Prejudice in paradise
Distorted histories and divisive myths have made
the Kashmir conflict messier, murkier, etching deep divides in a land that once
boasted a rich and unique tradition of syncretism
BY ANURADHA BHASIN JAMWAL
Where does one begin the story of the Kashmir conflict? Does one begin at
1947 when India was partitioned and Kashmir became a bone of contention between
the two new dominions – India and Pakistan? Or does one just wish away history
with the blink of an eye and move on to 1989 when armed insurgents began to
surface in the Valley? Or does one move ahead to newly created histories of
prejudice framed by religious and ethnic divides – Kashmiri Hindus versus
Kashmiri Muslims, Kashmir versus Jammu Dogras, Gujjars versus Paharis, and so on
and so forth. The irony is that the story of the Kashmir conflict is read by
most just where the chapter of prejudiced histories becomes more pronounced. The
perils are that a conflict that was not essentially communal or regional in
nature becomes more vulnerable to such divisions and polarisation. While the gun
was introduced with the slogan of azadi and talk of a secular Jammu and
Kashmir, it was essentially the government response through its various agencies
and sponsored or patronised organisations that ensured that seeds of division
and consequent fanaticism were sown.
The Kashmir conflict can be dated back to the partition of 1947; the violent
conflict is also steeped in long years of historic wars between India and
Pakistan fought over the land of Kashmir. But the insurgency operations and
counter insurgency operations are a far more recent phenomenon that gained
momentum in 1989, beginning first in the Valley. Ask a Pandit from the Valley
about the genesis of the conflict and he will blame the Islamisation of the
Valley and talk of the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits following threats to
Kashmiri Hindus in the Valley. Ask any Kashmiri Muslim and he’d swear that the
threats are vastly overrated and that the Pandits deserted them when the
azadi slogan gained momentum in the Valley. The two diametrically
antagonistic histories born in 1989, when the gun arrived, have contributed in
sharply dividing the two communities and shaped communal politics within and
outside the ambit of the gun. The much-fabled Kashmiriyat, bonds of which
every Kashmiri on both sides of the communal divide would love to eulogise, was
the casualty. But if the bonds were so strong, why did they suddenly snap, the
bullet piercing through age-old harmony?
It is necessary to first explore the genesis of the gun. Why did this come
about? Was Islamic jehad a propelling force? It would be difficult to
describe this genesis in a nutshell. And yet, for a cursory glance through the
events that shaped the history of militancy in Kashmir one would have to begin
in 1947 itself with the Instrument of Accession of Jammu and Kashmir State.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s unfulfilled promise for plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir
followed by New Delhi’s dictatorial policies and centralising control of the
state had subverted all democratic institutions in Jammu and Kashmir. It was
obvious that New Delhi could not implicitly trust any leader with a mass
following in Kashmir, particularly one who questioned central policies or
actions. Sheikh Abdullah was arrested, released, re-arrested and finally
released on a number of occasions during the period between the Delhi Agreement,
1952 and the Indira Gandhi-Sheikh Abdullah accord of 1975. It was mainly
government policy followed in New Delhi that led to the Sheikh’s oscillation
from the demand for plebiscite to a mellowed autonomy, an autonomy that had been
totally eroded long before his death. The puppet regimes imposed in Jammu and
Kashmir may have been mere extensions of this policy but they were nevertheless
a clear signal to the only state in the Indian union with not just a Muslim
majority population but also a disputed history that New Delhi was in no mood to
set aside its bid to rule the state through autocratic policies.
That religion may have had something to do with this is not known. For even
in the case of Pakistan, which administers one-third of this divided state, with
a majority Muslim population, various governments of Pakistan ensured that only
puppet governments took charge in Pakistan administered Jammu and Kashmir.
