#Kashmiri Pandits assassination

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 1.19 (after 1930)

1937 – Howard Hughes sets a new air record by flying from Los Angeles to New York City in seven hours, 28 minutes, 25 seconds. 1941 – World War II: HMS Greyhound and other escorts of convoy AS-12 sink Italian submarine Neghelli with all hands 64 kilometres (40 mi) northeast of Falkonera. 1942 – World War II: The Japanese conquest of Burma begins. 1945 – World War II: Soviet forces liberate the Łódź Ghetto. Of more than 200,000 inhabitants in 1940, fewer than 900 had survived the Nazi occupation. 1946 – General Douglas MacArthur establishes the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo to try Japanese war criminals. 1953 – Almost 72 percent of all television sets in the United States are tuned into I Love Lucy to watch Lucy give birth. 1960 – Japan and the United States sign the US–Japan Mutual Security Treaty 1960 – Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 871 crashes near Ankara Esenboğa Airport in Turkey, killing all 42 aboard. 1969 – Student Jan Palach dies after setting himself on fire three days earlier in Prague's Wenceslas Square to protest about the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union in 1968. His funeral turns into another major protest. 1977 – President Gerald Ford pardons Iva Toguri D'Aquino (a.k.a. "Tokyo Rose"). 1978 – The last Volkswagen Beetle made in Germany leaves VW's plant in Emden. Beetle production in Latin America continues until 2003. 1981 – Iran hostage crisis: United States and Iranian officials sign an agreement to release 52 American hostages after 14 months of captivity. 1983 – Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie is arrested in Bolivia. 1983 – The Apple Lisa, the first commercial personal computer from Apple to have a graphical user interface and a computer mouse, is announced. 1986 – The first IBM PC computer virus is released into the wild. A boot sector virus dubbed (c)Brain, it was created by the Farooq Alvi Brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, reportedly to deter unauthorized copying of the software they had written. 1988 – Trans-Colorado Airlines Flight 2286 crashes in Bayfield, Colorado, killing 19. 1990 – Exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley in Indian-administered Kashmir due to an insurgency. 1991 – Gulf War: Iraq fires a second Scud missile into Israel, causing 15 injuries. 1993 – Czech Republic and Slovakia join the United Nations. 1995 – After being struck by lightning the crew of Bristow Helicopters Flight 56C are forced to ditch. All 18 aboard are later rescued. 1996 – The barge North Cape oil spill occurs as an engine fire forces the tugboat Scandia ashore on Moonstone Beach in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. 1997 – Yasser Arafat returns to Hebron after more than 30 years and joins celebrations over the handover of the last Israeli-controlled West Bank city. 1999 – British Aerospace agrees to acquire the defence subsidiary of the General Electric Company, forming BAE Systems in November 1999. 2007 – Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink is assassinated in front of his newspaper's Istanbul office by 17-year-old Turkish ultra-nationalist Ogün Samast. 2007 – Four-man Team N2i, using only skis and kites, completes a 1,093-mile (1,759 km) trek to reach the Antarctic pole of inaccessibility for the first time since 1965 and for the first time ever without mechanical assistance. 2012 – The Hong Kong-based file-sharing website Megaupload is shut down by the FBI. 2014 – A bomb attack on an army convoy in the city of Bannu kills at least 26 Pakistani soldiers and injures 38 others.

[gadgetsforusesblog]

Click to read Kashmiri Pandit Group calls for "brutal operation" against terrorists

The KPSS said religious terrorist groups threaten Pandits. Srinagar: Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti or KPSS has called for a “brutal operation” against terrorists and their supporters in the Valley, a day after the assassination of Kashmiri Pandit Sanjay Kumar by terrorists in the Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir. KPSS, an organization of Kashmiri Pandits living in the Valley, has also…

[rudrjobdesk]

