Long before former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had invoked ‘Insaniyat, Jamhuriyat, Kashmiriyat’ as fundamentals of the land, Kashmiris like the mystic Lal Ded (also known as Laaleshwari) had sown a local culture of syncretism that besets the cardinal tenets of the 'Idea of India'.
For centuries, Lal Ded was venerated equally by the Hindus and Muslims and escaped petty appropriations and proprietary claims of religious monopolists who emerged suddenly post-1947. Kashmiriyat was always about seamless inclusivity and confluent identity that always overrode religious binaries – these exclusivist binaries were introduced when one part of the land had got attacked and usurped into the so-called, ‘Land of the Pure’, ie, Pakistan.