However, religion was definitely being liberally used by India to convey the
message that the people of Jammu and Kashmir were not to be trusted owing to
their ethnic and community identity. This was the same state, the south of which
burned like other parts of the subcontinent in 1947, but where in the north, in
the Valley, Mahatma Gandhi saw a beacon of light. Not a single killing was
reported on communal lines. Muslims and Hindus of Kashmir under the secular
umbrella of the National Conference also rallied for peace in October 1947 when
raiders began their attack. Sheikh Abdullah’s clarion call raised 15,000
volunteers and a peace brigade was formed as all of Srinagar echoed with slogans
of "Sher-e-Kashmir ka kya irshad, Hindu-Muslim-Sikh Ittehad" and "Hamlawar
khabardar, Hum Kashmiri hain taiyar" ("What does the Sher-e-Kashmir decree,
Hindu-Muslim-Sikh Unity" and "Attackers beware, We Kashmiris are prepared").
The secular essence of the Valley was embodied in the Sheikh’s words, when he
addressed the people: "Today the raiders from Pakistan are a few miles from
Srinagar. They are raising the slogan of Islam. It is open to you to be with
them or to be with me. If you opt to be with me you must know that you have to
live for all times on the principle that Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs are brothers.
If that is the language of a ‘kafir’ you should raise your sword against
me. If you want to raid or rape ‘kafirs’ I am the first ‘kafir’
and you must start from my place and my family."1
The holocaust that raged through certain states like Bengal and Punjab in
1947 "failed to have any echo" in the Kashmir Valley, which had a 93.7 per cent
Muslim population. The Hindus in the Kashmir Valley remained safe and protected
even in the wake of communal killings of Muslims in the Hindu dominated Jammu
region. Credit for this goes mainly to Sheikh Abdullah and his colleagues in the
party.2
If this was the picture of communal harmony in Kashmir in 1947, did it take
five decades for the fabric of Kashmiriyat to be tarnished, or did this
happen suddenly in the 1990s? Though the chasms between the two communities seem
to have appeared suddenly, with both sides being caught a little unawares, a
closer scrutiny of their prejudiced histories shows that cracks had begun to
form long ago. Many did not realise this and many chose to overlook it as a
passing phase. The Kashmiri Pandits formed a minuscule minority in the Kashmir
Valley, being only about two to three per cent of the Valley’s total population.
The rest were largely Muslim, mostly Kashmiri speaking. The creation of the gulf
between the two sides was shaped by several events and follies of history and
the manner in which both sides interpreted these events. The story probably
began some time in 1947 itself, with an incident in Baramulla:
"Left behind in Baramulla [on 27 and 28 October] were assorted groups of [Pathan]
tribesmen from the North-West Frontier Province and, even, it is very possible,
Afghanistan. Discipline was not the strongest characteristic of such men; and
their officers experienced serious difficulty in keeping them under control,
particularly when stories began to circulate of the arrival of the Sikhs (who
had been generally accepted by the tribesmen as the greatest scourge of the
Muslims in the communal massacres which accompanied Partition, and the
legitimate foe in any jehad, holy war) at Srinagar airfield. The
inevitable killing of Sikhs and Hindus in Baramulla, particularly merchants who
had remained to guard their stock, now began to be accompanied by indiscriminate
looting and a considerable amount of rape, applied as much to unfortunate
Kashmiri Muslims as to the infidel. Usually these outrages did not lead to
massacre; but in a few cases, where leaders completely lost control over their
men, an orgy of killing was the result. This was certainly the case at St.
Joseph’s College, Convent and Hospital, the site of what was to become one of
the most publicised incidents of the entire Kashmir conflict. Here nuns, priests
and congregation, including patients in the hospital, were slaughtered; and at
the same time a small number of Europeans, notably Lt.-Colonel DO Dykes and his
wife, as well as the assistant Mother Superior and one Mr. Barretto, met their
deaths at tribal hands."3
The Baramulla affair has become central to the Indian or Kashmiri Pandit
mythology about Kashmir. Events to the south of the Valley in the same state
during the same period may also have shaped the sense of respective insecurities
of both the Kashmiri Hindus and the Muslims. In the Jammu province, things went
very differently. There, unlike every other part of the state, Hindus and Sikhs
slightly outnumbered Muslims; and within a period of 11 weeks starting in
August, systematic savageries, similar to those already launched in East Punjab
and in Patiala and Kapurthala, practically eliminated the entire Muslim element
in the population, amounting to 500,000 people. About 200,000 just disappeared,
remaining untraceable, having presumably been butchered, or died from epidemics
or exposure. The rest fled destitute to West Punjab.4
According to official records of the United Nations Security Council, Meeting
No. 534, March 6, 1951: "Shortly after the terrible slaughters in India, which
accompanied Partition, the Maharaja set upon a course of action whereby, in the
words of the special correspondent of The Times of London published in
its issue of 10 October 1948, "in the remaining Dogra area, 237,000 Muslims were
systematically exterminated, unless they escaped to Pakistan along the border,
by all the forces of the Dogra State headed by the Maharaja in person and aided
by Hindus and Sikhs"."
