Syed Ali Geelani Must Travel To Pakistan, But not by the Bus
Geelani sahib must positively respond to Pakistan government’s invitation to travel to that country. However, he should take a Delhi-Lahore flight using an international route, and not board the Srinagar Muzafarabad bus for travel. There are reasons for both these suggestions. The reasons why Geelani sahib must go to Pakistan are:
1. Although, depending on circumstances, invitations can be accepted or rejected without losing goodwill, yet Geelani sahib’s rejecting Pakistan’s invitation might look an anti-Pakistani gesture in public perception. Pak-bashers will treat it as a God-sent opportunity to create venom against Pakistan, and it will adversely affect the Kashmir’s political atmosphere and the configuration. Something like Geelani versus Pakistan scenario will be sought to be projected thus creating an unreal configuration. The only beneficiary from all this will be the occupier state of India.
2. The recent pronouncements by the Pakistani officials, particularly those by the President Musharraf have created some anxiety in the freedom loving groups in Kashmir led by Syed Ali shah Geelani. However, one must understand that if Pakistani rulers decide to engage in a sell-out on Kashmir, they cannot do so without the co-operation of Kashmiri leadership. It takes a Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the West, and a Sheikh Mujib in the East to break up Pakistan and create a Bangladesh. If, suppose, there are powerful voices in Pakistan who believe the regime should ‘get rid of Kashmir’, there need to be a complementing voice in Srinagar saying ‘please leave us alone’. The two voices put together, like the positive and negative poles of electricity will create the desired effect. If Kashmir is represented by these ‘leave us alone’ type voices in Pakistan, it will be great tyranny with the cause of Kashmir, the people and the martyrs. What is needed instead, is someone, and that too a powerful and credible person like Syed Ali Geelani, who goes to Pakistan and tells its inhabitants, that the brave and freedom loving, but materially helpless and oppressed, Kashmiri masses have risen up against India, a giant military power with a hundred thousand standing army, for a future of freedom and dignity, mainly, if not only, on the basis of the Pakistan’s support. Nothing separates Pakistanis and Kashmiris except time. Kashmiris stand where Pakistanis stood before 14th August 1947, when all the Muslim communities of the region (pathans, Baluches etc.etc.) struggled for a strong, powerful political umbrella that could guarantee them a life of honour and dignity. It needs to be impressed on the Pakistani people that it is equally their responsibility, if not more, to see that the movement in Kashmir succeeds. By backing it they are only backing a cause of which Pakistan is the physical embodiment, and if they backtrack, they are, more than anything else, undermining the foundations of their own country. Geelani sahib can tell Pakistan that it is not the matter of ‘we’ (Kashmiris) and ‘you’ (Pakistanis), essentially it is ‘we’, that is Pakistanis and Kashmiris taken together. With such a voice representing Kashmir, a sell-out is out of question.
The reasons, why Geelani should not travel by bus, are:
a) The prime reason is that by rejecting the bus, Geelani sahib will be defeating India’s strategy of politicising the ‘bus’. The bus service from Srinagar to Muzafarabad, with whatever motivations it has been started, could easily be ignored as a political non-event. However, India has been, from day one, creating a hype around the event with a view to project it as a great political change and ‘achievement’ of Kashmiri people. This is nothing short of a criminal activity of changing the very goal post of the freedom movement of Kashmir. Those aiding India in creating this fanfare are actually a party to the act of changing the goal post.
b) Opting for a Delhi Lahore flight is more honest and realistic as far as the ground realities are concerned. Given the fact that Kashmir is still under India’s occupation, and Pakistan’s emergence on 14th August 1947 as a sovereign state continues to be the most tragic date in India’s political calendar, the distance between India-occupied Kashmir and Pakistan is simply huge; definitely not just a long jump from this end of the bridge to the other at Chakothi. That is only an artificial scenario, something pretended with criminal motives.
c) Lastly some may raise the bogey of Passport: travel by bus does not require a passport, that by plane requires. That is an extremely silly objection, to say the least. Gilani sahib, whether he travels from Delhi to Lahore using an Indian passport or from Srinagar to Muzafarabad using some other document, essentially avails, in the de facto capacity of his being a citizen of an Indian occupied state, the facilities and permissions of the same legal authority, namely, India.
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Dr. Syed M Inayatullah Andrabi is a well-known figure in the circles of political Islam. Born in Srinagar, the capital city of Indian Held Kashmir, Dr Andrabi has been intimately involved at the intellectual level with the global politics and political issues since his student days in 1980 at Pune (India), where he completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1983 at the Centre of Advanced Study in Linguistics, Deccan College, University of Pune, Pune, India. Upon completing his doctorate he returned home to join the University of Kashmir, first on a post-doctoral fellowship and later as faculty, but could not continue because of the deteriorating security situation in Kashmir, and had to move to United Kingdom in 1994 where he continues to live since along with his wife and five children.
