How green is their valley?

Reactions to a delegation of Kashmiri Pandits who visited Srinagar on July 19, 2005

“The government will not take the Kashmiri Pandits back. They (the government) have made the Pandits a museum piece so that they are able to show any foreign dignitary visiting the valley that look what has happened to our people by militancy” -- Syed Ali Shah Geelani of the hardline faction of the Hurriyat Conference.

“Exchanging garlands with leaders of the moderate faction of the Hurriyat Conference cannot absolve them (Pandits)” -- The joint statement issued by four minor militant outfits -- al Nasireen, al Arifeen, Save Kashmir Movement and Farzandan-e-Milat – emphasizing that the Pandits had deserted the Muslim community during a “time of crisis”.

“Kashmiri Pandits are a part and parcel of Kashmiri society and we will bring them back” -- Hurriyat Conference leader, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq.

* * *

“We are not going back.” Sunita Tikoo’s statement left no room to manoeuvre another perspective. She spread the day’s newspaper on the table. The day’s headlines mentioned the Pulwama tragedy. “Is that where we would want to go?”

Wasn’t that home?

“In Kashmir today, everyone is a Pakistani. How do you think so many small political outfits have come up?”

During our first encounter in Delhi last month, there was no conversation. The second time we bumped into each other, she asked, “Are you a Kashmiri?” There was a certain warmth in that query even as she went on to say, “I am a Pandit.”

I asked her where I could find those who were displaced.

“Go to Amar Colony, Pamposh Enclave – there are many of them.”

That afternoon I rented a car and asked the driver to take me to Pamposh Enclave. We stopped at a store opposite a gateless entrance with the name on a board. It was confirmed that the Pandits lived there. We drove right in. There were neat-looking houses, some quite beautiful. The driver said, “Yahaan koi jhuggi nahin hai.” There has to be something. I spotted an opening between two houses where shrubbery grew askew. Perhaps they were there somewhere behind. I found nothing.



Next day I sought out Sunita. I told her I had gone there, and they were all proper houses.

“What did you expect? This was not 1947. People had begun to move things. Every Pandit had two-three bags. They were rehabilitated within a year. Our education is our strength. Jagmohan helped a great deal. Some were given two-three jobs here. You won’t find a jobless Pandit. Most are well-off. Ghar khadey kar diye eik saal mein. It has been a long time. If you are looking for those camps, you will find them only in Jammu.”

There was sure to be another voice, another place.

The voice

I did not want to go through any organisation, for one is only too aware about how they politicise ordinary human lives. It took me a while, but I managed to trace one such place in Mangolpuri. I reached a yellowing building with rust-coloured broad panes that seemed like neatly-splattered paan spit. There was a passageway and rooms on either side. One of the doors was open; it had a curtain on the outside and a wooden plank served as a safety guard. A child’s head peeped out at the sound of footsteps.

A squat woman came out from another door. I asked if she could answer some of my questions. She took me to her room. Her son was stacking things in cartons. They were moving. There was a television set. Mats were spread out on the floor with bundled-up mattresses. The desert cooler was whirring and as I sat on the divan little drops from the vent were falling on my sleeve. Vinati Kaul wiped her face with the end of her dupatta.

I noticed her gold earrings; they were unusual. There was a long chain with one end pierced into the lobe and the other running behind the ear to form a dangling ‘V’. What did it signify?

“This is our custom. Suhaag ki nishaani hai.”

Her husband was busy. He had a steady job. She worked too. “If we did not have education, we might have been forced to beg.”

Why did you leave?

“Terrorists or someone issued threats. In the ’86 riots our villages were burned. This was ‘internal’; only in ’89 outside militancy came into the picture. We began to be worried, they were giving outsiders shelter. High officials were killed, some people were blinded. We came in April 1991. For three days we were on the footpath.”

And then?

“We all stayed together in one hall. Some people would send us old clothes as though we were beggars. We burnt them. We approached the Kashmiri Samiti and they gave us this place. The other camps are in Shahdara, Patel Nagar, Sultanpuri, Krishna Nagar.”

Do you have any other facilities?