GK Reddy, a Hindu editor of Kashmir Times, said in a statement
published in The Daily Gazette, a Hindu paper of Karachi, in its issue of
October 28, 1947: "The mad orgy of Dogra violence against unarmed Muslims should
put any self-respecting human being to shame. I saw armed bands of ruffians and
soldiers shooting down and hacking to pieces helpless Muslim refugees heading
towards Pakistan… I saw en route State officials freely distributing arms and
ammunition among the Dogras… From the hotel room where I was detained in Jammu,
I counted as many as twenty-six villages burning one night and all through the
night rattling fire of automatic weapons could be heard from the surrounding
refugee camps."
The communal violence that gripped Jammu was not altogether one-sided. A
large number of Hindu and Sikhs too were butchered in some parts of the region,
particularly in Rajouri, Mirpur and areas now under Pakistani occupation. But
the fact that there was an obvious bid by State forces to patronise the killings
and victimisation of Muslims was a more glaring occurrence. Trouble was brewing
in Poonch where a popular non-communal agitation was launched after the
Maharaja’s administration took over the erstwhile jagir under its direct
control and imposed some taxes. The mishandling of this agitation and use of
brutal forces by the Maharaja’s administration inflamed passions, turning this
non-communal struggle into communal strife. The Maharaja’s administration had
not only asked all Muslims to surrender their arms but also demobilised a large
number of Muslim soldiers in the Dogra army and the Muslim police officers,
whose loyalty it suspected. The Maharaja’s visit to Bhimber was followed by
large-scale killings in some areas of Poonch like Pulandri, Bagh and Sudhnoti
with a large number of ex-servicemen and soldiers who had joined the British
Indian Army and had served them in the Second World War raising a banner of
revolt against the Maharaja.5 The events in Jammu province revealed that there
was an attempt to change the demographics of the division. The 1947 carnage left
several Muslim majority populated villages in Jammu district alone totally Hindu
or Sikh populated. In Jammu district alone, which is a part of the larger Jammu
province, Muslims numbered 158,630 and comprised 37 per cent of the total
population of 428,719 in the year 1941. In the year 1961, Muslims numbered only
51,693 and comprised only 10 per cent of the total population of 516,932. The
decrease in the number of Muslims in Jammu district alone was over 100,000.6
That there was a design to change the demographics is demonstrated by another
incident. Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehr Chand Mahajan told a
delegation of Hindus who met him in the palace when he arrived in Jammu that now
when the power was being transferred to the people they should better demand
parity. When one of them associated with the National Conference asked how they
could demand parity when there was so much difference in population ratio.
Pointing to the Ramnagar natural reserve below, where some bodies of Muslims
were still lying, he said, "the population ratio too can change."7
The events in Jammu may have stirred up insecurities among the Muslims and
Pandits of the Valley for different reasons. The Kashmiri Muslims may have felt
threatened by the State’s role in patronising violence against Jammu’s Muslim
population. Added to this was the fact that while the raiders who attacked
Kashmir in 1947 from the Pakistani side were notorious for loot, plunder and
rapes, the policy of the Indian forces was not particularly sympathetic towards
the Muslims. The Pandits had reason to fear a backlash for what happened in
Jammu where Muslims were in a minority. The fears may have stemmed from a
minority syndrome, which could to some extent have been natural due to their
minuscule population in the Valley. But much of this fear stemmed from a history
of the misplaced sense of persecution that Pandits began to feel especially
after 1947 when the rule of the Hindu Dogra ruler was over and the state was
ruled by a government led by a Kashmiri Muslim. The fears were misplaced on
several counts. The Baramulla memory, one of the bitterest, was haunting for
Pandits and Muslims alike because the raiders did not spare any community.
