What happened 30 years ago in Kashmir?
January 20, 1990: The Exodus Begins…
“……My story is not the narration of how we left Kashmir; it is about being unable to return home. My story is not about death that stared us in our faces; it is about that one chance we got to live.’’
So says a Kashmiri Pandit whose week-long stay away from Kashmir turned into an exile of 30 years because of a terrible carnage that cost them things that they called their own.
It all began brewing in the 1980s when there was widespread political turmoil in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. There were tense relations between the Government at the Centre headed by the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the regional parties in Kashmir specifically the National Conference under the leadership of Sheikh Abdullah and later on his son Farooq Abdullah. To number events, there were many. The Central Government tossing between Ghulam Mohammed Shah and Farooq Abdullah as the J&K CM, the decision of the Central Government to open up the Ram Mandir locks to the Hindus to offer prayers and the elections of 1987 were just a few to name.
The most blatant irony of it was that severe attacks were made on the Pandits even in the very constituency of leaders who, on a daily basis proclaimed solidarity with the suffering minority, but remained comfortably aloof to the outlash made against the minority in their very state by militants blinded with bloodlust. Yes, Anantnag- the constituency of then Congress leader Mufti Mohammed Sayed was among the earliest witness of the miseries of the Kashmiri Pandits.
The Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front(JKLF) began an insurgent activity for the separation of Kashmir. This included the killing of BJP leader Tikka Lal (which was the first instance of a Kashmiri Hindu being targeted), retired Judge Neel Kanth Ganjoo, journalist-lawyer Prem Nath Bhat and the Director of Doordarshan Kendra Lassa Kaul. These came to be perceived as open declarations of the deliberate mishap that awaited them in the Valley.
Pandits were kidnapped, raped, tortured, used as a human shield against the armed forces and their houses burnt. While the men stopped greeting each other with Namaste, the women stopped wearing the tilak on their forehead to escape the eye of the militants. Notices were stuck on their homes giving them deadlines to vacate the valley.
It was on January 20th, 1990 that the Pandits began to leave their homes, in the wake of many more people of their community being killed. Subsequently, many more groups of Pandits began to flee from the valley in the months of March and April. During this time the Farooq Abdullah government was dismissed and Governor’s rule was imposed.
The worst part of it was that the Pandits couldn’t even be considered as refugees going by the definition given for the word ‘refugees’ by the United Nations High Commission. They could only be considered as ‘Internally Displaced Persons’. This was because refugees included only people who left their countries and the Pandits never left India. Though there were schemes taken by the government agencies to facilitate the return of the Kashmiri Pandits, none of these could bear fruit due to the repeated massacre of the Pandits in the Valley — with Sangrampora (22 March 1997), Gool (15 June 1997), Wandhama (25 January 1998), Talwani 2000 and Nadimarg (23 March 2003) still remaining as blots on the face of humanity.
According to Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti (KPSS), of 75,343 Kashmiri Pandit families in January 1990, more than 70,000 fled between 1990 and 1992. The flight continued until 2000. Of the approximately 300000 to 600000 Hindus living in the Kashmir Valley in 1990, only 2000 to 3000 remain there as of 2016. It is indeed a national shame that not a word of protest came from any of the human rights activists, liberals and pseudo-intellectuals even when such an outrageous genocide took place before their eyes. The unsaid reason vibrating that the Pandits never formed a tasty layer of the ballot boxes.
The displaced Pandits had to live in tents and camps with the most inhumane conditions where electricity and water were a luxury for them. The education of children was severely affected, and they were also unable to access proper healthcare facilities. The birth rate of the community fell at a rapid rate. Many died of snake bite. For people living in tatters, education and healthcare were but echoes of a past reality. Only a few affluent and educated persons could secure employment. Others began settling in Delhi, Pune, Mumbai Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Lucknow. They had to spend the rest of their lives in the bitterness of poverty that was so ruthlessly imposed on them. This was coupled with a sense of despondence and the feeling of being utterly hopeless when your life is at a question mark. The incessant fear of being persecuted again almost drained them of the limited hope that was left in their lives.
Even today against the backdrop of the abrogation of Article 370 as the community looks forward to going back to their home-state, many of them are yet to come to terms to the sad reality that their houses had been long sold off or burnt down to ashes. And the valley they left had changed into the worse over the past three decades. Militancy, freehand of extremism, appeasement politics and a lack of conscience are just a few of the true reasons for such an exodus to take place in a pluralistic state of a secular country.
Even amidst accusations against the then J&K Governor of triggering fear in the minds of the Pandits, the Gawkadal massacre that took place on January 21, 1990, and the stance taken by most leaders of the ruling party then, the most important lesson to be kept in mind is that such a brutal atrocity that was meted out against the Pandits should remain a thing of the past, even while serving as a reminder of the aftermath that will eventually follow when an indigenous community is wiped out of their own land.
Yes. 2020 marks the 30th year of their forced and unfair departure from the Valley, and even to this date, many a Kashmiri Pandit has not seen at least a resemblance of what can be considered a home. And in such a scenario still prevalent in our society, a step above petty politics and bigoted mindset is indeed the only alternative we have. For, justice is rightly deserved by each and every community whose identity was born out of the very soil of our motherland.
#opinion
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