Bhalessa is settled in rural most realty of Jammu and Kashmir. It has many sorts of roots to accomplish the desirable destination. Full of awe hopeful mountains and having a Brobdingnagian possibleness of business here, the narrowing agency snaked its artifact finished towering slopes, throwing up large clouds of dust. It passed by lowercase hamlets, comprising a pair of houses shapely around pagoda-shaped mosques and box-like temples with sloping roofs prefabricated of corrugated shackle Bhalessa is famous for tralatitious communal hormony.
Owing to the dedication and shared discernment of the Hindoo Islamic secular acquisition the wicked designs has been wiped and topical inhabitants pleased their tending towards the higher objectives. Bhalessa has a flush history. The Atlantic derivative its study from its grouping “Bhalay Loug” (The correct grouping with correct destiny)- The grouping employed and inhibiting without some semi political mileage.The digit communities move to springy unitedly in the aforementioned towns and villages in qualifying peace, beside the independent tendencies of wicked designs current here.Bhalessa is flooded of meadows popularly famous as Dhar same Kanthi, Soin Bhagar, Roharhi, Dagan, Bal Padri, etc. the Atlantic is mountainous, it has many sort of trekking routes which transfer finished places with unlikely enthralling scenic beauty.
Bhalessa is digit of the most far and outback parts of Doda. Straddling the abut with Chamba in Himachal Pradesh, it has a Islamic majority, with a Hindoo eld of a lowercase more than a ordinal of the population.The story of Bhalessa and Bhaderwah dates backwards to 200 B.C. When the reverend religion person Nagsena was solicited to a communicating by power Mender in his hall at Sakla.Kishtwar.
The motorable agency from Thathri to Gandoh is in the impact of up rank which when completed, module attain agency travelling from Thathri to Gandoh shorter and more favourable as compared to travelling to Bhaderwah. Thus, on the foundation of closeness and administrative lavatory Tehsil Thathri is in fireman closeness to Gandoh than Bhaderwah and it module be in the large interests of the open of Tehsil Thathri that it is prefabricated conception of newborn Sub-Division Gandoh.The towering town of Bhalessa, thickly carpeted with evergreen forests and dotted with tiny hamlets, is home to roughly equal numbers of Hindus and Muslims, Besides walls of suspicion strong ties bind other Hindus and Muslims and have halted the complete polarisation of the populace. This is something that I’ve been attempting to study since long. A township well knitted by historical kalgoni temple and Markazi Jamia Masjid managed by Sanathan Dharam Sabha and Temari Committee.
The people in community social work, Aman Committees of hindu and Muslim populace presents a very interesting picture and reveal the massage of brotherhood.
In his article Youginder Sikand- a writer par excellence working in Jamia Millia Islamia New Delhi has conducted an extensive tour of the area to study Hindu Muslim relations in Bhalessa, pointed that the people of the area owe peace and end the nefarious designs. The story of yoginder Sikand in his articles entitled “Hundu Muslim relations enthralled me. The story goes like this…..!
“For the last five years, things began limping back to a semblance of ‘normality’ in Bhalessa. The number of killings registered a rapid decline. Long spells of curfew were done away with. As were the army checkpoints that had come up at every kilometer or so on the road connecting Bhalessa with Doda and Jammu. My friends in Doda, Hindus and Muslims, were ecstatic about the prospects of peace. But now, with the ongoing agitation in Jammu and in Kashmir over the Amarnath yatra, that might be a mere chimera if things are allowed to spin out of control, as they indeed seem to be”.
Yogi- A good friend of mine shared with me during my interaction with him as like this:-
“It was a little after noon that we arrived in Bhatyas, a settlement consisting of a row of houses and shops along the main road, some seven kilometers from main town. Exhausted and ravenous, we entered a tea-shop, whose amiable owner rustled up for us a sumptuous meal of rajma-chawal, standard fare in these parts.”
despite the walls of suspicion that have come up between local Hindus and Muslims in early years, the two communities continue to live together in the same towns and villages in relative peace, barring occasional incidents. While sporadic killings of civilians lead to further polarisation and mistrust, there are other forces that are at work that help maintain centuries’-old bonds between Hindus and Muslims in this area.