Secondly, Jammu and Kashmir, despite its disputed nature, was for all practical
purposes administratively a unit of India. The state was initially granted full
autonomy barring three issues – external affairs, defence and communication. The
presence of the Indian army, an epitome of security for the Pandits, itself
ensured a smoother integration of Pandits with the rest of India and they were
indeed a part of the larger Hindu majority. Besides, the New Delhi dominated
politics that took hold in Kashmir in subsequent years was proof enough that
Pandits had no reason to feel insecure where majority Hindu State-centric
policies were to determine the fate of the land. Coupled with this was the
State-sponsored bid to change demographics in 1947, followed by the Hindu
nationalist demand to dilute Jammu and Kashmir’s special status with their
slogan of "Ek Vidhaan, Ek Pradhan aur Ek Nishaan". In fact, Hindu
right wing leaders like Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and Balraj Madhok’s repeated
rhetoric questioning the safety of border villages where Muslims were in a
greater majority was a greater source of insecurity for the Muslims than it was
for the Hindus. Thirdly and more importantly, in 1947, unlike elsewhere in the
subcontinent, here it was the 97 per cent Muslims of the Valley who ensured full
protection to the minority Hindus. But it seemed that one isolated event of
Baramulla and exaggerated rumours were more likely to shape the psyche of the
Kashmiri Pandits in years to come.
There were some more compelling economic reasons as well, making both the
Pandits and Muslims reel under a minority syndrome. Sheikh Abdullah’s land
reforms had mainly affected the Pandits or the upper caste Hindus of Jammu
province in whose hands the major portion of landholding was consolidated. A
mere two per cent of Pandits owned 30 per cent of all landholdings in the
Valley. The land reforms introduced by Sheikh Abdullah from 1948 to 1953,
together with the spread of free primary education, had created a new class of
ambitious Kashmiri Muslims. But no new institutions had been provided to
accommodate these Muslims; and the older ones were monopolised by the minority
Hindus who ran schools and colleges and had a disproportionate presence in the
bureaucracy. Thus on the part of Muslims there was also a brewing resentment
against Pandits who had a history of being over-represented in government
employment as compared to the overall proportion of their population. They were
better educated and occupied all top posts in the bureaucracy and other
professional fields. Even as Muslims started making indents in various fields,
taking a share of what was otherwise a monopoly of the Pandits, during the 1960s
and ’70s, the Pandits gradually began to slip into a syndrome of insecurity.
They were aware of their minuscule minority and their history of monopoly,
educational, professional and economic.
This feeling of ‘dispossession’, along with the interplay of rumours and some
stray events that became part of a bitter collective memory, enhanced their
insecurities within the Valley. Whether motivated by misplaced psychological
fear or deliberate design, most of the rumours were exaggerated through a
whisper campaign projecting the Pandits as victims and the Muslims as
perpetrators. Several incidents such as the involvement of a group of five men
with Pakistani agencies in the mountains of North Kashmir during the 1965 war,
the murder of a Hindu youth in a downtown area and the damage to a temple in
Anantnag in South Kashmir in 1986, were cited again and again to magnify the
threat perception to Pandits. Kashmiris in the diaspora have been particularly
active in engaging world opinion with this sort of perception. The Tiger
Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir, the memoirs of an expatriate Kashmiri woman,
Sudha Kaul, is trapped in the same mindset. Despite its high literary merit, it
talks of such myths as memories that are suddenly shaped into history without
chronological details. This is a clever ploy as the writer jumps from the
incident of 1965 to the militancy of 1989 as if the events are not just
interrelated but as if there were no intervening period in between. Such myths
that were only oral history became more prevalent after 1989. The perils here
cannot be overemphasised as today these distorted histories from a community
perspective are being handed down in written form.
