Harkrishan Singh Surjeet once known as an Akali Communist and then as a dubious power broker had been overseeing the functioning of his Party unit in Kashmir and directing its affairs prior to the split of the Communist Party and continued with the over-lordship even after the Party floundered into groups and sub-groups. His Jaunts between Delhi and Kashmir undertaken with the objective of proliferating and strengthening the base of CPI (M) unit in Kashmir and his successes and failures in this behalf were within the knowledge of people interested in political affairs.

 

 

Born in March 1916 into a small peasant family in Rupowal, a village in eastern Punjab, Surjeet joined the Communist Party of India in the mid-1930s. Following the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the CPI's line changed into support for what had now become the "people's war" and CPI leaders, including Surjeet, who were imprisoned by the British were released in 1942. By 1944 Surjeet was propounding his own thesis for a Sikh homeland on the model of the Pakistan being proposed by the Muslim League. But Surjeet's idea was firmly squashed by Rajani Palme Dutt, the Communist party of Great Britain's chief ideologue, who for many years supervised the CPI on behalf of Stalin's Comintern.

 

 

By 1952 Surjeet was general secretary of the Punjab CPI and was elected to the Punjab legislative assembly (1954-59). But in the early 1960s the Sino-Soviet split in global communism triggered a crisis in the CPI. This was exacerbated in 1962 by the six-week Indo-Chinese war. Many CPI leaders, including Surjeet, backed China and were imprisoned. Two years later a faction including Surjeet broke away to set up the CPI (M). In 1967 Surjeet was elected to the Punjab legislative assembly for the CPI (M), serving until 1972. From 1978 until 1982 he was a member of the Indian parliament's upper house.

 

 

 

As was common knowledge, his sphere of activities in Kashmir had been limited to a house in Khanyar, Srinagar, which was owned by Yusuf Zargar, a Muslim activist, but a comrade in Communist parlance. It was at the same house situated within the tangle of narrow lanes of the locality that Comrade Surjeet dilating on the political scenario of Kashmir was said to have expressed his shirking doubts about the relevance and efficacy of Article 370 and was said to have advocated its repeal. The meeting though not largely attended was suddenly wound up when hundreds of Muslims lying in wait surrounded the house and lapidated it and let loose a barrage of abuse and curse against the owner of the house and filthily denounced Surjeet, his Party and the atheistic philosophy of Marx in so loud tones as to rend the sky.

 

The Scene was set for manhandling the Comrades. But, before Comrade Surjeet could be bashed and thrashed in the native Muslim fashion, his pantrymen, pale and panting, led him out of the house through the back-yard door merging into the labyrinthine of lanes and drains to the house of a Kashmiri Pandit, late J.L. Dhar, not a comrade, where he cooled his heels and felt safe and secure and reassured. Invested with an exceptional capacity of mind and intelligence, Surjeet should have promptly measured the trend of ominous events shaping in the secular skies of Kashmir and despairing as it is he without touching the hornet's nest maintained wooden silence and thought it highly prudent and sagacious not to broach the subject with the powers that be then at the Central capital and perhaps fearing loss of face concealed the incident fraught with nefarious designs of ominous proportions even from ills own party circles to which he was responsible if responsibility is a principle informing the Communist politics.

 

The Muslims who had surrounded the house as the venue of Communist activists and had virtually bade for their blood were the same fanatic brigands churned out from the Madrasas functioning as the seminaries of fanaticism and bigotry and upholding the agenda of converting the valley into a haven of Islam through its annexation with Pakistan.

 

Aware as every cawing crow is of the tact that Kashmiri Pandits as a distinctive religious minority have been expelled from their native birth-place lock, stock and barrel by the armed Muslim killers earning not covert but overt support and collaboration from large sections of Muslim majority, but comrade Surjeet set on the trail of faceless opportunist refused to identify and cognise the stark reality and call a spade a spade.

 

If he did, the apple-cart of hollow secularism as conceived and practised in the country would have turned turtle and that is why he and his party as votaries of the same phoney secularism did not politically necessary and expedient to issue out a single statement on the cruel expulsion of the entire Hindu minority from the Muslim Kashmir. He could be unflinching in his support to the creation of Malappuram, a citadel of Islamic Sevak Sangh, but he did not afford pay even lip-service to the cause of the three lakh Hindu refugees wallowing in dust and dirt lest it should have tainted his secular image which in fact was nothing more than a mask to conceal his anti-Hindu motivations.