of Gandhi that has been erected as the so-called Father of the Nation must be demolished.