In retrospect, several Pandits look back and recall that they had always felt
secure amidst the presence of the Indian army, a presence of which most Muslims
were wary. Their ‘patriotism’ towards India was their potential weapon against
any Muslim domination or the threat that Muslim Pakistan would take their side.
This is what essentially shaped the Pandit psyche in the years preceding the
insurgency. Thus, when militancy suddenly surfaced, with reports that
disgruntled Muslim youth were going across the Line of Control to receive arms
training in camps set up by Pakistan, the fears multiplied. Added to this was
the nationalist discourse going on at two levels – one at the government level
and a parallel one at the Hindu right wing level. The killings of some prominent
Pandits, including right wing leaders or men who had affiliations with the Hindu
right wing like Tikalal Taploo, added fuel to the fire. The killings of all
Muslims was eclipsed by the killings of the Hindus, projected more widely and
with a twist both by the Pandit community, under the shadow of its growing
insecurities, and the Indian agencies. The media happily played the role of
force multiplier, this side or that.
When men from the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) began the armed
struggle, it was not an Islamic jehad. Slogans of ‘azadi’ rent the
air as the JKLF presented its vision of a secular Jammu and Kashmir, although
aberrations by some over-zealous youth talking also of ‘nizam-e-Mustafa’
and sloganeering from mosques, which has been a traditional manner of
politicking in the Valley, cannot be ruled out. The first casualty of the
struggle was a Muslim, Mohd. Yusuf Halwai, demonstrating that the targets were
not only Hindus but also Muslims. Though in proportion to their population a
larger number of Pandits were killed in this first phase of militancy, they were
not killed because of the community they belonged to. There were other reasons
behind the killings. The Kashmiri Pandits formed a kind of elite in the Valley;
they had a large presence in the bureaucracy, both in the Valley and in Delhi,
where government policy on Kashmir was often dictated by the fears and concerns
of this tiny minority. Their connections with India and their relative affluence
made them highly visible targets during the first few months of the insurgency
in 1990.8 The myth of selective killings is further exploded by statistics.
According to a report in The Times of India in 1993, quoting official
sources, militants killed 1,585 men and women, including 981 Muslims, 218
Hindus, 23 Sikhs and 363 security personnel between January 1990 and October
1992. According to research by the Strategic Foresight Group, 29 Muslims were
killed in 1988 in militancy related violence. There was no Hindu killing. In
1989 and 1990, six and 177 Hindus respectively were killed, as against 73 and
679 Muslims, besides six Sikhs. In 1991, the killings of Hindus are recorded at
34 and those of Muslims at 549. These killings are not Valley specific but hold
good for the entire state. Moreover, these figures also include Hindu pilgrims
or tourists killed in the state. The statistics reveal that at no point of time
were more Hindus killed than Muslims. In fact, barring 1990, Hindus formed a
minuscule percentage of the total killings.9 In fact, the victimisation of
Muslims is also greater in view of the large-scale atrocities by security
forces.