कश्मीरी पंडितों ने फिर शुरू किया प्रदर्शन, कहा- हमारी जिंदगी दांव पर है

कश्मीरी पंडितों ने फिर शुरू किया प्रदर्शन, कहा- हमारी जिंदगी दांव पर है

Image Source : PTI Kashmiri Pandits Protest Highlights कश्मीरी पंडित कर्मचारियों का प्रदर्शन अवसादग्रस्त महसूस कर रहे: प्रदर्शनकारी ‘कर्मचारी सरकारी ��ॉलीपॉप में नहीं फंसेंगे’ Jammu Kashmir News: कश्मीरी पंडित कर्मचारियों ने जम्मू में आज सोमवार को फिर प्रदर्शन किया और शांति बहाल होने तक घाटी से बाहर स्थानांतरित किए जाने की मांग दोहराई। ऑल माइग्रेंट एम्प्लॉई एसोसिएशन कश्मीर के बैनर तले सैकड़ों…

[troytiwari]

On January 19, 1990, Hindu Pandits were evicted from Kashmir by local Muslims. The number was in the millions. Many Hindu houses and temples were demolished overnight. At that time, the then government only took a watchful role.

As the present generation has forgotten this dark night, meetings were held at some places in Delhi on 19th January.

On January 19, 1990, a large number of Muslim youths started marching in Kashmir.

His proclamation in Kashmir language and Kashmir Hindu Pandit started to be heard. Knocked out

Kashmiri Pandits were given only 48 hours and the men were ordered to leave, leaving the women and girls in the house.

In September 1989, Tika Lal Taplu, the leader of the Kashmiri Pandit, was assassinated.

Many Kashmiri Pandits were killed in the attack on the night of January 19.

At that time, 5 lakh Kashmiri Pandits fled to India.

In March 1997, seven Kashmiri Pandits were evicted from their homes and shot dead by militants

In January 98, 23 Kashmiri Pandits were killed in Windham.

In March 2003, 24 Kashmiri Pandits, including infants, were shot dead.

Millions of Kashmiri Pandits are still living in 8x8 rooms in the camp.

[beardedmrbean]

SRINAGAR, India, June 2 (Reuters) - A Hindu bank manager was shot and killed inside his office in Kashmir on Thursday, police said, as a wave of targeted killings drove more Hindu families to flee India's only Muslim-majority federal territory.

Vijay Kumar was attacked by a suspected militant inside a branch of the Ellaquai Dehati Bank in southern Kashmir's Kulgam, where a schoolteacher was shot dead on Tuesday, local police said.

"He received grievous gunshot injuries in this terror incident," Kashmir police said in a tweet, later adding that Kumar, originally from western Rajasthan state, had succumbed to his wounds.

At least 16 people - both Hindu and Muslims - have been killed in targeted attacks this year in Kashmir, where India has been fighting an armed insurgency since the late 1980s.

A little-known militant group called "Kashmir Freedom Fighters" claimed Thursday's attack on social media, telling non-locals not to settle in the Kashmir valley.

"Anyone involved in the demographic change of Kashmir will meet the same fate," said its statement, the authenticity of which could not be immediately verified by Reuters.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government in 2019 split Jammu and Kashmir, then India's only Muslim-majority state, into two-federally administered territories, promising to improve development and security in the restive region.

Both India and neighbouring Pakistan claim the Himalayan territory in full, but control only parts of it.

But New Delhi's reorganisation raised concerns among some local communities that the federal government may use it to alter Kashmir's demographic by bringing in more outsiders.

'WE ARE NOW SCARED'

Rattled by the recent spate of assassinations, scores of Hindu families, including those from the minority Kashmiri Pandit communities, have begun fleeing Kashmir in recent days. More than 100 Hindu families have left after the schoolteacher's killing, a community leader said on Wednesday.

A rebellion by Muslim militants in 1989 led to some 250,000 Kashmiri Pandits fleeing the Kashmir valley because of killings of Hindus and attacks on their homes.

But many, like Sanjay Kaul, were lured back to Kashmir by the previous federal administration with the promise of government jobs and better security.

"After recent killings we are now scared and fear for our lives," said Kaul, a schoolteacher who left a government-built Kashmiri Pandit colony along with his family on Wednesday.

"We demand re-location outside Kashmir till the situation normalises."

[werindialive]

Day after 2 killings, Centre’s meeting on Kashmir, SOS from Pandits!!!

There will be a meeting held between Amit Shah and lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha in Delhi just after a day when the union home minister met national security advisor Ajit Doval and intelligence officials.

