Author: Kanchan Gupta
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: January 19, 2005
URL: http://in.rediff.com/news/2005/jan/19kanch.htm
Srinagar, January 4, 1990. Aftab,
a local Urdu newspaper, publishes a press release issued by Hizb-ul Mujahideen,
set up by the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1989 to wage jihad for Jammu and Kashmir's
secession from India and accession to Pakistan, asking all Hindus to pack
up and leave. Another local paper, Al Safa, repeats this expulsion order.
In the following days, there is
near chaos in the Kashmir valley with Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah and
his National Conference government abdicating all responsibilities of the
State. Masked men run amok, waving Kalashnikovs, shooting to kill and shouting
anti-India slogans.
Reports of killing of Hindus, invariably
Kashmiri Pandits, begin to trickle in; there are explosions; inflammatory
speeches are made from the pulpits of mosques, using public address systems
meant for calling the faithful to prayers. A terrifying fear psychosis
begins to take grip of Kashmiri Pandits.
Walls are plastered with posters
and handbills, summarily ordering all Kashmiris to strictly follow the
Islamic dress code, prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks
and imposing a ban on video parlours and cinemas. The masked men with Kalashnikovs
force people to re-set their watches and clocks to Pakistan Standard Time.
Shops, business establishments and
homes of Kashmiri Pandits, the original inhabitants of the Kashmir valley
with a recorded cultural and civilisational history dating back 5,000 years,
are marked out. Notices are pasted on doors of Pandit houses, peremptorily
asking the occupants to leave Kashmir within 24 hours or face death and
worse. Some are more lucid: "Be one with us, run, or die!"
* * *
Srinagar, January 19, 1990. Jagmohan
arrives to take charge as governor of Jammu and Kashmir. Farooq Abdullah,
whose pathetic, whimpering, snivelling government has all but ceased to
exist and has gone into hiding, resigns and goes into a sulk. Curfew is
imposed as a first measure to restore some semblance of law and order.
But it fails to have a deterrent effect.
Throughout the day, Jammu and Kashmir
Liberation Front and Hizbul Mujahideen terrorists use public address systems
at mosques to exhort people to defy curfew and take to the streets. Masked
men, firing from their Kalashnikovs, march up and down, terrorising cowering
Pandits who, by then, have locked themselves in their homes.
As evening falls, the exhortations
become louder and shriller. Three taped slogans are repeatedly played the
whole night from mosques: 'Kashmir mei agar rehna hai, Allah-O-Akbar kehna
hai' (If you want to stay in Kashmir, you have to say Allah-O-Akbar); 'Yahan
kya chalega, Nizam-e-Mustafa' (What do we want here? Rule of Shariah);
'Asi gachchi Pakistan, Batao roas te Batanev san' (We want Pakistan along
with Hindu women but without their men).
In the preceding months, 300 Hindu
men and women, nearly all of them Kashmiri Pandits, had been slaughtered
ever since the brutal murder of Pandit Tika Lal Taploo, noted lawyer and
BJP national executive member, by the JKLF in Srinagar on September 14,
1989. Soon after that, Justice N K Ganju of the Srinagar high court was
shot dead. Pandit Sarwanand Premi, 80-year-old poet, and his son were kidnapped,
tortured, their eyes gouged out, and hanged to death. A Kashmiri Pandit
nurse working at the Soura Medical College Hospital in Srinagar was gang-raped
and then beaten to death. Another woman was abducted, raped and sliced
into bits and pieces at a sawmill.
In villages and towns across the
Kashmir valley, terrorist hit lists have been floating about. All the names
are of Kashmiri Pandits. With no government worth its name, the administration
having collapsed and disappeared, the police nowhere to be seen, despondency
sets in. As the night of January 19, 1990, wears itself out, despondency
gives way to desperation.
And tens of thousands of Kashmiri
Pandits across the valley take a painful decision: to flee their homeland
to save their lives from rabid jihadis. Thus takes place a 20th century
Exodus.
* * *
Srinagar, January 19, 2005. There
are no Kashmiri Pandits in Srinagar, or, for that matter, anywhere else
in the Kashmir valley; they don't live here anymore. You can find them
in squalid refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi. As many as 300,000 Kashmiri
Pandits have fled their home and hearth and been reduced to living the
lives of refugees in their own country.
Two-thirds of them are camping in
Jammu. The rest are in Delhi and in other Indian cities. Many of them,
once prosperous and proud of their rich heritage, now live in grovelling
poverty, dependent on government dole and charity. In these 15 years, an
entire generation of exiled Kashmiri Pandits has grown up, without seeing
the land from where their parents fled to escape the brutalities of Islamic
terrorism, a land they dare not return to, although that land still remains
a part of their country.
A large number of them are suffering
from a variety of stress and depression related diseases. A group of doctors
who surveyed the mental and physical health of the Kashmiri Pandits living
in refugee camps, found high incidence of 'economic distress, stress induced
diabetes, partial lunacy, hypertension and mental retardation.' Statistics
reflect high death rate and low birth rate among the Kashmiri Pandit refugees.
And thereby hangs a tragic tale
that has been all but wiped out from public memory.
An entire people have been uprooted
from the land of their ancestors and left to fend for themselves as a weak-kneed
Indian state shamelessly panders to Islamic terrorists and separatists
who claim they are the final arbiters of Jammu and Kashmir's destiny. A
part of India's cultural heritage has been destroyed; a chapter of India's
civilisational history has been erased.
Had this tragedy occurred elsewhere
in Hindu majority India, and had the victims been Muslims, we would have
described it as 'ethnic cleansing' and 'genocide.' We would have made films
with horror-inducing titles. We would have filed cases in the Supreme Court
of India. Our media would have marshalled remarkable rage in reporting
the smallest detail.
But, this tragedy has occurred in
Muslim majority Kashmir valley, and the victims are all Hindus, that too
Pandits. What has been lost is part of India's Hindu culture, what has
been erased is integral to India's Hindu civilisation.
Therefore, the government makes
bold to record that the Kashmiri Pandits have "migrated on their own" and
their 'displacement (is) self-imposed;' the National Human Rights Commission,
after a perfunctory inquiry, refuses to concede that what has happened
is 'genocide' or 'ethnic cleansing,' though facts add up to no less than
that, never mind that 300,000 lives have been destroyed.
And, our jhola-wallah brigade of
secular activists rudely turn up their noses to the plight of Kashmiri
Pandits: Hindu sorrow, inflicted by Islamic terror, stinks.
Today, on January 19, the 15th anniversary
of the forced flight of Kashmiri Pandits, look back at India's wretched
history of secular politics and consider the terrible price the nation
has paid at the altar of appeasement because the Indian State has, and
continues to, toe the line of least resistance.
Reflect. Resolve. React.
