Nasty man, he, indeed, must have been to suggest that Gods have been on the run these past few weeks as his devotees converge on that beautiful mountain range where He, in one of his many incarnations, is said to lay anchor for 15 days annually, in a leaking cave, to bless several thousand Hindu devotees and in the form at that of a ice lingam formed with droplets of water falling at the particular spot, the sanctum sanctorum, thanks to the melting snows lying atop the cave. The whole endeavor, now lasting a longish, over-extended two months, indeed, takes a heavy toll of the naturally formed ice lingam itself, with choppers freely used to transport VVIPs or the very rich from many helicopter bases, hundreds, if not more, packing up the cave any time, the devotional lamps lit up outside and scores of cameras (TV included) lights popping up every now and again, flashing inside the cave to capture the moment for the family album, as the elite among the pilgrims stand up face to face with the Good Lord Shiva, now in the form of the icicle lingam. One particular year of the yatra, when under the benign governorship of Lt. Gen S.K. Sinha (the Governor is also the chairman of the Amarnath Yatra Trust) the VIP rush was extremely heavy and the sheer body heat of the assemblage and that generated by the VIP/DD cameras, caused the ice lingam to melt. Elementary : ice melts when temperature rises. The good soldier, Sinha, passed over by Mrs Gandhi when he was at the head of the list of the vacant Army Chief’s post, promptly arranged to have ice slabs brought in from as far away as Delhi stacked up in the shape of a Shiva Lingam overnight. Fauji solution – ingenuity for you and me. Nobody lost any sleep over it, only it meant a wind fall for the barf khanas and a “night operation” for the Army personnel. It may cause annoyance to some, but, I often wonder why so much fuss should be made over a natural phenomenon (like melting ice) which for one reason or another has been adopted by Hindus as a matter of faith. The good Hindu, I presume, accepts it as God’s doing. Incidentally, the cave shrine was discovered by local Muslim Bakerwals and for the record I might add that my mother, grandmother did the yatra thrice, the first with granny taking a tonga to Avantipr, thence to Anantnag and on to Pahalgam; the tonga of the day over a hundred years ago must have been some kind of a stage coach for Kashmiris from Srinagar; and my mother a few decades later had taken a local bus from Srinagar to Pahalgam. For my dad, I learnt later, such tortuous journeys were a no no. He would of course go to Pahalgam to spend a couple of days there with mother just then back from the cave. The whole thing lasted less than a week including a day’s picnic for the children at Pahalgam on the return of the elders from Amarnath. And no free ‘langars´and fancy sarkari bandobast for them. It was your pilgrimage and you managed it yourself. Yes, you would feed the odd mendicant or give him some money to buy his evening high. Let me leave God and godly matters aside for a while. The whole of past two weeks, ever since my return to my Gurgaon hole, after a longish nine-week stay in Kashmir, I have been bored to death by Mr. Narendra Modi and his Ministers, not to speak of the sinister Mr. Amit Shah (gives me goose bumps the moment my eyes set on him) reminding me and the country of how everything looks nice and dandy after the first 48 months of his party’s rule in the country. To go by the BJP rhetoric India 2014 might well have lived in the stone age. Lies are piled on,one upon another, to distort recorded history ,well researched, well preserved data to establish India’s march into the list of good stable democracies ever since its independence. RSS and Saffron we are force-fed into believing that our independence was the result of the vision of men like Guru Golwalkar, Hegdewar, Savarkar and that kind, not to forget Mukhya Pracaharak Modi and his saffronite superior Mohan Bhagwat who are leading the country in its drive to discover itself as Bhaat, the Hindu Rashtra. Everyone born therein is a Hindu. And this is no idle boast Assam, West Bengal with their substantial Muslim population (Assam 34 percent) are set to tell one apart from the other : Hindu, the native, Muslim, the infiltrator previously only from Bangladesh but Myanmar added now as a convenience. Mr. Modi also kept drilling in the anti–Emergency rhetoric pertaining to Mrs. Gandhi’s serious aberration of the mid 70s. He chooses to forget that Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency was deplored by everyone and most of all by the poor who were driven to the wall by Mrs Gandhi’s errant son, Sanjay, with his nasbandi campaign. He also ignores the fact that the people punished Mrs Gandhi when she lifted the emergency 19 months later and chose to face the people. I remember Mrs Gandhi’s two constituency high powered poll managers in Rae Bareli – Mr Yashpal Kapur and Mr. M.L. Fotedar trying to talk me out of my prediction that Mrs Gandhi would lose.” No way”, Guruji, the two would insist, I had the advantage of having travelled the constituency with Mrs Gandhi, but I had toured the same constituency with Mr. Rajnath Singh the whole of a week round-the-clock, if you will. Mr Modi and his Sancho Panza from Gujarat days, Amit Shah, will never have the grace of a Mrs Gandhi who in an interview with me hesitantly admitted to me on a warm April day in 1977 at her Safdarjang Road house that she may have erred. This was after her defeat. Mr Modi has to this day not acknowledged the Muslim genocide in Gujarat during his first term as Chief Minister of Gujarat. His own party leader, then Prime Minister Vajpayee reminded him gently of a thing called Raj Dharma, (even handedness) but Modi wouldn’t listen. Nor would his then Home Minister Amit Shah. Shah was directly linked to some murders and encounters but has chosen, not to look back. To be sure the 2019 general election will see both Modi and Shah outdoing each the other in playing the communal card. In Kashmir the die has already been cast through deepening the divisions between Hindus and Buddhists on one side (Jammu and Ladakh) and the Muslims . The ruse of keeping the State assembly in suspended animation is not difficult to unravel. One tactic would entail naming some convenient MLAs from the existing mainstream parties or directly mandating a handful of valley Muslims it has lured to its camp and putting them up for a few valley seats, the Srinagar parliamentary by poll I believe attracted just seven percent of the vote. Be assured the high minded Indian Prime Minister would be happy with the one percent return in the valley. Remember also that he may put up a Kashmiri Pandit or two from the valley. And if the voting, whenever, be in summer we could produce a handful of migrant Pandit employees to cast their ballot as well.
Experiments with a frozen god!!!