The lieutenant governor of Jammu and Kashmir has been called to Delhi for a meeting with union home minister Amit Shah this Friday, just a day after two men including a bank manager were shot dead there in Kashmir as a part of a spate of eight targeted killings within a week in the region.

The attacker shot a Hindu bank manager in his office with a pistol in the Kulgam area this Thursday. He later died in the hospital. Just hours later, two migrant laborers were shot by terrorists in the central Kashmir valley when they were returning from their work. They used to work in a brick kiln.

After the incident, Police tweeted the information that says “The duo was shifted to hospital for treatment, where one among them succumbed”. This incident took place at Magraypora in the Chadoora area at around 9.10 pm.

Apart from that this Tuesday, a Hindu woman school teacher was also shot dead by terrorists in the same area, and before that, terrorists shot and killed three off-duty policemen and a television actress who all were Muslims in three separate assassination style attacks, these attacks have been done last week by the terrorist.

Just a few days before this, a Hindu government employee was shot dead inside his office by the terrorists and as per the police, these terrorists belonged to the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Considering all this now Amit Shahs and Lieutenant Governor Major Sinha will hold a meeting in Delhi. These killings have intensified calls by the Kashmiri pandits to ensure their security. 

[decadeslife]

‘The Kashmir Files’ movie review: A alarming take which grips and gripes in turns

“Filmmaker Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri makes is clear from the word go that his film, The Kashmir Files, will not be subtle. A gut-wrenching watch, it is based on the plight of Kashmiri Pandits who faced a massacre and forced exodus from their own land by the Islamic militants.”

Characters in The Kashmir Files are nothing short of ‘real people’. The way they emote on screen makes you feel their pain, leaving a lump in your throat. Anupam Kher as Pushkar Nath delivers by far his strongest and most convincing performance. Given that Kher himself is a Kashmiri Pandit, Agnihotri couldn’t have cast a better actor than him for the role.

The Kashmiri Pandits’ pain is real and should be expressed in popular culture, but it deserved a more nuanced, more objective take rather than the ‘us vs them’ worldview that Agnihotri has propagated over 170 minutes.

The film is based on the testimonies of the people scarred for generations by the insurgency in the State, and presents the tragic exodus as a full-scale genocide, akin to the Holocaust, that was deliberately kept away from the rest of India by the media, the ‘intellectual’ lobby and the government of the day because of their vested interests.

Here, Krishna (Darshan Kumar), a Kashmiri Pandit and student of a premier university, modelled on Jawaharlal Nehru University, has been tutored by his ‘liberal’ teacher Radhika Menon (Pallavi Joshi) into believing that the secessionist movement in Kashmir is akin to India’s Freedom Movement.

When Krishna’s grandfather Pushkar Nath (Anupam Kher) dies, he returns to Kashmir with his ashes and meets four of his grandfather’s friends who reveal the ‘real’ story of Kashmir to Krishna, and of course, the audience. In their narrative, Kashmir was faced with a clash of civilisations, and the Pandits were left to die by the State and the central government to appease one community. The villain of the piece is Bitta, who seems like a combination of real-life Ghulam Mohammad Dar alias Bitta Karate and Yasin Malik, the faces of terror outfit Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front.

Unlike Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s films on the subject, Agnihotri has no time for romance in the Valley. It is more like a rejoinder to Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, as the film tries to suggest that the Kashmiri Muslims deserved to suffer after what they did to the Pandits and other minorities.

A disturbing take, it grips and gripes in turns. The scenes of bloodshed, torture, and otherisation of Pandits have been filmed with brutal intensity. The camerawork captures the dark, brooding shades of the Valley and the performances are compelling.

As the conscience keeper of the film, Kher is at his rhetorical best. Darshan is a revelation and it is good to see the gifted Pallavi back. Mithun Chakraborty, Prakash Belawadi, Puneet Issar, and Atul Shrivastava sound convincing, as friends of Pushkar Nath.

However, the film that accuses the foreign press of milking choreographed unrest and clickbait headlines, gradually falls for the same alleged exploitative methods to reach out to tear ducts and arouse animosity. There is hardly any effort to understand what happens when a majority becomes the minority and vice versa. The voice of the moderate Muslim is conspicuous by its absence. The representation of the educated elite is shallow and towards the end borders on easy character assassination.

