Kashmir Files: Reliving Indescribable Trauma of Kashmiri Pandits: Lalit K Kaul
Kashmir Files: Reliving Indescribable Trauma of Kashmiri Pandits
Lalit K Kaul
After seeing the movie, a retired
Chief Secretary of a State government stated that his head hung in shame as he
was not aware of what had happened in Kashmir! Friends ask me if I had seen the
movie; I respond by saying that I saw the whole episode live in the real world
in real (not reel) life and that the movie can’t go beyond that. Such of the
Pandits who went through the agony that’s beyond words, the movie may look like
a caricature of what in reality they experienced; the unforgettable experience
that not only rendered them homeless, but also hurt their intellect and psyche.
The movie serves the purpose of informing such uninformed ones who lay claim to
being educated and blessed with scientific temper and this class includes all “educated”
Indians including the political leaders and “intellectuals”. In a piece that I
wrote sometime in June 1990 and distributed it to the Kashmiri Pandit
organizations in different States, I categorized, we, the Pandits as “Palestinians
of the Second Kind”. This article by me was distributed in the International
Conference on Kashmir held in October, 1990 and organized by Kashmiri Samiti
Delhi. I was one of the invited speakers, but was not allowed to speak for more
than 5 minutes as the facts as I knew and the experiences that I had gone
through were not acceptable to the Chairman of the session, Sri S L Shakder.
That experience told me that the facts about what had happened with the Pandits
in Kashmir were going to be blocked by the powers that be because Sri S L
Shakder had been the Chief Election Commissioner of India – a Kashmiri Pandit,
but a thorough bred pro establishment man.
Good Work by the Film Producers:
To screen the film outside India is
a remarkable thing to do as the people of those countries would know how
secular and democratic India is wherein her own people have been living like an
uprooted community (refugees) for the last 32 years. Other than educating the
world on the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits I don’t know how that’s going to
help our cause, but the hope is that someday some journalists in those
countries will take on our depraved politicians on the question of the future
of the Pandits as a distinct ethnic group in their country- India; having been
ousted from their Motherland - Kashmir.
Response of various Political Party
Leaders and Press in 1990:
The then PM of India, Sri V P Singh,
when informed about the forced mass exodus of the Pandits he posed “Who Pandits”;
he had Mufti Mohammed Sayeed as the Home Minister who was known to be rabidly
communal element, but tagged as “secular” by the entire political leadership of
India including the BJP.
The Baroda Dynamite Case
accused/convict (?) Sri George Fernandez, in a press statement, said that the
Muslims in Kashmir had risen up in arms against the Indian State because the
Kashmiri Pandits had usurped all the jobs! Was he uninformed? No. Whatever his
compulsions, his public statement was not contested by any other political
leader/party including the BJP.
There was this Muslim (forgetting
his name) who masqueraded as Communist belonged to CPM and he too gave
statements similar to the ones by the Baroda Dynamite Case Accused.
One MLA in Bihar when told that
insurgency had erupted in Kashmir and that the Pandits had been forced out of
the Valley responded: but, there is Maharaja Hari Singh’s rule in Kashmir!!
The response of the Congress MLAs
spanned from Pandits “Karmfal” to usurpation of the jobs!
The National print media furnished a
restrained coverage of the barbarism let loose on the Pandits by the gun wielding
mercenaries and their leaders like Yasin Malik and Bitu Karate, et al.
As an individual who had lost
everything but most importantly his honour, I arranged for the
meetings/seminars on the exodus of my community in few cities in India
including Nagpur, Madras, Bangalore, Hyderabad etc. No National daily covered
it whereas the regional dailies gave the meetings some coverage, but not on the
front page.
For all the disinformation campaign
let loose against my community – the one that had been transformed into slum
dwellers overnight- I, with some verifiable documents met with the Editor of
Siyasat (Urdu daily) in Hyderabad and tried to explain him the situation
obtaining that time and requested him to do coverage based on the documents;
the editor refused and didn’t even touch the documents with his hands!! So much
for the Muslim intellectuals! The Urdu TV channels were busy telecasting how
Muslims in Kashmir had been deprived of everything in life; the madrasas were
in full swing.
Always in Denial Mode:
“Islam is a peaceful religion”; this
statement I am nobody to contest; but beheading of Guru Teg Bahadur by the
followers of Islam raises lots of questions in my mind. The narrative fed to
their generations next by the Muslims in Kashmir is that the Pandits left on
their own as they were Indian agents and wanted to defame “peaceful” Azadi
movement; while this kind of narrative beats all logic comprehensible by a
human mind yet the live telecast of Yasin Malik with Door Darshan in June 1990
can’t be a myth. The JKLF chief proudly states that he does not remember how
many Pandits he slaughtered; how many Pandit women he and his colleagues raped and
how they were cut into pieces in a wood cutting factory; his compatriot Bittu
Karate proudly stated in one of his briefings to the press that he was being in
the path of Allah. Both of them expressed no regrets for the barbarism they and
their colleagues had let loose on the Pandits.
