The tragic plight of Kashmiri Pandits who continue to live in exodus away from their homeland remains a huge blot on modern Kashmiri history. The majority community in Kashmir needs to introspect seriously on this because the ultimate test of any society is the way it treats its minorities. This introspection may begin with recognizing the immense pain and suffering of the Pandit community. We need genuine efforts of truth and reconciliation. Truth needs to be acknowledged, no matter how hard it is to swallow. Our collective society needs to come to terms with acknowledging the primacy of the suffering of our Pandit brothers and sisters.
Taking recourse to denialism and absurd conspiracy theories cannot be the way out for reconciliation. It is so because a good number of people in Kashmir especially youngsters have been fed with wrong narratives and outright lies regarding Kashmiri Pandits and their suffering.
The truth that needs to be stated boldly and openly is that the Kashmiri Pandits became victims when a significant portion of the majority community, abetted by our neighbouring country, decided to embark on a path of religious extremism. On this destructive path, they decided that the dissidents had no role or right to live in peace. What followed was a blatant act of persecution of the minority community which hurt the soul of Kashmir, Kashmiriyat, and Indian ethos.
What today’s Kashmiri youth must understand is that the massive onslaught of Pakistani-sponsored insurgency in 1989 affected almost every walk of life in Kashmir. In its very beginning, the religion-infused insurgency jolted the venerable bond of peace and harmony between Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits. The growing fear and insecurity forced Kashmiri Pandits to leave their homes for safety and survival. Kashmiri Pandit poet Subhash Kak writes in his poem “Snow in Srinagar” about the assault on the Pandit identity by the forces of cruelty:
Who knew then that decades later a terror will come to Srinagar
and I will be unable to see my home where I was born
where we had played cowries on many new snows.
The terrorists want us to bury our past
forget the deeds of our ancestors.
Their long-cherished dream to return to their homeland has sadly not materialized all these years. Over the years, this displaced community has produced burgeoning expressions of pain and suffering. These expressions have successfully and continue to immortalize the agonizing memories of the past, of rootlessness, of the identity crisis of their community, scattered around the country and outside the country. Nothing can match the agonized memories of a displaced community.
No matter what religious extremists declare, nobody can dispute the fact that the Pandit and Muslim residents of Kashmir are not only the descendants of a common cultural heritage and identity, but have historically lived together beyond the barriers of religion and ideology even during the reign of harsh rulers, or even when communalism, a holocaust of violence incited and escalated by the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 had murderously blinded the people. When truckloads of dead bodies were traded in other parts of the country, not even a single death was reported from Kashmir despite the Muslim population being high.
However, this historic harmony became a victim of the militant insurgency and terrorism that erupted in the late 1980s in Kashmir. It brought about a tragic end to this largely harmonious, unruffled, and peaceful history of the Pandits and Muslims of Kashmir. The proxy war initiated by Pakistan, the violent Kashmiri militants with backing from Pakistan and from inside Kashmir, the regular protests for secession by the local belligerent mobs, and the increasing number of targeted killings led to a growing sense of insecurity among Kashmiri Pandits.
The militants and their patrons declared them “enemies”. They used intimidating measures to force Pandits to vacate the valley by using mosque loudspeakers and by pasting death warnings on electric poles and walls everywhere. Some of the prominent Pandits who initially resisted the provocations were brutally targeted and killed. Radical fanatics, backed by Pakistan and inspired by the fundamentalist movements elsewhere, wanted to enact an ethnic cleansing to rob Kashmir of its plural identity in favour of a puritanical Islamic identity.
Unfortunately, the apparatus of governance at that time just capitulated. It emboldened the radical and violent elements. The growing fear and insecurity led to a mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits to Jammu and various other parts of the country in the beginning years of the troubled 1990s. It was a tragedy that shocked the entire nation and should have never happened. Imagine a people who had to live as “refugees” and “migrants” in their own country while not being able to live in their original, native land.
The plight and agony of Kashmiri Pandit migrants over the last three decades has erupted on two levels: physical and psychological. The story of irreparable loss, suffering, and distress, both physical and psychological, of Kashmiri Pandits begins with the migration. Their broken memories of the past, their unflinching yearnings to return to their homeland, their helplessness while living a sub-human life in squalid migrant camps, their tormenting sense of uprootedness, and their endless strivings to settle in alien socio-cultural and linguistic settings, are some of the poignant aspects which often get ignored amidst the din of politics.
The physical plight began with the assassination of some of the prominent Kashmiri Pandits even before the mass migration. The way they were forced to leave their homes in overcrowded trucks evoked the most pathetic images. Initially, the major chunk of the displaced Pandits had to live in the dilapidated migrant camps in Jammu. In these camps, Pandits silently bore the humiliating hardships. The psychological plight, on the other hand, is very complex and almost involves every Pandit inhabitant of the tented camps. Their anxiety and despair, causing a “sickness unto death” developed from the very moment when the outbreak of insurgency in 1989 unleashed the reign of terror and insecurity in Kashmir. They left their homes in desperation and fear. Their actual psychological battle to belong to a new terrain and to re-connect the present with the snatched past began after migration.
The more the consciousness of the loss of their past grew, the more their psychological despair intensified. K L Chowdhary, a prominent Kashmiri Pandit poet, writes:
Even after a decade in exile
I hang, from my girdle, this bunch of keys,
keys that I carried with me
when I was forced to flee,
keys to my home,
keys to my relics, my diary, my library,
keys that opened the sanctum where my gods reside…
The Pandits loved their land even more than their fellow Kashmiri Muslims because they lived there even when Islam had not arrived. Their love and attachment to their land led to a grave psychological disturbance among Pandits after migration. They were simply unable to withstand the mental horrors that were brought upon them by Islamic extremists backed by the neighbouring country. And such horrors which destroyed Kashmir must never be forgiven and forgotten!
Basharat Bhat is an academician based in Srinagar with a keen interest in politics and culture.