Some of the dialogues give hope that Agnihotri will address the complexity of the subject that hasn’t been addressed before, but once he starts peddling an agenda against a religion, The Kashmir Files loses its objective, humanistic gaze.

It does the same selective treatment of the period that it accuses the players in the ’90s of.

Like most in the era of social media, Agnihotri looks at the past from the prism of today and a lot of dinner table discussions make it to the screenplay. There is no middle ground for him, as he picks and chooses instances from the past to suit his narrative. He talks of Sheikh Abdullah, but doesn’t mention the role played by Raja Hari Singh at the time of the accession of Kashmir to India. He also doesn’t talk about how the rigged ballot gave way to a bullet culture in Kashmir in the late 1980s.

The film underplays the Pakistan-Afghanistan angle and puts the onus for perpetuating the insurgency on the local Muslim. In Agnihotri’s documentation, terror has a religion and it appears every Muslim in Kashmir has been a separatist and keen to convert Hindus to Islam. How the Dogra Kings ruled the State till 1947 is out of the syllabus here.

Of course, religious slogans were raised, and indeed Kashmir Pandits got caught in the crossfire between India and Pakistan, but the history is not as black and white as Agnihotri wants us to believe.

The names of Kashmiri legends and their contribution that Krishna invokes in the climactic speech are very much there in history books and oral tradition. If the makers got to know them during the research for the film, it is not fair to tell the audience that they have not been taught about the mystic Lalleshwari, the journey of Shankaracharya to Kashmir, and the intellectual capital of the State.

Talking selective use of facts, the film directly attacks Farooq Abdullah and Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, and indirectly holds Congress responsible for the exodus, but conveniently forgets to tell us that it was the National Front government that was in power in January 1990, when the alleged genocide took place, whose survival depended on the outside support of the Bharatiya Janta Party and the Left parties.

He has also conveniently forgotten the party, whose agenda he is consciously or inadvertently perpetuating, had formed the government with one of the regional parties which the films describe as nationalist in Delhi, communalist in Srinagar.

Curiously, the film talks of justice but doesn’t bring in the role of the judiciary, the legal battle of Pandits, and the fact that the real Bitta spent more than two decades in jail and after being out on bail, is once again behind the bars.

In the bid to distort, even the good old poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz is not spared. Written in 1979, Hum Dekhenge uses the metaphor of traditional Islamic imagery to subvert and challenge Pakistani General Zia Ul Haq’s fundamentalist interpretation of them. When he says “An-al-Haq” (I am truth), he comes close to the Advaita philosophy of Hinduism. The film subtly derides previous Prime Ministers like Atal Bihari Vajpayee for aiming to win the hearts of people. Perhaps, the makers believe in ruling only the landmass.

One fear, in the name of street justice, the clippings of the film will soon end up in social media to fuel further hate against one community.

Source: https://www.decadeslife.com/the-kashmir-files-movie-review-a-alarming-take-which-grips-and-gripes-in-turns/

[hurricanehenry]

A wave of assassinations targeting victims on the basis of religious and ethnic identity has reminded Kashmiris of old wounds.⁠ ⁠ Not all bloodshed in the state of Jammu and Kashmir garners coverage. But a new spate of killings aimed at minorities such as Sikhs and Pandits, as well as migrant workers from other parts of India, has left many people scrambling to flee. ⁠ ⁠ An outfit calling itself the Resistance Front (TRF), which Indian security forces say has links to Pakistan, has claimed responsibility for the killings.⁠ ⁠ It may be that TRF or other groups are attacking civilians around Srinagar because their forces have been worn down from the fight against armed forces in the countryside and are finding softer targets.⁠ ⁠ Nonetheless, their actions betray a broader obsession with demography in the territory. Click the link in our bio to read why.⁠ ⁠ Credit: Mukhtar Khan/AP Photos View all 249 comments whenrishabhspeaks @asimnasir42 The only thing you need to answer (genuinely) is, there was nothing like this 31 years back, but stuff still happened. Why was that? hardy_is_starboy Islamic extremists are killing hindus n sikhs in kashmir. They have also killed thousands in 1990. https://www.instagram.com/p/CVjrITYNMxi/?utm_medium=tumblr

[thenorthlines]

ISI Meddling Again?!

