Author: K. P. S. Gill
Publication: South Asia Terrorism
Portal
Date:
URL: http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/kpsgill/2003/chapter9.htm
Since late 1989, the Indian State
of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has been in the grip of a vicious
movement of Islamist extremist terrorism. As many as 36,289 [till December
30, 2003, Source: www.satp.org] lives have been lost in this conflict over
nearly 14 years of a sub-conventional war that has inflicted enormous suffering
on the people of the State, and transformed this confrontation between
South Asia's traditional rivals into a potential nuclear flashpoint.
Among the worst victims of this
conflict are the Kashmiri Pandits, descendents of Hindu priests and among
the original inhabitants of the Kashmir Valley, with a recorded history
of over 5,000 years. Over the millennia, this community has been integral
not only to the cultural and intellectual life of the people of this region,
but the bulwark of its administration and economic development as well.
The Pandits have now become the targets and victims of one of the most
successful, though little-known, campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the world.
Pogroms of a far lesser magnitude in other parts of the world have attracted
international attention, censure and action in support of the victim communities,
but this is an insidious campaign that has passed virtually unnoticed,
and on which the world remains silent. Among the complex reasons for this
neglect is, perhaps, the nature of this community itself: where other campaigns
of ethnic cleansing have invariably provoked at least some retaliatory
violence, the deep tradition and culture of non-violence among the Kashmiri
Pandits has made them accept their suffering in silence, with not a single
act of retaliatory violence on record.
January 19, 2003, marked thirteen
years since what is generally recognized as the beginning of this process
of ethnic cleansing as a result of which the Kashmiri Pandits were hounded
out of the Kashmir Valley. On this day in 1990, a Kashmiri Pandit nurse
working at the Soura Medical College Hospital in Srinagar was raped and
later killed by Pakistan-backed terrorists. The incident was preceded by
massacres of Pandit families in the Telwani and Sangrama villages of Budgam
district and other places in the Kashmir Valley. While the Jammu &
Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) claimed a 'secular' agenda of liberation
from Indian rule, the terrorist intent was clearly to drive non-Muslim
'infidels' out of the State and establish Nizam-e- Mustafa (literally,
the Order of the Prophet; government according to the Shariah). Accounts
of Pandits from this traumatic period reveal that it was not unusual to
see posters and announcements - including many articles and declarations
in local newspapers - telling them to leave the Valley. Pandit properties
were either destroyed or taken over by terrorists or by local Muslims,
and there was a continuous succession of brutal killings, a trend that
continues even today.
Ethnic cleansing was evidently a
systematic component of the terrorists' strategic agenda in J&K, and
estimates suggest that, just between February and March 1990, 140,000 to
160,000 Pandits had fled the Kashmir Valley to Jammu, Delhi, or other parts
of the country. Simultaneously, there were a number of high- profile killings
of senior Hindu officials, intellectuals and prominent personalities. Eventually,
an estimated 400,000 Pandits - over 95 per cent of their original population
in the Valley - became part of the neglected statistic of 'internal refugees'
who were pushed out of their homes as a result of this campaign of terror.
Not only did the Indian state fail to protect them in their homes, successive
governments have provided little more than minimal humanitarian relief,
and this exiled community seldom features in the discourse on the 'Kashmir
issue' and its resolution.
A majority of the Pandit refugees
live in squalid camps with spiralling health and economic problems. Approximately
2,17,000 Pandits still live in abysmal conditions in Jammu with families
of five to six people often huddled into a small room. Social workers and
psychologists working among them testify that living as refugees in such
conditions has taken a severe toll on their physical and mental health.
Confronted with the spectre of cultural extinction, the incidence of problems
such as insomnia, depression and hypertension have increased and birth
rates have declined significantly. A 1997 study based on inquiries at various
migrant camps in Jammu and Delhi revealed that there had been only 16 births
compared to 49 deaths in about 300 families between 1990 and 1995, a period
during which terrorist violence in J&K was at a peak. The deaths were
mostly of people in the age group of 20 to 45. Causes for the low birth
rates were primarily identified as premature menopause in women, hypo-function
of the reproductive system and lack of adequate accommodation and privacy.
