Not everyone betrayed us but everyone turned the other side: Khushboo Mattoo in exile
Throughout the night of 18 January 1990, loudspeakers across the Valley blared with slogans and warnings for Pandits, asking them to leave or to face the consequences. This followed long tensions. On the morning of 19th, lakhs of Pandits left the Valley that they had called home for centuries. They left their homeland, their temples, their shrines, and three decades later, in exile in their own country, their story still remains largely on the margins. The Dispatch’s Kumar Gandharv and Madhur Sharma interview Khushboo Mattoo, an exiled Pandit who is today the programming head for Radio Mirchi in Jammu and Kashmir.
Khushboo Mattoo was 10 months old when she left the Valley. She tells The Dispatch that most of their neighbours in the colony had left and those who remained would only light candles in their homes so the terrorists roaming out would feel that the house is empty. But they knocked on their door one day.
Mattoo says, “They had been looking for my uncle who had been sent to Jammu. My father opened the door. They somehow heard me crying in the background and they let him [her father] go.
“We left then and there. My mother was asked to take the milk off the gas once it had boiled and that was it. My mother left with just ten months old me in her arms and a bag on her shoulders. She did not even put on her slippers.”
They went to Jammu where their family of nine would live in a two room house. Mattoo would change eight homes until she reached college. She credits her parents’ hard work through the years for what she is today.
She says, “Kashmiri Pandits have always been a literate community. Even in exile, we have retained our intellectual culture. We studied in camps under lamps and we worked hard.”
She says her story is still better than a lot of others who she says had to run after trucks to escape for their lives.
India is the country where people have sought refuge for long. Tibetans along with their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama have been in India for six decades who were forced out due to Chinese expansionism, but Kashmiri Pandits have been refugees in their own country.
Three decades later, while Tibetans and Uighur Muslims are part of mainstream discussions when we talk of persecuted communities, the story of Kashmiri Pandits still remain on the margins.
Regarding the popular memory and understanding of their exile, Mattoo says the narrative is not important but facts are. She says that while no one has a proper count, estimates suggest some six lakh families were forced to leave.
Mattoo says, “We have been displaced in our own nation. The important thing is that our nation could have stood up for us. It’s important to understand that had the nation stood up for us at that time, what happened may not have happened.”
Since their exile, a lot of myths have taken over in Kashmir. One of them is the Jagmohan Theory.
The theory is that the then Jammu and Kashmir governor Jagmohan facilitated Pandits’ movement out of the Valley. Mattoo tells The Dispatch that as per the theory, Jagmohan asked Pandits to leave and said that “ki koyi baat nahi (it’s not a big deal), we will get you back in six months.”
No credible person backs this theory.
“It was not Jagmohan but terrorists out there who were instigating young ones and making them kidnap and kill us,” Mattoo says.
Once someone in the family was harmed or kidnapped, the family would leave, and that way an entire community was terrorised and forced to leave.
“Some of the killers like Bitta Karate have still not been tried,” Mattoo says.
Bitta Karate is infamous for roaming in Kashmir with a gun to kill Pandits and claiming that he could sniff and tell whether the person is a Pandit.
In commentary on Pandits, an allegation often comes up that since most of the jobs and senior posts in the state were with the Pandits, the majority of Kashmiris developed resentment against them.
She says, “There was hundred per cent literacy in the community. Everyone who was old enough had a job and it was a stable society. It has nothing to do with stealing jobs.”
Such a community was forced to flee. People in their thirties who had good jobs had to start their lives from scratch in exile. Mattoo highlights the trauma.
She says, “There is immense mental trauma the community has gone through, particularly the elderly. Effects include hallucinations about their colonies, lanes, and the places they would visit in the Valley.”
Mattoo brings up a very interesting aspect of the community’s life in exile. She tells The Dispatch how the Jammu-based newspaper Daily Excelsior acts as a connector for the community that is today scattered all across.
She says, “The paper’s condolences column is very essential as whenever and wherever a Kashmiri Pandit dies, their condolence is published in the paper, and this way we learn about members of our community who we have lost touch with.”
Social media has connected a lot of Pandits in exile but a lot have never reconnected after being forced to leave.
Three decades into exile, the slogans that were once used by armed mobs asking them to die or leave, and to call for a Kashmir with Pandit women but without Pandit men, are popular slogans in protests across Indian campuses and streets. This, Mattoo says, is something that deeply discomforts the community.
She says, “Not just me but the whole community is highly uncomfortable with azadi slogans. It brings back the trauma and agony of that time.
“I don’t undermine the Shaheen Bagh protest but they should be considerate about the history of such slogans. For us, azadi slogans reverberate with us being thrown out of our homes. It’s this simple.”
The story of their suffering is in no way a story that can be used to antagonise those who are in Kashmir today. About the allegation that often comes up in discussions regarding Kashmir, that the story of Pandits is one that is used as part of a narrative against the Kashmiri Muslims presently living there, Mattoo says both sides have suffered.
She says, “Kashmiri Pandits had a lightning bolt of suffering. After 1990, a lot of Muslims have also suffered. Exodus has led to torture of both the sides. In our own ways, we both are victims and victims blaming victims is unhealthy.”
About inter-community relations in the Valley, Mattoo says she was too young to know but her elders tell her that most of the Kashmiri Muslims around them did not do anything, but she says that “there was a large radicalised bunch, a huge lot,” that was after them. Even today, Mattoo says, their neighbours regret their exodus and a lot of Pandits continue to have very good relations with their former Kashmiri Muslim neighbours.
Mattoo says, “Not everyone around us betrayed us but everyone turned the other side — like the rest of India.”
Kumar Gandharv and Madhur Sharma are students of journalism at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi, and are graduates in history from the Delhi University. Gandharv tweets at @KumarGandharv15 and Madhur tweets at @madhur_mrt.
This story is first of a part of series on three decades of exile of Kashmiri Pandits. Follow this space for more stories in days to come.