But the damage had been done. The minority syndrome, the perpetuated myths
and baggage of distorted history that the Pandits carried, coupled with the
killings, the sloganeering and mosque calls, which, like the Anantnag event of
1986 when a temple was damaged, became the accepted generalisation. This was
further compounded by the appointment of a new governor to the state, Jagmohan,
and the consequent announcement of governor’s rule. The exodus of Pandits from
the Valley had become inevitable. For many, Jagmohan is seen as the man who
engineered the mass flight. Whether this was true or not, Jagmohan did see the
Kashmir problem as essentially a Muslim versus Hindu one, where Muslim was
perpetrator and Hindu the victim. This was no strong departure from the myths
those at the helm of affairs in New Delhi shared. In an interview to Current,
May 1990, Jagmohan stated, "Every Muslim in Kashmir is a militant today. All of
them are for secession from India. I am scuttling Srinagar Doordarshan’s
programmes because everyone there is a militant... The bullet is the only
solution for Kashmir. Unless the militants are fully wiped out, normalcy can’t
return to the Valley."10 It was in early 1990, during Jagmohan’s few months as
India’s appointed governor – and, some say, with his active encouragement – that
most of the community of 140,00011 Kashmiri Hindus left the Valley. Jagmohan
had originally been made governor of Kashmir in 1984 by Indira Gandhi in order
to dismiss Kashmir’s elected government; he had served for five turbulent years
during which his aggressively pro-Hindu policies further alienated Muslims in
the Valley from India. His limited comprehension of the insurgency – as simply a
limited law-and-order problem that could be swiftly contained – is apparent in
his memoir about his time as governor of Kashmir. Many Kashmiris believe that he
wanted the Hindus safely out of the way while he dealt with the Muslim
guerrillas.12
There is more evidence to suggest Jagmohan’s role in the exodus. Senior
Jammu-based journalist and human rights activist Balraj Puri writes in
Kashmir: Towards Insurgency:
"The Jagmohan regime witnessed the exodus of almost the entire small but
vital Kashmir Pandit community from the valley. Padma Vibhushan Inder Mohan
(later he renounced the title) and I [Balraj Puri] were the first public men to
visit Kashmir in the second week of March 1990 after the new phase of repression
had started. Though the Kashmiri Muslims were in an angry mood, they heard us
with respect and narrated their tales of woe. At scores of the meetings to which
we were invited during our short but hectic visit, Kashmiri Muslims expressed a
genuine feeling of regret over the migration of Kashmiri Pandits (KP) and urged
us to stop and reverse it. Encouraged by the popular mood, we formed a joint
committee of the two communities with the former chief justice of the high court
Mufti Bahauddin Farooqi as president, the Kashmiri Pandit leader HN Jatto as
vice-president and a leading advocate Ghulam Nabi Hagroo as general secretary,
in order to allay the apprehensions of the Kashmiri Pandits. Jatto recalled that
the Pandits had reversed their decision to migrate in 1986 after the success of
the goodwill mission led by me. He expressed the hope that my new initiative
would meet with similar success. A number of Muslim leaders and parties,
including militant outfits, also appealed to the Pandits not to leave their
homes; Jatto welcomed and endorsed their appeals, but soon migrated to
Jammu himself. He told me that soon after the joint committee was set up, the
governor [Jagmohan] sent a DSP to him with an air ticket for Jammu, a jeep to
take him to the airport, an offer of accommodation at Jammu and an advice to
leave Kashmir immediately. Obviously the governor did not believe that the
effort at restoring inter-community understanding and confidence was worth a
trial.
The experiment came under crossfire. The official attitude was far from
cooperative. The rise of new militant groups, some warnings in anonymous posters
and some unexplained killings of innocent members of the community contributed
to an atmosphere of insecurity for the Kashmiri Pandits. A thorough, independent
enquiry alone can show whether this exodus of Pandits, the largest in their long
history, was entirely unavoidable."
There was an obvious bid to use the theory of Hindu victims suffering at the
hands of Muslim guerrillas and their exodus, which the Hindu right wing called
‘forced exile’, as a political tool to demonise the movement for independence
through a systematic war of propaganda unleashed by the government, the Hindu
right wing and the elite Kashmiri Pandits. The displacement of Pandits from the
Valley has been the prime tool of Indian officials, politicians and media in the
propaganda war over Kashmir since 1990.13 There were two distinct kinds of
displacement from the Valley. Those who were well off, mostly in government
jobs, retained the rights to their salaries and looked for better career
opportunities in Jammu or elsewhere in the country. And about 5,000 of those who
left lived in shabby camps in the scorching heat of Jammu or Delhi. As the
latter were left to their fate, there was a growing feeling that the community
leadership, mainly the elite class, had betrayed their interests for the sake of
vote-bank politics.
