For new “Radical Humanists with expertise in Kashmir affairs” and for people selling the news about Geelani “talking” to Burhan Wani before his “sahadat” and Hafiz Saeed organizing the mass mourning.
Khudiram Bose carried out violent acts between the age of 14 to 16 in which innocent people died. Before his 19th birthday, he was hanged, people say, with a smile on his face. The legend of Khudiram Bose was born.
In 1949, Nehru refused to inaugurate Khudiram Bose Memorial in Muzaffarpur in 1949. In response, Nehru’s ideological opponent, M.N. Roy, the grand-daddy of new “Radical Humanists with expertise in Kashmir affairs” was to write:
“I had the privilege of knowing Khudiram. I met him and Prafulla [Chaki] on the eve of their pilgrimage…with pioneers like Khudiram, nationalism was a religion…For them, patriotism was not the path to power. It was tapasya, a mystic experience of self abnegation. Khudiram himself was the gentlest of souls…In a trance a psychological state of the mystic karamyogi, he stated on his fatal pilgrimage; the bomb on his box and the pistol in his pocket were not the means to destroy human life; they were as flowers with which the devotee goes to the temple to please and propitiate the god.” (Independent India April 16, 1949)
Nehru, in fervor of new found Aazadi, could have appropriated Khudiram Bose and cheered him as the youngest hero of Indian Freedom Struggle. It would have made good headlines and a lot of happy people. But, he didn’t. It was against his principle of non-violence and he probably better understood the perils it would bring for India. He would have been leading Indian Aazadi Tahreek in which Godse and Bose sleep in the same grave with Gandhi. One big graveyard. He wasn’t going to encourage the cult in which violence would be celebrated like a religion. Nehru was thinking about future while M.N. Roy fell back to populist iconography of his Hindu origins. The purpose of a revolution for M.N. Roy was always simple: if in the end the majority of the people are happy, the revolution is worth it. However, he didn’t have to deal with morality of Islamist revolutions and the questions of minorities.
It is not surprising that today the “Kashmiri” followers of M.N. Roy still sell revolutions by using iconography of religion. And that’s why Kashmir is not anytime soon going to see a leader who can say Abdul Sattar Ranjoor and Burhan Wani cannot lie in the common grave of Kashmiri religio-nationalism.
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