RSN Singh Two alleged contract killers from Faridkot in Punjab, Sukhvinder  Singh (25) and Lakhan (21), deployed through the aegis of Pak ISI Dubai network, were apprehended by the Special Branch of Delhi police on 26 Feb. Armed with two foreign made pistols, they were on a mission to assassinate Sushil Pandit, a beacon of displaced Kashmiri Hindus. Only two days before, on 24 Feb, Sushil, was…

[someswarraous]

Kasmir Pandit Martyrs Remembered

Kasmir Pandit Martyrs Remembered

Kashmir (in green) before Buddhist Ladakh was separated, but Hindu Jammu remains.

TODAY 31 YEARS AGO the assassination of Tika Lal Taploo by JKLF Islamists in the Kashmir valley marked the start of the massacre, looting and rape of the valley’s minority community, the Kashmiri Pandits, the original HIndu residents of the state before the Islamic invasion. Even the ‘sickular’ liberals’ and…

[gokul2181]

I-League: Real Kashmir's co-founder Shamim Meraj quits | Football News

New Post has been published on https://jordarnews.in/i-league-real-kashmirs-co-founder-shamim-meraj-quits-football-news/

I-League: Real Kashmir's co-founder Shamim Meraj quits | Football News

NEW DELHI: When a Kashmiri Muslim man and his Pandit friend joined hands to promote football in Kashmir even as the Valley battled infiltrations and terror attacks, it seemed sport had blurred the invisible lines in the disturbed region, including those drawn by religion and politics. Shamim Meraj and Sandeep Chattoo formed Real Kashmir FC in 2016, and within a couple of years the club participated in the I-League (in 2018-19). The club finished third in its debut season and is now a force in Indian football. On Monday, Shamim, who is the editor of the Kashmir Monitor newspaper, informed TOI that he has ended his four-year association with Real Kashmir. He cited “personal reasons” for leaving the club. “People come and go, but institutions should remain,” Shamim said. He unequivocally rejected reports which suggested he left the club due to growing differences with the team management and that he didn’t like coach David Robertson’s style of football and wanted the club to adopt a more entertaining style. “These are juicy stories, nothing else,” he stated. Both Shamim and Chattoo refuted any discord between them. “Our friendship is still the same. That is unrelated to what we do professionally,” said Shamim. “We remain together. Only professionally, he has left us. He is as close to me as he was when he was part of RKFC. Personally, the Hindu-Muslim combine remains the same. We meet every other day… discuss the situation in the state,” said Chattoo. “I tried to persuade him to continue, tried really hard… but I feel he had made up his mind last year. Especially, after Article 370 was revoked by the Centre in Jammu and Kashmir. You must have seen, I was all by myself in the last season,” Chattoo elaborated. Recently, a senior Kashmiri leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party Wasim Bari, his brother and his father were killed by militants in Bandipora area. In the last few years, there has been a spate of killings of mainstream Kashmiri leaders, academicians and social workers who have taken a stance against terrorism in the Valley. In the past, Shamim too has had multiple assassination attempts on his life. He is an influential person in the Valley and often travels with bodyguards. “We all know Kashmir is a sensitive place. At the end of the day, Real Kashmir is an Indian football club representing Kashmir. There are lots of complex issues here (in Kashmir), which the people from the rest of the country would not understand. So, let it be,” a person close to Chattoo and Shamim, said. Shamim and Chattoo formed the club in 2016 after witnessing the plight of the youth two years earlier during the devastating 2014 floods in Kashmir.

Source link

[mensrightsff]

RT @AartiTikoo: BREAKING @ians_india: Pakistan’s The Resistance Front (TRF, the new name of Lashkar-e-Taiba) shows it’s true colours; takes responsibility for the assassination of Sarpanch Ajay Pandita, a member of Kashmiri Pandit community, ethnically cleansed from Kashmir by jihadis. https://t.co/uLOZiewHBq

[comepraisetheinfanta]

Shobha Nehru, left, with President John F. Kennedy and Indira Gandhi in 1962. Mrs. Nehru’s husband was ambassador to Washington at the time.GEORGE TAMES / THE NEW YORK TIMES

By ELLEN BARRY 

APRIL 28, 2017

NEW DELHI — Shobha Magdolna Friedmann Nehru, a Hungarian Jew who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, married into India’s leading political family and witnessed religious and ethnic violence convulsing both her native and adopted countries, died on Tuesday at her home in the Himalayan foothills. She was 108.