“The government initially gave us Rs. 500 (for a four member family) and rations every month. The payment was increased to Rs. 800, then 1,200, now it is 3,200. Jagmohanji was the one who pushed things. The BJP helped us a lot, giving us ghee and blankets. They would feel bad giving us aid because earlier we used to give them funds. Sahib Singh Verma, Madanlal Khurana, they got us jobs.”

And yet you say the government has done nothing?

“We left our homes, everything, we have not been compensated for that. The government is giving so many crores of rupees to Kashmir. Why? The Muslims there are well-off, what bekaari are they talking about? They start businesses. They are willing to buy our houses at cheap rates and make a profit.”

But you people had left…

“Some were returning till 1993 to collect their things and selling their homes. The common people too wanted us to leave. This Mufti Mohammed is number one communal. His daughter Mehbooba has been given talaq. Do you know why she covers her head? No, it is not because of Islam…her sisters don’t…it is because her husband cut off one ear. That Rubaiya was not even kidnapped. It was all staged.”

And Dr. Farooq Abdullah?

“We have fewer problems with him because his father Sheikh Abdullah was a nice man.”

What about the militant outfits?

“The JKLF is secular. People like Yasin Malik and Shabbir Shah are nice; Shabbir was in college with me.”

You did say that initially terrorism in the Valley was local, so would you not blame these people too?

“As individuals they cannot do anything because their organisations are opposed.”

There is a peace process…

“What peace process? Militancy will increase. Inter-marriages across the border will take place. We will have no chance to return. A 16-year old Kashmiri today does not even know what a Pandit is.”

Many 16-year-olds are lured into militant organisations due to unemployment or because they have seen their family members killed. Maybe the locals there too are victims of terrorism and some are not living in the Valley for the same reason as you?

“The Muslims come here to start businesses and make money, they are not unemployed.”

Do you work?

“We had education or else we might have had to beg. I did not have to make a future, so I kept changing jobs. I now have a steady income. Government employees initially earned about Rs. 8000-9000. Some people were recruited in private firms. My son is handicapped, he is applying for a phone booth.”

And you are moving from here?

“The Government has asked us to leave within 30 days. What have they given us? We have been given a DDA place in Dwarka. They give us incomplete homes, the doors are not fixed. We will have to pay Rs. 2000 per month in instalments.”

(At this point, she took me out and showed me open wires and peeling plasterwork; we went to the common toilets – there was the familiar stink; again she showed me the cracks. I tried to tell myself that for people who were not used to it, this could be horrible, I must not judge their problems by what I had seen two days ago when I was part of a slum rehab programme.)

I told her, instead, about Pamposh Enclave. The houses there were nice.

“There are Pandits from different places, they are not like us. Government employees and people in good positions used facilities reserved for us.”

What about funds?

“A lot of aid comes from abroad, but it goes to the Samiti, it does not come to us.”

Will you return home?

“No question of leaving here.”

Double speak

If one removes oneself from such individual traumas and looks a bit deeper, it is possible to see the contradictory positions on different issues taken by those who claim to speak on behalf of the community.

Sovereignty

While we hold Pakistan responsible for occupying a part of Kashmir (and rightly so) and blame the Valley population for wanting a separate identity, there is little anyone says about the cockiness with which not only was the Panun Kashmir movement born, but the way it goes about propagating its ideology. It smartly obfuscates the issue by adding its dose of patriotic fervour.

On December 28, 1991, the Margdarshan Resolution was passed. Watch out for the double-speak: Kuldeep Raina, in the General Secretary’s Report, talks about “retrieving Kashmir as a nationalist bastion” and then goes on to mention the determination “to carve out a union territory on the soil of Kashmir”.

Yet, they want to be called refugees? What right do they have to crib about Article 370, then? The Pandits want the freedom to create their own homeland and bring in technology and industry. Where will this come from when they are complaining about the squalid conditions they are living in? They want to bring back secularism in the State, which is so ironical considering they are asking for a separation on the basis of their religious identity. And they say they will act as a “buffer against the export of jehad into India”. They who fled? Who is going to finance them?

Hari Jaising in his book, ‘Kashmir: A Tale of Shame’, observed, “Strangely, the Pandits were the first to oppose the entry of ‘foreigners’ (i.e. the Punjabis) into the Valley after partition. They were afraid of losing their jobs. This shows how narrow and time-serving their aims were.”

