Nehru's 97 Major Blunders

by Rajnikant Puranik

Rinchin was a Buddhist from Ladakh. Hinduism (Shaivism) was then the dominant religion in Kashmir. Islam was on the fringe, and was at the time being propagated by Saiyyid Bilal Shah, popular as Bulbul Shah. After Sahadev fled and Dulacha left, Sahadev’s Army Chief, Ramchandra, occupied the throne of Kashmir. But Rinchin, who had a key post in Sahadev’s administration, plotted and eliminated Ramchandra, and sat in his place in 1320 CE. To pacify the public provoked by the misdeed, Rinchin married Kotarani, daughter of Ramchandra. At Kotarani’s behest, discarding Buddhism, Rinchin adopted Shaivism to become acceptable to the public. But the Kashmiri Pandits refused to accept him in their fold, saying that his conversion was not feasible—a legend says they couldn’t decide which caste to put him in. As a reaction to the rebuff, and at the instance of Shah Mir, Rinchin then approached Bulbul Shah, who converted him to Islam, and gave him the name Sultan Malik Sadruddin. Rinchin later built a mosque called the Bodro Masjid, venerated both by the Ladakh Buddhists and the Kashmiri Muslims. With the king converted to Islam, many others followed. And thus Islam spread in the Kashmir Valley. This is how Pandits scored a self-goal. So, in a way, the Kashmiri Pandits have themselves to blame for inadvertently giving a push to the Islamisation of the Valley, though it was the later state-backed campaign—through preaching, patronage, incentives, torture and forced conversions—that redu...