Yogi’s amazing experience with Local Sufi:
When yogi finally arrived at Akhiyarpur and entered Haji Sahib’s room, he was sitting in a corner on a mattress with a crowd of supplicants in rows in front of him. Most of them were Muslims, but some were Hindus, too. A few of them had come from so far as Poonch and Kathua in the hope of a miraculous cure to their woes. One by one they narrated their troubles to Haji Sahib in hushed tones. He listened to each of them patiently, advising them on what to do.
After the last of his other visitors had left, Haji Saheb turned towards Yogi. His eyes were soft, yet sad, gentle and the same time firm and determined. He looked considerably younger than the roughly seventy that they were told he was.
A day long conversation turned to the ongoing conflict in the region. Hindus and Muslims, Haji Sahib assured Yogi, had traditionally lived harmoniously in the area, even in the tumultuous days of the Partition. Killing an innocent person, he referred to the Qur’an as saying, is tantamount to slaying the whole of humankind. That principle applied in every case, he stressed, when Yogi asked him about the atrocities committed both by militants as well as Indian soldiers, which were not few in number. ‘May God grant the world His blessings’, he cryptically replied in response to my query about the possibility of a realistic resolution to the Kashmir conflict.
An hour later they found themselves snuggled under layers of thick cotton quilts, tucking into a sumptuous meal in the house of the principal of Haji Sahib’s school. The principal and his son were impeccable hosts, and despite the fact that we were complete strangers and uninvited guests we were treated like some long-lost friends.
They talked late into the night, mostly on the ongoing conflict and the impact this had had on Hindu-Muslim relations. Before we finally retired for the night, the principal read out to us a letter written by him and recently published in a Jammu-based Urdu newspaper.
The letter stated, Jammu town observed a complete shut-down. That very morning the principal’s grandson, a student in Jammu University, had to appear for an important examination.
He assumed that because of the strike the examination had been postponed. In the afternoon, he rang up a Hindu friend of his, who told him, to his shock, that the examination was actually on schedule and that he had just entered the examination hall. No vehicles were plying in the streets that day and the principal’s son had no way out to reach the university. However, his friend magnanimously rushed out of the examination hall and sped on his motorcycle all the way to his house and picked him. They arrived in the examination hall just in time to write their paper. ‘Such examples of Hindu-Muslim harmony and friendship must be regularly highlighted in the press’, the letter stressed. It concluded with a line in which the principal revealed that he had sent an appeal to the Chief Minister to announce a reward to his grandson’s Hindu friend for having ’served as a model of communal harmony’.
The next morning, after a heavy breakfast which we had to accept after much protest, we trudged down the mountain back to the main road to head back to Doda town. And as the principal hugged me in farewell, I promised him that I would, in my own modest way, do what he had advised in his letter: to highlight this instance of love and friendship beyond communal boundaries as a lesson that others could emulate.
Besides the divisive policies of nefarious designs, communal identities have become increasingly polarized, large numbers of Hindus and Muslims still privately insist on the need for cordial relations and do their own bit in that regard in their own ways: Jointly demonstrating against the slaughter of innocent villagers in a remote village, Aman Committee jointly spearheaded by the elderly and eminent masses of Bhalessa is a major revolt against such communal frenzy. People are busy in pooling resources to rescue people trapped in an avalanche or injured in a road mishaps, or imparting higher education to their children who before a recent decade, during the darkest nights, had to hide them in their chests in order to escape the claws of death looming over their heads
The story is narrated by the author after the prior meeting with Yoginder Sikand-Who is serving as Professor in India’s Jamia Millia Islamia University New Delhi.
