CPM takes UPA govt to task on Amarnath land row

“India cannot afford to allow this situation, which has serious implications for our territorial sovereignty as well as social harmony, to slide into disastrous anarchy,” Politburo member Sitaram Yechury said.

In an editorial in the forthcoming issue of‘People’s Democracy, he said it was “clear that the communal forces and the separatist forces feed and strengthen each other”.

Maintaining that a solution to the land controversy can be arrived at only through dialogue, he said “a solution does not seem to be the objective of the RSS/BJP. They appear bent upon to intensify communal polarisation and enlarge the confrontation to the national level”.

On the other hand, “these communal forces are admirably aided and abetted by the separatist extremist forces in the Kashmir valley,” Yechury said.

While the separatists were projecting the “temporary change in the land use pattern to provide facilities to the yatris only for the duration of the yatra” as a permanent settlement, the RSS/BJP was seeing the issue as an opportunity to “consolidate the Hindu vote bank at the expense of mayhem and bloodshed”.

“In the process, it is innocent life that is the casualty. So is the assiduously built, over the centuries, warmth of coexistence between Hindus and Muslims in the state,” Yechury said, adding India’s secular fabric has once again come under “severe strain”.

Observing that the volatile situation in Jammu and Kashmir has “rudely shaken the conscience” of the country, he said it had driven home the “tenuous fragility of our secular foundations.” In the Independence Day Special issue of the party organ, the CPI-M leader said the RSS ideology of establishing “a rabidly intolerant fascistic Hindu Rashtra” was the complete anti-thesis of a modern secular democratic republic.

Calling for a “resolute and uncompromising struggle” against communalism, separatism and all expressions of divisiveness, he said “India cannot win if these forces are not defeated.”