Ranbir Singh Pathania
mlaudhampureast@gmail.com
“Vande Mataram is not merely a song; it is the dream of India’s freedom itself,” Rabindranath Tagore had once observed.
Across the national movement, this was not a Hindu chant or a Hindu war cry. It was a civilisational invocation. It was recited by those who challenged colonialism with the certainty of death and the clarity of conviction. Ashfaqullah Khan – the martyr of the Kakori case – invoked it from jail. Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan – the Frontier Gandhi – invoked it in public mobilisation. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad treated it as part of the emotional vocabulary of anti-colonial Indian nationalism. For them, this was not a clash with Islam. For them, this was part of the composite spiritual vocabulary of a free India in the making.
Yet, in 2025, in Srinagar, an issue was sprung – without context, genealogy, intellectual preparation – that Vande Mataram “goes against Tauheed”. No jurist of Islam, no historian of Islam, no philosopher of Islam, ever said this in 100 years. Suddenly, it is being said – today.
It is an engineered flashpoint.
It is constructed outrage.
It is a controversy out of thin air.
And once again – leaders who ought to know better – Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti – did not examine the provenance and seriousness of this claim. They joined the very fringe that has been politically irrelevant for a decade now. They followed it as ceremoniously as mice follow a Pied Piper.
In this sense, nobody in Kashmir “asked” for this.
Nobody in Kashmir “felt” this.
This did not come from the social DNA of Kashmir.
It came from the last surviving islands of fear-extraction politics.
The deeper question therefore is:
Why is manufactured outrage trying to override Kashmir’s civilisational archive?
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Kashmir’s actual civilisational heritage is plural, polyphonic, and syncretic
Kashmir’s intellectual foundations do not belong to any one religion.
They belong to the search of knowledge itself.
Abhinavagupta – the philosopher-aesthetician of the 10-11th century – did not write for a sect. He wrote for consciousness. His Tantraloka remains one of the most sophisticated metaphysical works produced anywhere in the world.
Nund Rishi (Sheikh Noor-ud-Din Noorani) and Lal Ded – two names inseparable from Kashmir’s memory – represent the extraordinary confluence where the metaphysics of Islam and the metaphysics of Shaivism do not collide; they converse. They do not negate; they co-create.
Shah Hamdani’s arrival in Kashmir in the 14th century was not with violence. It was with the ethics of craft guilds, illumination and adab. Carved wood, papier-mâché, silk – these were the cultural imports Hamdani institutionalised. Islam came here not as a sword but as a civilisation of artisanship.
Before that – in the early centuries – Ramanujacharya had come to Kashmir. Hiuen Tsang – the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim-scholar – wrote of the grandeur of learning centres in Kashmir. Alberuni recorded and studied the Sanskrit knowledge systems of the Valley. The University of Sharda Peeth was one of the great learning centres of the subcontinent – where Sanskrit sutra literature was not only preserved but expanded. Even into the 19th century, Maharaja Ranbir Singh supported Sanskrit pathshalas. Under Budshah (Zain-ul-Abidin), Sanskrit Paathshalas co-existed with madrasas.
This is the deeper truth:
Kashmir was always a seedbed of syncretic learning.
It was a laboratory where Indian philosophy tested its hypotheses.
It was a valley where ideas travelled – and did not die.
It was a civilisation in conversation with other civilisations.
This is the real Kashmir. And this is the Kashmir that manufactured controversies are trying to suffocate.
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The Amarnath Land case: a case study in politicised fear
When the Amarnath Yatra Board sought mere hectares of non-forest land for temporary amenities, it was converted into a crisis. “Not an inch shall be given,” was the cry. But this was not a cry of law. This was the cry of suspicion.
Similarly, when Rajpariangini Cooperative was conceived in the 1980s – a simple housing cooperative, conceptualised for superannuating IAS officers, who had served India for 30-35 years – it was projected as a conspiracy against “identity”. The fear was not real. The fear was manufactured.
A region that fears benign diversity will lose intellectual capital.
And will lose dignity.
What is more self-contradictory than a Valley that invokes Abhinavagupta and Lal Ded and Shah Hamdani – and then trembles when pilgrims, professors or post-retirement civil servants seek legitimate access to space in the Valley?
This is not Kashmir.
This is political narrowness masquerading as cultural anxiety.
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The deeper paradox of Article 370
An argument is rented every now and then,
“Delhi destroyed Article 370.”
But constitutional history is unequivocal:
Article 370 was labelled temporary by the Constituent Assembly’s own text.
What collapsed Article 370 was not Delhi alone.
It was its own internal contradictions.
When a right that was meant to safeguard diversity becomes a tool to block diversity, it begins to lose legitimacy. When a provision that was meant to protect autonomy becomes a wall against integration, it begins to lose justification.
Article 370 died intellectually – before it died legally.
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Today’s Kashmir is not yesterday’s Kashmir
The young Kashmiri is not looking for a theology of grievance anymore.
He is looking for mobility.
He is looking for capital.
He is looking for exposure.
He knows that the Valley cannot survive as an island of linguistic or cultural autarky. He knows that only by inviting the world, not by fearing the world, will Kashmir re-enter the civilisational league of relevance.
The future discourse of Kashmir will not be shaped by retired fundamentalists. It will be shaped by the young Kashmiri who will ask the much harder question:
“Is your idea adding anything to my future?”
If the old voices have no answer – then irrelevance is their destiny.
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Kashmir will return to its civilisational defaults
Every soil breeds what it is prepared to nurture.
Kashmir’s soil is prepared for synthesis.
Kashmir’s soil is prepared for scholarship.
Kashmir’s soil is prepared for the aesthetics of plurality.
Fundamentalism is an import.
It is not native.
Manufactured controversies will come.
They will thicken a news cycle.
And they will evaporate.
Because a slogan cannot defeat a civilisation.
Because the real Kashmir is not afraid of Vande Mataram.
Because the real Kashmir belongs to Abhinavagupta, Lal Ded, Shah Hamdani and Nund Rishi – who are the permanent shareholders of Kashmir’s soul.
The rest are transient.
They will go.
And Kashmir – will stay.
(The author is member of Legislative Assembly of J & K.)
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