[About 350,000 Pandits, including my family, were forced into exile after being brutalized on the streets of Kashmir and inside their homes. Hundreds were killed and many raped and maimed. Since the Pandits are an educated lot, most of them moved on, securing jobs and careers in India and abroad. But a small percentage continues to live in miserable conditions in refugee settlements like Jagti.]
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Courtesy of Ashish Sharma
Kashmiri Pandit women praying at a temple in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir
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On April 24, Kamal, a 35-year-old unemployed Kashmiri Hindu, died
in the Jagti refugee settlement on the outskirts of the city of Jammu, the
winter capital of the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. His body was
found a few days after his death. More than three weeks later, the Jammu
Tribune reported that
the young man, who was living alone after his parents died some time ago, was
mentally disturbed and had died of starvation after the state government’s
relief department stopped his monthly stipend for unknown reasons.
Kamal’s death is the
latest event to add to the Jagti residents’ sense of abandonment by the state
and central governments. The Jagti settlement is home to about 4,000 Kashmiri
Hindu families, who have been living there since 2011 after the state
government dismantled their old camps scattered around Jammu, which had served
as their homes since 1990. The Kashmiri Hindus, more popularly known as
Pandits, were forced out of their land in 1990 when an Islamist insurgency
broke out in Kashmir Valley. It’s the only Indian state where the Muslims are
in a majority.
About 350,000 Pandits,
including my family, were forced into exile after being brutalized on the
streets of Kashmir and inside their homes. Hundreds were killed and many raped
and maimed. Since the Pandits are an educated lot, most of them moved on,
securing jobs and careers in India and abroad. But a small percentage continues
to live in miserable conditions in refugee settlements like Jagti.
I was there in
September last year when a few residents were on a hunger strike, protesting
against the state government’s apathy. Those families who didn’t have a
government job survived on a monthly dole of 1,250 rupees, or $22. The
government provides a maximum monthly stipend of 5,000 rupees for each family,
and the Pandits at the Jagti settlement were demanding more aid and new
facilities.
Many such families had
taken small loans from banks, both private and government to start small
businesses before they were shifted to Jagti. The loan installment was deducted
from their meager monthly stipend.
All year round, the
camp faced a power outage of 16 to 18 hours each day. Residents alleged that a
substantial amount from the 3.69 billion rupees allotted for the construction
of the camp had been siphoned off by government officials and their political
bosses. “We belong to nobody,” a resident, Bhushan Lal Bhat, told me. “No
government is interested in us because we are not a vote bank.”
When a team of three
delegates appointed by the Indian government looked into the grievances of the
people of Jammu and Kashmir, the report it
issued in October 2011 was dismissed by
everyone, including the
separatist groups in Kashmir. The Pandits, in any case,
expected nothing from it. The report made some vague references to the Pandits,
asking the government for “sympathetic consideration” toward their plight. In
an even vaguer reference, it said that the “women can provide a bridge for
Kashmiri Pandits to reconcile with their co-citizens in the Valley.”
Recently, the same
government-appointed team submitted a feedback report to
the Home Ministry in New Delhi, recommending the construction of a new city in
the heart of Kashmir Valley for the rehabilitation of the Pandits. Howver, it
doesn’t acknowledge the circumstances that led to the exodus of the Pandits in
the first place, a trauma that is still fresh in many Pandits’ minds. Without
official recognition of the events of 1990, true reconciliation is not
possible.
In April, I was in
Bangalore for the release of my book,
“Our Moon Has Blood Clots,” which deals with the exodus of the Pandits. Among
the audience was a lady who sat upright all time, paying attention to every
word I spoke. As I read a passage, she bowed her head and I could see she was
trying hard to control her emotions. Later, I learned her name, Rudrakshi
Warikoo. She spoke about her experiences of 1990 – she was 19 at that time, she
said. “I still have nightmares about those days,” she said, shuddering.
Most Pandits have gone
through similar experiences and have no hope of returning to their homeland.
“We visit Kashmir Valley in summer to escape the heat,” another Jagti resident,
who did not wish to be identified, told me. “The former militants who killed
Pandits in 1990 have turned politicians and keep on saying: ‘Kashmir is
incomplete without the Pandits.’ But they don’t mean it.”
That is what a few
hundred young men and women who returned to their erstwhile home under a
central government job program, which has been operating since 2008, have
experienced. In the valley, they stay in a few ghetto-like camps. But security
is the least of their concerns. They have faced such harsh treatment and
harassment from their Muslim colleagues that many of them have left their jobs
and Kashmir Valley.
“I suffer from a
permanent depression because of what I go through daily,” one man told me when
he visited me secretly at my hotel room in September. He worked as a teacher
and said he was thinking of leaving his job.
In all the Pandit
killings, there has been but one conviction so
far. Meanwhile, people like the militant Farooq Ahmad Dar, alias Bitta Karate,
freely run around Kashmir – a man who in 1990 confessed on national
television that he was responsible for the killings of about two dozen Pandits,
including his neighbor, on whose scooter he used to pillion ride at times. He
spent 16 years in jail awaiting a trial, then was granted bail after a judge,
N.D. Wani, said the
prosecution had shown no interest in arguing the case. For some in Kashmir, Mr.
Dar is a hero.
In September, I was at
one of the camps in Kashmir Valley where some Pandits live under police
protection. I met an old lady who sat on her haunches outside her quarters,
winnowing rice grains. She would not let my photographer colleague take her
picture and declined to give her name. But she said in the last seven years she
had been out of the camp only thrice. “My heart is about to burst,” she said.
The return of the
Pandits to Kashmir Valley seems like a distant dream unless the wounds of the
1990s exodus are healed. Under such circumstances, the idea of the new city, as
proposed by the government-appointed delegates, is far fetched.
Rahul Pandita is an
author, more recently of “Our Moon Has Blood Clots.” He works with the
newsweekly Open. Follow him on Twitter @rahulpandita.
