Rughonath Vaishnavi

Rughonath Vaishnavi (? -22 November 1996) was a Kashmiri Pandit politician who co-founded the Jammu and Kashmir Political Conference along with Ghulam Mohiuddin Karra. A vocal advocate of Kashmir's right to self-determination, he expressed life-long solidarity with Kashmiri Muslims.

Early life and education In 1928, Vaishnavi—then, barely out of high school—had his first brush with politics as a supporter of India's movement to independence. Disillusioned with socio-religious orthodoxy, he collaborated with Kashyap Bandhu and Jiya Lal Kilam to reform regressive Hindu customs concerning dowry and widow-remarriage. He went on to pursue his L.LB from University of Allahabad.

Politics

National Conference Vaishnavi returned to Kashmir in 1938. In 1941, he joined the National Conference (NC) and got nominated to the Working Committee. The entire top rung of the party including Vaishnavi was incarcerated at Udhampur Jail; with the Fundamental Rights governing India not yet being deployed to Kashmir, it would be long before he secured release. Mona Bhan—a cultural anthropologist at DePauw University—is her granddaughter and views India to be an occupational regime in Kashmir. She used to live with Vaishnavi and was a part of the Azaadi-marches in her school days during the Pandit Exodus. Bhan urges using Vaishnavi's experience to reformulate commonly held notions about Kashmiri struggle for Azaadi being an exclusively Muslim agenda, as portrayed by India under the pretext of combating Islamic radicalism.