It must also be emphasised that while they go around declaring that Article 370 only increases the Muslim stronghold -- it IS a Muslim-majority state, the only one in the country -- they had no problem flashing their Hindu identity. (All this talk of Kashmiriat and Sufi-Rishi bhai-bhai is just that.) A senior national coordinator of Panun Kashmir, Kamal Hak, had said in an interview, “Since 1990-1991, Panun Kashmir had a lot of hope on the BJP since it declared itself a champion of the Hindus. The party was then striving for consolidation of the Hindu ethos in India.”

Status and squabbles

The problem is the Pandits who claim to be voiceless in fact use this silence in unusual ways. Anupam Kher, who has lived in Simla and Mumbai, decided one day to become a spokesman. When Mufti Mohammed Sayeed talked about the possibility of the Hindi movie people shooting in the State, Kher shot back, “Mufti sahab, before seeking Bollywood, spend some time in the camps of homeless Kashmiri Pandits. The recently appointed president of Brazil went to the slums where he had grown up. Salve the wounds of those refugees before you invite us to shoot in Kashmir.”

When was the last time Kher visited a refugee camp? True, he is an actor and it is not necessarily his job, but trying to get political mileage without visiting the scene of action will not help. Besides, before shooting in England, would he ask Tony Blair to salve the wounds of those from the subcontinent who are suffering the ignominy of racial profiling? Instead of throwing such hollow challenges, this was the moment to grab. The Pandits could have taken a crew there, employed those in the camps and sent out a message of hope and unity.

But sense in the time of status quoism does not sound trendy enough. Ajay Raina, a documentary film-maker, has put up a long letter in response to mine on The Asian Age website. At one point he says, “It may be true, Pandits have great support from abroad, but it is the kind of support that actually pales in comparison with the support Khalistanis had from Canada, US and UK. It pales in comparison with the support Kashmiri secessionists have from UK Muslims, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, or even Al Qaeda. But, does she ever wonder, why unlike Kashmiri Muslims, and Khalistanis, Pandits (inspite of the great support they have from abroad) never took up a gun to kill a Muslim in revenge?”

This reveals a ‘yours is bigger than mine’ mindset and little else. And which Muslims would they kill in revenge? Can even the local Muslims in Kashmir kill the militants, unless they end up joining them? Is it mere naiveté when he states, “Compared to what happened with the minorities in Kashmir, the Gujarat carnage was just that, a carnage, a bloody but unsuccessful attempt at a similar kind of cleansing 12 years after”? Do these people who speak up for their community not realise the difference between terrorism and state-sponsored ethnic cleansing?

He further adds, “I was there in Kashmir, the day 24 unsuspecting Kashmiri Pandits were massacred. They were not professionals, or teachers. They did not have any supporters abroad or even in the Pandit refugee camps. They had no say in the government. They were farmers. They owned orchards and farms. They were at the mercy of their neighbours.”

This only proves that they do own farms and are not all in camps, and certainly not “on the roadside”. And instead of talking about being at the mercy of anyone, one should note that there has been a constant battle going on within the Pandit community, which was exposed in the Margdarshan Resolution.

As Hari Jaising had written, “Adversity has not forced them to forge a new destiny, but only to find new causes to divide themselves.”

Militants

Yasin Malik recently said in a TV interview that merely the return of Pandits would not bring back normalcy. The Kashmir issue is far more complicated than that.

When people like Ashok Pandit (“We should have perhaps gone the way of the Yasin Maliks and Shabir Shahs. Perhaps the government would have taken us more seriously then”) and Ajay Raina (“they were asked to pack up and leave by Yasin Malik’s of Kashmir, the darlings of Pakistan”) try to convey something, paradoxes go into delightful paroxysms either with their active participation or right under their noses.

Not only did the Pandit delegation visit Kashmir and garland some of the “darlings of Pakistan”, but Kamal Hak had said much earlier that if a tripartite solution is sought with the Hurriyat entering the picture, then “there is need for a Panun Kashmir team to visit Pakistan to apprise the bulk of its population of the pitiable plight we have been suffering for a decade.” His organisation had even talked to the Pakistani human rights activist, Asma Jehangir.

Nobody questions their stand.