Her death was confirmed by her son Ashok.

Mrs. Nehru was known by her Hungarian nickname, Fori, but did not often speak about her background. After marrying the Indian diplomat Braj Kumar Nehru in 1935, she took the name Shobha (which was selected by her in-laws), dressed in saris and was so thoroughly assimilated that acquaintances often took her for a pale-skinned Kashmiri Pandit, like the Nehrus themselves.

As a member of the Nehru household, she grieved beside the bodies of Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, all of whom were assassinated. And at a key moment in the country’s history, she delivered a hard truth to an imperious leader who rarely heard it.

Mrs. Nehru typically stayed away from political matters, but she took the unusual step of confronting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, her close friend and cousin by marriage, when she believed that the state of emergency Mrs. Gandhi declared in 1975 had too severely rolled back human rights in India.

She later recalled presenting Mrs. Gandhi with a list of men who said they had been forced to undergo vasectomies during a coercive mass sterilization campaign spearheaded by Mrs. Gandhi’s son, Sanjay. Expecting to encounter resistance from the prime minister, she had asked each man for his telephone number.

“I said, ‘Indu, you know I never talk to you about politics, never, no,’” Mrs. Nehru said in an interview with Indian state television. “‘Please look at this — these are all complaints about sterilization of young boys and old men. You know yourself that there is no need to sterilize. Why?’ She listened, looked at me. ‘But.’ What but?”

Mrs. Nehru’s husband, in his own memoir, reflected that virtually nobody — including himself — was willing to take the risk of alienating Mrs. Gandhi, who resented any criticism of her son. He said his wife was less cautious, and “certainly on more intimate terms with Indira Gandhi than I was.”

“I guess she was like that,” Ashok Nehru said. “She felt she had to get the truth across to her. It was a close family relationship, not a political relationship. She felt free enough to do that.”

Mrs. Nehru was 90 when she asked an Oxford classmate of her son’s, the British historian Martin Gilbert, to suggest some reading material on the history of the Jews. Mr. Gilbert wrote that he was perplexed by the inquiry, having always seen her as “an Indian woman,” until she recounted the story of her childhood in Budapest.

“Auntie Fori wanted to learn the history of the people to whom she belonged, but from whom, 67 years earlier, she had moved away, to the heat and dust and challenges of India,” Mr. Gilbert wrote in “Letters to Auntie Fori: The 5,000-Year History of the Jewish People and Their Faith,” published in 2002.

She was born on Dec. 5, 1908, into a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family that had changed its surname from Friedmann to the less Jewish-sounding Forbath. Her mother’s family, Mr. Gilbert wrote, was one of the few Jewish families licensed, under the Austro-Hungarian empire, to use the aristocratic prefix “von.” She rarely visited a synagogue except to collect her father after services.

“She used to say, ‘Both my sister and I didn’t believe in all this stuff,’” Ashok Nehru recalled. “She said they would stand outside the synagogue, stamping their feet in the cold.”

An anti-Semitic tide was rising in Hungary, and the family was forced by law to revert to the name Friedmann. In 1919, hoping to stave off a Communist revolution, right-wing mobs roamed the streets, killing Jews.

“Once a week my father would travel to the villages to get food,” she told Mr. Gilbert. “He had a house on Lake Balaton. One summer we went there — by train — and I saw people hanging from trees. It was terrible for us children to look at.”

By the time she was 20, strict quotas had been introduced for Jewish students in Hungarian universities, and her parents sent her to the London School of Economics. There she met B. K. Nehru, a member of a distinguished Kashmiri family, whose cousin Jawaharlal was already a leader of the Indian independence movement (and would later become India’s first prime minister).

Her parents were skeptical of the match, Mr. Nehru recalled in his memoir: “How could their beautiful and lovely daughter marry a black man in a distant country of which they know nothing, and who, by his own confession, belonged to a family of jailbirds?”