Doctors treating various Kashmiri Pandit patients assert that they had
aged physically and mentally by 10 to 15 years beyond their natural age,
and that there was a risk that the Pandits could face extinction if current
trends persist. On the conditions at the camps, one report stated that,
at the Muthi camp on the outskirts of Jammu where a large number of the
Pandits stayed after migration from the Valley, a single room was being
shared by three generations. In certain cases at other places, six families
lived in a hall separated by partitions of blankets or bed sheets.
Worse, the dangers of this ethnic
cleansing are also making inroads into the Muslim dominated areas along
the Line of Control and the international border in the Jammu region as
well, with Islamist terrorists specifically targeting Hindus in these areas.
There is now a steady flow of migration of Hindus from the rural and remote
areas of the Jammu region towards Jammu city, and these trends accelerate
after each major terrorist outrage.
The Pandits have rejected rehabilitation
proposals that envision provision of jobs if the displaced people returned
to the Valley, indicating that they were not willing to become 'cannon-fodder'
for politicians who cannot guarantee their security. The Pandits insist
that they will return to the Valley only when they - and not these 'others'
- are able to determine that the situation is conducive to their safety.
"We cannot go back in the conditions prevailing in Kashmir. We will go
back on our own terms," Kashmiri Samiti president Sunil Shakdher said in
August 2002 in response to the then Farooq Abdullah regime's proposed rehabilitation
agenda. At the minimum level, these terms would include security to life
and property and, at a broader level, a consensual rehabilitation scheme.
The Pandits appear fully justified
in their reluctance to fall for the succession of 'rehabilitation schemes'
that are periodically announced. Any proposal to return the Pandits to
the Valley in the past has usually been followed by targeted terrorist
attacks. Whenever any attempt to facilitate their return to the Valley
has been initiated, a major incident of terrorist violence against them
has occurred. The massacre of 26 Pandits at Wandhama, a hamlet in the Ganderbal
area of the Valley on the intervening night of January 25-26, 1998; the
earlier killing of eight others at Sangrampora in Budgam district on March
22, 1997; the massacre of 26 Hindus at Prankote in Udhampur District on
April 21, 1998; and the killing of 24 Kashmir Pandits at the Nadimarg Village,
District Pulwama, on March 23, 2003; these are the worst of the many examples
of the terrorists' tactic to block any proposal for the return of migrants
to the Valley. These massacres and a continuous succession of targeted
individual killings have ensured the failure of every proposal to resolve
the problem of the exiled Pandits. It was, again, this pervasive insecurity
that led to the collapse of the proposal to create 13 clusters of residential
houses in 'secure zones' in different parts of Anantnag for the return
and rehabilitation of Kashmiri Pandit migrants from outside the Valley
in April 2001.
The current Chief Minister Mufti
Mohammed Sayeed, addressing his maiden press conference at Srinagar on
November 3, 2002, said that the rehabilitation of migrant Pandits was one
of his government's 'top priorities'. The Pandits, however, regard the
Sayeed regime's 'healing touch' policy with great scepticism. The regime's
decision to release a number of terrorists and secessionists on bail and
the proposal to hold talks "without any pre-conditions" with a mélange
of groups actively pursuing the agenda of violence has led a section of
the Pandit community to believe that the State government, "is turning
a blind eye to our plight."
For a majority of the displaced
Kashmiris, the recent State Legislative Assembly elections held little
meaning. Panun Kashmir ('Our Kashmir' - a leading organisation of the displaced
Kashmiri Pandits), during the run-up to the State Legislative Assembly
elections in year 2002, had dismissed the exercise as 'meaningless'. They
said the Election Commission's decision to make arrangements for Hindu
migrants to vote from outside J&K would institutionalise their migrant
status. "The move to allow migrant Hindu Pandits to vote at their respective
refugee camps only reinforces the mindset that there are no chances for
them to return to their homes, ever," said Shakdher.
A section of the Pandits have demanded
a geo-political re-organisation of the State and the carving of a separate
homeland for them. While such an extreme suggestion may arise out of the
increasing desperation of a people whose plight has been ignored for nearly
a decade and a half, the idea itself is fraught with the imminent danger
of playing into the hands of religious extremists who seek a division of
the State along religious lines.
Their relatively small numbers,
coupled with a tradition of non-violent protest, has made the Pandits largely
irrelevant in the political discourse - both within the country and internationally
- on Kashmir. It should be clear, however, that the many 'peace processes'
and 'political solutions' that are initiated in J&K from time to time
have little meaning until these include some steps to correct the grave
injustices done to this unfortunate community.