Solitary reapers

1989. 1,600 violent incidents, including 351 bomb blasts.
January 1990. 319 violent incidents, 21 armed attacks, 114 bomb blasts, 112 acts of arson and 12 outbreaks of mob violence.

Were all the victims Pandits?

We hear statements like, “The image of a safe Kashmir is one that has been created by the central and state governments. The number of tourists going to Kashmir is not an indication of how safe the place is. The militants in Kashmir have a problem with the Kashmiri Pandits. The attacks and killings have been going on for the past 15 years.”

As I have written earlier, had they stayed back they might have no doubt been under threat from terrorists as are the rest. But no Kashmiri Pandit has ever been arrested by government organisations, not even journalists for downloading research material on militant outfits, as Iftikhar Gilani was. Therefore, it is unfortunate that such groups make it seem like the local population has talked about the extermination of Hindus.

People like Ajay Raina cover their flanks spawning the whole gamut between being “victims” and “pawns”: “The bitter truth about us is that after the first kicking out by the majority community of Kashmir, we continue to be kicked around by Indians of all hues. Hindutatva vadis, congressi’s, leftists, liberals, Muslims, seculars, pseudo-seculars; all have used the issue of our exodus to suit their own political agenda.”

He forgets to mention that Kashmiri Pandits themselves observe September 14 as Martyr’s Day not to commemorate innocents but the murder in 1989 of the BJP vice-president and its national executive member, Tika Lal Taploo. (In the Valley, on the other hand, July 13 is commemorated as Martyrs Day in remembrance of a dozen Kashmiris who were killed in 1931 by the Dogra regime outside the Central jail in Srinagar.)

There is more to come: “It suits the leftist-liberals to blame our plight on the machinations of some Jagmohan.”

Suddenly, it becomes some Jagmohan’s machinations. Talk to the Pandits who have been rehabilitated. And, as K.N. Pandita wrote from New York, “The works of public welfare which Mr Jagmohan did for Kashmir during his tenure endeared him to the masses in Kashmir to the extent that Muslim women in Srinagar sang his praises as part of contemporary folklore (wanwun).” This would means the locals would do what he wanted!

More double-speak from Kuldeep Raina who has talked about a separate state declaring, “Those who are working against Panun Kashmir are the same people who are bent upon sabotaging the nationalist initiatives on Kashmir.”

One of the aims of the organisation is to sensitise the global community that “it was not Kashmiri Muslims but the ethnically-cleansed community of Kashmiri Hindus that was the real victim of human rights violations and it was a key factor in any solution to Kashmir”.

Here are some figures:

Total Killings till 2005 (including custodial killings) - 89,742
Custodial Killings- 6,771
Civilians Arrested- 110,100
Structures Arsoned / Destroyed -104,866
Women Widowed- 22,240
Children Orphaned -106,353
Women gang-raped / molested- 9,579

This averages over 5,500 deaths a day. How many Pandits are there in the Valley?

Amnesty International has referred to the massacre at Chitthisinghpora in which 36 Sikh civilians were killed in March 2000, and there has been no enquiry into it. Does this hold any interest for the Pandits?

Are they concerned about the issue of surrendered militants? One police officer told Human Rights Watch/Asia, “The government has recruited criminals who loot and steal and extort and these criminals are living in security force camps. This is the third force—the renegades. It is completely true that they exist...It is 100 percent true that police investigate crimes, arrest individuals and then the army interferes and lets them go so they can work with the army as renegade forces.”

The earlier Pandit grouse was that their problems started after Partition. Some details: Yuvraj Karan Singh took over as Regent in 1950 and when hereditary rule was abolished two years later he was sworn in as sadar-e-riyasat. In 1961, he was recognised as the Maharaja of the State by the Indian government. So, where was the “persecution by Muslims” of the Pandits? Why were they not protected then? Why have they woken up now?

Is this only their problem? If they fled, then who is being killed? How many Pandits mourn for their Kashmiri brothers and sisters?

The terrorists are seen as just that. Politicians are thrown out after elections. How does one deal with groups for whom, from the convenience of greener pastures, their desolate valley is no more home – it is a stomping ground for assertion and politicking?

They expect sensitivity from others. Before asking for an apology from me, will they be kind enough to ask the Panun Kashmir Movement to apologise for talking with impunity about a separate homeland?