His parents were skeptical as well. But when the two sets of parents met in Budapest, there was a sudden thaw, Mrs. Nehru told Mr. Gilbert.

“They were sitting in the sitting room,” she said. “I was crying in my bedroom. My future mother-in-law had to go to the loo. She came by my room — saw me crying. She said, ‘We must let them do what they want to do.’”

The Hungarian bride stepped off the ship in a sari and never looked back.

As part of a countrywide tour, she was taken by her future mother-in-law to the prison where Jawaharlal Nehru was being held by the British. Seeing that she was in tears, he later sent her a gently chastening letter, informing her: “Nehrus don’t cry in public. They keep a stiff upper lip.”

Meanwhile, her relatives and friends in Hungary were scattering. Her father was saved by his German housekeeper; her brother, an officer in the Hungarian Army, swam across the Danube to Czechoslovakia; her best friend drove across the border with her son hidden in the trunk of her car.

She was busy with her own crises in India. As partition approached, Delhi was flooded with refugees: Hindus who had been pushed out of Pakistan, Muslims who were boarding trains for Pakistan, mobs pumped with murderous rage on both sides. She learned, after she had helped families crowd onto one such train, that everyone aboard had been dragged off and killed while crossing Punjab.

“Can you imagine the horror?” she told Mr. Gilbert. “For several days we sent no train.”

For the newly arrived refugees, she began an employment campaign, opening a shop to sell the handicrafts of refugee women that grew into a vast network, the Central Cottage Industries Emporium.

She would not return to Hungary until 1949, along with three sons who had never seen her in anything but a sari.

“She used to go out every day, to meet her friends,” her son Ashok, who accompanied her on that trip, recalled. “Many of them had disappeared. Many had been raped by the Russians or killed by the Germans. They were harrowing tales. I remember her coming back crying.”

B. K. Nehru died in 2001. In addition to her son Ashok, Mrs. Nehru is survived by two other sons, Aditya and Anil; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

As the wife of a high-level dignitary, Mrs. Nehru moved from Washington, to the northeastern state of Assam, to London, but thoughts of Hungary’s Jews never entirely left her. She told Mr. Gilbert that at official receptions, she could not bring herself to shake hands with the German ambassador.

“I have a feeling of guilt,” she said. “I wasn’t there. I was safe. The guilt feeling is still with me. Why should I not have suffered?”

[sporadicwinnersong]

