Sunday, October 12, 2008

Kashmir - Whose line is it anyway ?

My favourite subject in school included 'geography' and I used to treasure those days when I read 'maps' aimlessly. I mug up longitude-latitude or play hot-cold or capital cities or rivers running or seas or mountain chains and information like these when I take a look into maps. Somehow, India map was always a treasure of information for me and I will stare at it so many times, such that I can draw the map of India with my eyes closed. (india map)
And then it happened, when CNN or BBC came to India, they knocked off the 'horns' of India, here am referring to 'Kashmir'. Surprisingly, Indian map didn't look half as attractive as it used to look without Jammu and Kashmir horns. Those were the times when Indian government will throw warnings to CNN or BBC or other western media requesting them not to tamper our boundaries. But those were the burgeoning times of Indian economy when it was quickly liberalizing itself. Still, BBC or CNN or even MTV resisted cause they were vastly 'western' media who were traditionally more close to Pakistan and not with India and so they toed their government's boundary lines.
With the onset of India liberalization, Indians weren't anymore immune to what happens around the world and thus, India got wide publicity on its policies on 'Jammu and Kashmir'.
It became a deja vu that 'Azad Kashmir' is annexed by Pakistan, 'Aksai Chin' was donated by Pakistan to China. And now India has just the Kashmir valley with the horns lost. And worst part of all this information overkill is, India had never really had the horn all the while in its history since independence. The horns were always with Pakistan or rather weren't formally annexed at all. The sickening part here is, why would Indian government claim to its people that 'horns' are part of our territory when it was never its own ! And of course misrepresented the facts to all its citizens in particular to the kids in school by providing wrong maps or wrong information claiming 'India has a land border with Afghanistan' how could we possibly have a land border with Afghanistan when the horns is not ours.
Trust, this could be an sensitive topic to Indian government i.e in rewriting their history/geography/atlas books to suit the reality, but posting false information to all concerned in particular its own citizens, is much worse.

1 comment:

Simar said...

I understand your line of thought. Their is one more dimension to this chaos. Pakistan since 1948 has been showing the whole Jammu & Kashmir in their map, including the cities of Jammu, Srinagar, Anantnag, Pehalgaam etc..

Simarprit