One of my Muslim friends, in the
place where I live, asked me if I had read anything about Islam. I responded by
saying that there is no community in India that has experienced Islam as, we,
the Pandits have; not even the various sects in Islam. Therefore we may make a
tall claim that nobody understands Islam as, we, the Pandits do. We both smiled
and continued to be friends.
Mr. Prime Minister appreciating
Kashmir Files does not solve the Pandit’s Issue:
Politicians and leaders have this
unparalleled gift of praising anything and everything that can afford them an
escape route. The Kashmir Files may get nominated for many awards including
National awards; but recognizing a team’s artistic skills does not solve a grave
political problem like, having thrown out of the Valley what are the
co-ordinates of the Pandits in India? One line answer “Indian” is the hardest
slap on the face of every Pandit because it legitimizes the exodus thrust upon
them by a people of certain religion. Numbers don’t matter; not all were
involved is not the consolation; as it is the political ideology that matters
and its protagonists sure try take it to its logical end and that ideology
was/is to Islamize Kashmir and that could be achieved by one of the following
ways 1) forcible conversions and 2) creating conditions for the Pandits to flee.
In that Islamization of the Valley the protagonists were thoroughly supported
by the National party leadership of all hues. It was a political consensus at
the National level to allow exodus of the Pandits because only that would help
create Islamic Kashmir and that would be a kind of de facto Azadi for the
Islamists.
That’s the reason no PM ever visited
the refugee camps of the Pandits not even the Sri Narendra Modi. Friends
counter it by saying that Manmohan Singh visited and there can’t be a bigger
cruel joke on the Pandits than this as he was a subject of Sonia Gandhi and not
the PM of India; the other example they give Sri Inder Kishen Gujral; but he
himself was on crutches and survived only 6 months or so. Sri Narendra Modi
visited the Valley many times to make lot many promises as also to attempt to get
a toehold for BJP in the Valley, but he never visited now concretized slums in
which Pandits live.
The final stamp of Islamization of
Kashmir was put by the Supreme Court of India when, in its wisdom, it refused
to hear the case about ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Pandits in the
Valley, citing the time bar!!! Of course the SC cannot override the political
consensus at the National level that was arrived under the leadership of Mufti
Mohammed Sayeed who was then the Home Minister. No wonder the BJP leadership
under the Prime Minister ship of Sri A B Vajpayee encouraged Mufti Sayeed to
found his own political party -the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) - and in 2002
elections enabled the father-daughter duo to campaign in such areas in the
Valley that were highly militancy afflicted and which resulted in PDP forming
the coalition government in the State. You should know it Mr. Prime Minister.
Will Kashmir Files change Political
fate of the Pandits?
No. Immediately post exodus, the Pandit
youth got together to realize that only a political demand was the way out for
their miseries and ever so unreliable future in the Valley. The uncertainty of
their existence in the Valley had begun from the Shah Mir days (1338 AD?) and therefore
1991 couldn’t have been much of a surprise for the Pandits. To avert such
possibility in future and to ensure peaceful stay in their Motherland, the
Pandits through “Margdarshan ‘91” asked for a Homeland for Kashmiri Pandits to
the North and East of river Jhelum. The BJP/RSS combine aborted it with the
active connivance of such Pandits who hadn’t gone through the trauma of forced
exodus. RSS enrolled dazed rural Pandit youth as Kar Sevaks – the Ram Bhaktas-
and sent them to different parts of the country along with their cadre. The
displaced, unemployed and dazed youth and old just followed like a herd of
sheep. The problem of Kashmiri Pandit is neither social nor economical nor
cultural, when it comes to staying in the Valley; it’s political and therefore
a political solution needs to be found and no political party including the
self proclaimed “Sapoots” of Bharat Mata – BJP/RSS- have the political will to
do it because every party wants Muslim votes. The Communist government created
an exclusive Muslim majority district in Kerala, but won’t create a Hindu
majority district because Hindus can be manipulated by caste to garner votes
whereas the Muslims vote as one block.
The Pandit Homeland may become a
bargaining chip if ever India was to part with the Valley as this demand has
been documented in history books and it was also taken cognizance of by Ms. Condoleezza
Rice of the USA, but then one may have to wait for Yugas unless the Communist
and Muslim leaders like Owaisi et al supported by the likes of Sonias Mamtas
and Kejris capture majority in the Parliament. The Owaisis being pro Pakistan
and Sonias/communists pro Chinese the threat to Indian integrity cannot be
ruled out.
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