RIP Atal Bihari Vajpayee

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru did not believe in astrology or any sort of future predictions. But as the Prime Minister of India, Nehru had introduced Atal Bihari Vajpayee during the 1950s to a foreign dignitary as the future prime minister of the country. Vajpayee was then a first-time Member of Parliament and that too from a political party that was created to build an alternative political ideology as opposed to the Congress of Pandit Nehru. Nearly 40 years later, Vajpayee proved Nehru true and after two failed attempts, he led the first non-Congress government at the Centre to complete its full tenure. Vajpayee led an uneasy coalition of nearly two dozen parties with great poise for six years between 1998 and 2004. Many called him the greatest prime minister that India ever had with some other giving Pandit Nehru a slight edge over Vajpayee. Vajpayee was certainly the tallest leader from the RSS-BJP family Born to Krishna Devi and Krishna Bihari Vajpayee in Gwalior district of Madhya Pradesh on December 25, 1924, Atal Bihari Vajpayee became an activist during his teenage. His first ideological inclination was towards Communism. He was an active Communist teenager in the Madhya Pradesh of the 1930s, when Mahatma Gandhi was leading a formidable fight against the British colonial power. When Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement in 1942, Vajpayee had joined the agitation along with his elder brother Prem. Both were arrested and jailed. Around this time, Vajpayee was a member of the Arya Samaj's youth wing, Arya Kumar Sabha, of which he was the general secretary. After he was released from jail, Vajpayee, influenced by Babasaheb Apte, had turned towards the RSS. Vajpayee became a full member or pracharak of the RSS in 1947, the year India won Independence following a bloody Partition of the country. He wrote an emotionally charged poem on the Partition mixed Independence - 15 August Ki Pukaar (Call of 15 August). In the poem, Vajpayee gave a call for the reunification of the country and condemned violence on both sides of the newly carved border in the name of religion. For years, Vajpayee - an acclaimed poet - used to recite this poem on stage. in 1948, the RSS was banned following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. This prompted the RSS to dish out a group of committed members for politics. Vajpayee was a journalist at the time and was working for the RSS-linked newspapers. In 1951, Vajpayee was among the RSS members who were tasked with assisting Deen Dayal Upadhyay and Syama Prasad Mookerjee to form the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, the precursor to the Bharatiya Janata Party. Vajpayee was the secretary to Syama Prasad Mookerjee, when the latter set out for Srinagar from New Delhi to protest the permit system for entry into Kashmir. Mookerjee was arrested as he attempted to enter Kashmir "illegally" and later died under mysterious condition. Vajpayee had gone to see off Mookerjee at the Delhi railway station. The impression that Vajpayee carried from the series of incidents that unfolded later formed his Kashmir policy, which is often described as "Insaaniyat, Jamhooriyat, Kashmiriyat" or "humanity, democracy and preservation of Kashmiri culture". Vajpayee entered the Lok Sabha as a member for the first time in 1957. He went on to win nine more Lok Sabha elections after that. He was the foreign minister in the first non-Congress government, formed in post-Emergency years. However, the 1977-Janata Party experiment collapsed within three years and the Congress made a comeback in 1980 under Indira Gandhi. After the Janata Party broke away, the BJS reorganised itself as the BJP in 1980. Vajpayee became its founder president. In 1984, the BJP suffered a massive defeat under Vajpayee's leadership. Riding on a sympathy wave in the aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Congress had swept the Lok Sabha elections winning more than 410 seats. The BJP was reduced to just two seats. Vajpayee offered to resign. The loss under Vajpayee was to be overturned by his long-standing political companion in the RSS and the BJP - Lal Krishna Advani, who rode on a Toyota rath to mobilise Hindutva opinion for the construction of a Ram temple at Ayodhya. In 1989, the BJP emerged as the kingmaker and seven years later, Vajpayee became the "king" for 13 days. The BJP was the single-largest party in the 1996 elections but could not get alliance partners to stay in power. Learning from the 1996-experience, Vajpayee accumulated allies - from almost every state in the country. He became the prime minister for a second time in 1998 leading a big coalition - the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). But a year later, he failed to win a floor test by the narrowest possible margin - one vote - after J Jayalalithaa's AIADMK withdrew its support to the alliance. Fresh elections were held and the Vajpayee-led NDA won 303 seats in 1999. He became the first non-Congress prime minister - and also the first PM outside the Nehru-Gandhi family - to complete five years in office. His tenure as the prime minister was eventful. The Vajpayee government decided to declare to the world India's nuclear capabilities with Pokhran-II in 1998. He made attempts to establish peace with Pakistan by travelling in a bus to Lahore. However, his peace initiatives were met with Pakistani incursions that led to the Kargil war in 1999. The war caused heavy losses for Pakistan, which then turned to the US seeking its help to bring an end to the military conflict. The Kargil misadventure by Pakistan did not deter Vajpayee from inviting the man, who is held responsible for it, for peace talks. The then Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf was invited to the Agra Summit, which failed for reasons not publicly known. But Vajpayee succeeded in getting a ceasefire agreement between India and Pakistan signed in 2003. It still forms the bottomline of peace between India and Pakistan. For his political and diplomatic acumen, Vajpayee was rightly called the "Great Connector". He stitched political parties of all hues and kept them together. As foreign minister, he opened channels of communications with China and the Middle East. As prime minister, Vajpayee not only brought India and Pakistan closer despite a military conflict, but also established closer connect among the SAARC nations. He will be remembered as a great communicator and connector. #MohnishAhluwaliaNotes

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#KashmiriPandits observing #Martyrs' Day on Sept 14. It was on this day in 1989 when Pradesh #BJP Vice President, #TikaLalTaploo, a fearless leader of #Kashmiri Pandits fell to assassins’ bullets in #Srinagar. His killing set alarm bells for the entire community. #LestWeForget pic.twitter.com/rTmJFOSFpb

— Dr.Rajesh Bhat (@raajbhat) September 13, 2019