It is almost maddening to hear the daily newsbreaks in India and abroad and especially from Pakistan all focusing on a small part of Jammu and Kashmir. No one ever talks about how happy the Ladakhi’s or people in Jammu, the Gujjars, Bakhrawals, Buddhists, Sikhs and Kashmiri Pundits are. Even the Sunni population of Kashmir that Pakistan focuses on are not no all against the removal of article 370.

This was a long time in the making and it has nothing to do with the Accession of Kashmir to India which happened in October 1947. It does not even have anything to do with the plebiscite that was to happen when Nehru took it up in the United Nations when Pakistan attacked Kashmir. That clearly states that for a plebiscite to happen Pakistan would have to take away its armed forces in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and the people from outside the region that they have brought in there and till then India would be able to keep their forces in the area. Only when all this was achieved could a plebiscite happen.

Much has happened since then. Pakistan has settled millions of non-Kashmiris in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, including giving up much of the territory to China. So, a plebiscite is dead.

In India the reverse happened. From 1947 onwards, Hindus fleeing across the border were not allowed to be part of Kashmir even though they came from POK, neither were Dalits that were invited on the premise that they would become full-fledged Kashmiris nor the Sikhs or the Pundits or the Gurkha Soldiers whose families were part of the Maharaja Hari Singh’s army.

In fact, the greatest shame of Indian democracy was when extremist Muslims of the Kashmir valley mercilessly killed several prominent Hindus and ethnically cleansed 500,000 Hindu Kashmiris and the Indian state did nothing about it.

Today, the people of the Kashmir valley and their children born after 1990, who know nothing about Kashmiriyat, and the original inhabitants of this beautiful valley, wonder if by removing article 370, their Muslim heritage is in danger!

This has to be the ultimate irony.

But I don’t blame them entirely, it was political appeasement and has been for a long time. This along with a good dose of Wahabi terror introduced by Pakistan had created the conditions to turn perfectly decent people into a rioting mob that created the conditions for a two-state solution that Jinnah broke up India for.

What I would ask them is that this land of Kashyap, of Sanskrit and ancient Hindu heritage really means to them without the very people they cruelly killed and banished from the land they had inhabited for 5000 years. Is Kashmir really Kashmir without the original inhabitants that are living as refugees in their own land–who have been marginalized and made to feel like pariahs in the land that belonged to them for eons.

What is there worry if Kashmir once again belongs to Hindus and Muslims living side by side in the Kashmiriyat they claim was the essence of their existence but which they have denied for 30 years. I don’t blame the Muslim population of the valley, though I do believe they could have resisted the pogroms of 1989 and 1990s if they had so wished. Instead students and Separatists, inspired by Pakistan and Wahabi clerics killed their teachers who they had they has grown up with along with doctors and professors, only because they were Hindus.

It is eerily reminiscent of Kristallnacht (German pronunciation: or the Night of Broken Glass,) a pogrom against Jews carried out by Nazi forces and civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night”) comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed. Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. The rioters destroyed 267 homes and synagogues. over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed.

But 1990 January was worse for the Hindus, as every mosque had loudspeakers that threatened families that if they did not leave, they would be killed and the men should go but leave their wives behind! Even newspapers started threatening Hindu families and to make it worse mobs came out on the streets all over the valley saying that Kashmir was only for Muslims.

I am aghast that all this happened and the Indian state did nothing, world media was silent, and that not one person was booked or imprisoned for the brutal murders or forced exodus that continued relentlessly till the ethnic cleansing was complete.

That was the time the Indian state should have abrogated Article 370 that gave special rights to the inhabitants of the valley that prevented any form of justice to prevail from the center.

Article 370 came too late as no one in the Indian state could question the real oppressor and innocent people suffered the greatest because they were given refugee status in their own land for 30 years.

And today the world media is worried about justice for those who were the real oppressors. They forget the history. They forget that Kashmir belonged to all Kashmiris, even those who were made to flee. They forget the history and the real injustice that happened.

I write this for the world media and India–Lest we forget.