SRI SRI IN SRINAGAR
Another Sri Sri event runs into a controversy
Reports of a ruckus at ‘Paigam-eMohabbat, Peace in Paradise’, a peace meet in Srinagar, where Art of Living (AoL) founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar was the main speaker, have predictably set off contesting narratives of how it all really played out.
Senior AoL representatives have vehemently denied media accounts that a section of the audience left the Shere-Kashmir International Convention Centre (SKICC), the venue of the event on March 12, before the spiritual leader could finish his address. National and local dailies also quoted several people at the event complaining they had been “tricked” into attending with promised gifts of cricket kits, sewing machines and bank loan waivers.
A group of youngsters, reportedly, also briefly indulged in sloganeering for Zakir Musa, a former Hizbul Mujahideen commander who now claims to represent ISIS in the Valley.
But Sanjay Kumar, AoL’s representative in J&K, claims there was no trouble at all. Sri Sri, he says, was invited to the event in Srinagar by a civil society coordination committee with members from both Kashmir and Jammu. “The audience of nearly 10,000 had people from Kulgam, Pulwama, Shopian and Anantnag, as also Gujjar and Bakkarwal families from remote areas of Tangdhar and Kupwara,” he says.
AoL, Kumar says, has an MoU with the Union ministry of skill development & entrepreneurship to collaborate with over 500 government-aided skill development centres in the state to facilitate training and job placements for Kashmiri youth outside J&K. “We’ve trained over a thousand youngsters at our Bengaluru skill centre,” he says.
Sheikh Imran, who heads the upcoming political party People’s Alliance, and was part of the coordination committee that invited Sri Sri to Srinagar, also denies the media reports. He says Paigam-e-Mohabbat was a follow-up to a similar event at AoL’s Bengaluru ashram in November last year. He claims it was attended by nearly 200 J&K families. “It was they who asked guruji to come to the Valley,” Imran says.
Kumar does not entirely deny that slogans were heard. “The group that left the venue early and was confused as sloganeers,” the AoL representative says, “was, in fact, a delegation of Gujjars who rushed out in the hope of a separate meeting with Sri Sri at the Lalit Hotel (where he stayed in Srinagar).”
Kumar also spoke of attempts by the J&K police to discourage people from attending the event. “There were just about 10 policemen at the entrance [of the convention centre] and they were trying to turn people away,” he says. But there is no way an event of this magnitude (10,000 invitees) could have been pulled off without the blessings of the Centre and the state government.
To the charge of luring people to the event with false promises, Faisal Mohammad, a man from Pulwama who runs a skill centre in Srinagar, says: “First the media insults Kashmiri youth by saying we’re pelting stones for Rs 500. Now they accuse us of going to a peace meet to get cricket bats and other gifts. You think Kashmiris are stupid?”
There hasn’t been a peep out of Mehbooba Mufti. Perhaps the chief minister was too preoccupied with the other storm in Srinagar, stirred by her finance minister Haseeb Drabu.
SOME REPORTS SAID PEOPLE WERE ‘TRICKED’ INTO ATTENDING WITH PROMISED GIFTS OF CRICKET BATS, SEWING MACHINES