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August     Last updated: August 12  5:00 p.m.

 THE more Satiricus reads about the Kashmir situation, the less he understands it. But of course that is to be expected when so many pundits of the press come together to educate one ignoramus. After going through—and trying to understand—all available newspaper writings on Abdullah's autonomy on the one hand and Hizbul's ceasefire offer on the other, all Satiricus knows is that he doesn't know what's what. His ‘desi’ ignorance is further compounded by the fact that he finds the American think tank which has come up with its own Kashmir solution deep enough to drown in. It has suggested one “sovereign” Kashmir “without an international personality”.

 What exactly does that mean—if it means anything at all? Can there be a sovereign state without its sovereignty being internationally recognised? And if this one, united sovereign state of Kashmir is to be made up of PoK plus “Indian-held Kashmir”, as an Indian newspaper itself describes the state of J-K, what happens to the jehad to ‘liberate’ this Indian-held Kashmir and merge it with Pakistan? Satiricus has no answers of these questions, because complex international affairs are supposed to be beyond the limited understanding of nationalist simpletons. However, taking pity on this birdbrain an editorialist has kindly explained that the RSS idea of trifurcation of J-K is “insidious” because it will “jeopardise the very logic of India”. And what is that logic? It is “its multi-religious mosaic welded by history”. Oh my! Satiricus never knew that Pakistan's mono-religious history of 50 years was such a glorious proof of secular India's multi-religious mosaic. He also does not know that the systematic and more or less official Islamisation of Ladakh is required to maintain this multi-national mosaic.

 He has been told that this mosaic has been “welded by history”, but unfortunately he has not been told how long history should be to be called history. Is history 50 years old, when India was partitioned for one religion, or is it 12-13 hundred years old when an upholder of that religion was the first tourist to this country, or is it ten thousand years old, when this country began to develop its own religion? Satiricus has his own answer to this question, but alas, it is a Hindu answer, so it cannot be the truth. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the secular truth is that Indian history began with the advent of Islam. Why, otherwise, would Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi have declared during a speech in a Muslim country that India was a Muslim country? And why even before that, would the Government of secular India have sent a Muslim minister to gatecrash at a meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Conference, from which, alas, Pakistan had driven it out? In other words, India is multi-religious because India is Muslim? Does that make sense? Not to Satiricus, but that is only because he is not a sensible secularist.

To take matters beyond the comprehension of this communal cuss, our erudite editorialists do not stop at waxing eloquent about India's multi-religious mosaic, they even go lyrical about “the pluralistic ethos” of India and say Kashmir represents it so well. Why? Why, because Kashmir is Muslim, stupid! Satiricus is suitably mortified, and yet he cannot help wondering about one thing—if Muslim Kashmir is such an ornament of Indian history, what was it when it had a Hindu history? Is it not a shame that the “Hindu history of Kashmir” should be long enough and memorable enough to merit a whole book by that title? What is all the more abominably anti-secular is that this history of Kashmir is not only the history of great Hindu kings like Lalitaditya, but also of great seers who developed what is now called Kashmir Shaivism. In his recent, best-selling book The Triadic Heart of Shiva Dr Paul Muller, a leading American theologian, describes Kashmir Shaivism as a major school of Indian philosophy on par with Vedanta.

 Isn't that the limit? No, it is not. For according to scholars—real scholars, not the newspaper variety—Kashmir was the birth-place of some Hindu scriptures themselves. Most communally they claim that there is evidence to show that Kashmir was the original home of a Vaishnava ‘Agama’, and there is also a Shaiva Agama text of Kashmir. Satiricus is shocked. For this means the history of Kashmir is the history of Hinduism itself. And this hideously Hindu history does not stop here. It points it finger at Sharda in Pak-occupied Kashmir as the Hindu world's most venerated ancient pilgrimage centre. It was visited by the famous Arab scholar Alberuni in the eleventh century, and before that by the famous Chinese traveller Huen Tsang in the seventh century, who wrote that the exceptionally intellectual priests at Sharda had brought glory by their peerless contributions to the spiritual thought of mankind.

Fortunately for secularism these ancient Arab admirers of Hindu Kashmir are history. Now the Indian offsprings of latter-day Arabs are busy painting the multi-religious mosaic of India, without, of course, forgetting that every Darul Harab in the world must be finally changed into Darul Islam—whether it is Bosnia in the West, India in the middle, or Chechnya in the East. But talking about this multi-religious mosaic business, Satiricus was as shocked as any sterling secularist to learn that it was not Islam in India but Hinduism outside India that was making multi-religious history since hoary times. Pre-Islamic Arab poets wrote poems in praise of “Mahadeva”, and eminent Christians from Will Durant to Francois Gautier say Christianity borrowed many things from Hinduism.

In the West a nine-thousand-year-old sculpture of a Brahmin's head, complete with choti, was found in the now-Muslim Middle East, and in the East an ancient Sanskrit inscription was found in China. What does all this show? In the considered opinion of Satiricus it shows that the very science of archaeology has gone berserk and needs to be banned as black magic. For it devilishly delves into what it calls history, but there can be no history before Jesus and Mohammed were born. The Dead Sea scrolls may expose Christianity as a myth, and Pakistani scholars like Ibn Warraq and Anwar Shaikh may write books on Islam as a tyrannical political ideology, but for us secular Indian intellectuals the “idea of India” can have substance only if it is partly Christian and mostly Muslim, with ‘fundamentalist Hinduism’ religiously kept away. In other words, the fundamentalist secular idea of India is that India is not, and never was, Bharat.