Pankaj Mishra writes about a Hindu, Gautam, whom he met in a camp. He had
left his apple orchards near Baramulla in the north of the Valley in 1990 with
sixty-five rupees in his pocket to come here. There had been no water for eight
days and the plastic buckets used for storage had begun to run dry. He said
bitterly, "We are like a zoo, people come to watch and then go away." He felt
betrayed by Jagmohan and the other politicians, especially the Hindu
nationalists, who had held up the community as victims of Muslim guerrillas in
order to get more Hindu votes, and had then done very little to resettle them,
find jobs for the adults and schools for the young. He had been back to the
Valley just once: he had been persuaded to do so by his Muslim neighbour who
personally came to the refugee camp to escort him back to his village. The
warmth between the Hindu and Muslim communities of the Valley – so alike in many
ways for the outsider, so hard to tell apart – had remained intact, and had
acquired a kind of poignancy after such a long separation.
There may be some stories – of neighbours occupying homes of Pandits – but
conversely there are also stories of how Muslim neighbours have looked after the
property of Pandit friends and neighbours. In Tulamulla, it was a Muslim family
that lit the lamps at a famous temple shrine considered sacred by the Pandits.
In some cases there are stories of flight necessitated by the threats Pandits
received in the initial years of militancy because envious Muslim neighbours
wanted to grab their property. But equally, there are also cases of a Muslim
neighbour grabbing the property of a Muslim or a Pandit neighbour grabbing the
property of a Pandit. A middle-aged Pandit in a Kashmiri camp on the outskirts
of Jammu I met a year ago, Krishan Lal mentioned how he had been persuaded by a
relative, also a neighbour, in his village in Tangmarg in North Kashmir, to
shift out. They had planned to leave together but the neighbour backed out at
the last moment. His son was killed in militancy related violence some years
later. Krishan Lal said, "We heard he was involved with some group." His Hindu
neighbour continues to live in their ancestral village 14 years after Krishan
Lal’s flight. Krishan Lal’s house and small restaurant are today in the
neighbour’s possession, who visits Jammu occasionally to tell him that his
property is in safe custody but his own return may not be safe. Visit the
migrant camps or visit rural Kashmir, villages where Pandits had a substantial
presence, and one hears stories with wide ranging reasons on why Kashmiri Hindus
fled or how they managed to stay put due to the efforts of good old neighbours.
A senior journalist in Kashmir talked of one Pandit family near Tangmarg who
decided to stay on till 1991, when the few other Hindu families in their village
also shifted out. They decided to follow suit but were stopped by Muslim
neighbours. The neighbour’s son, in the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, assured them of
protection. They continue to stay there till date.
The exodus itself may not have damaged the bonds of Kashmiriyat as
much if the propaganda machinery on Islamic jehad started by the State
and the Hindu right wing, which was becoming a force to reckon with in the ’80s,
had not roped the displaced Kashmiri Hindus into their fold. Several Pandit
organisations that were floated during or after the exodus and several elitist
Pandits became a pliable tool in the hands of such propagandist tactics. The
bitterness on the other side was a reaction. The timing coincided with the
gradual decline of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front after the arrest or
killing of its top brass and Pakistan’s conscious decision to strengthen the
hands of the Jamaat-e-Islami backed Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM). Pakistan wanted
more control in Kashmir politics and the JKLF’s independent approach could have
been detrimental to its interests as compared to the HM’s pro-Pakistan agenda.
But first came the propaganda with its exaggerated statistics of Pandit
killings and the number of those displaced. Statistics show that there couldn’t
have been more than 160,000 Pandits in the Valley at the time of the exodus. But
figures were inflated to 4 lakhs as many of those already settled outside the
Valley also began to register themselves as displaced. Kashmiri Muslims resented
the growing propaganda against them all over India, and which they saw Kashmiri
Pandits as being party to. Pakistan’s plan in replacing the JKLF with the HM at
this juncture may not have succeeded so well had the gulf between the two
communities not widened so much. For even today the sympathies and aspirations
of most Muslims in the Valley still lie with the independence ideology. The
shift from secular Islam to jehadi Islam may not have triggered the
large-scale displacements of Hindus from Kashmir but the latter may have played
a part in popularising the jehadi groups during the early ’90s. Kashmiri
Pandits did not figure in the HM’s game plan to Islamise the Valley. Most
Pandits had fled by the time the HM entered the picture as a dominant group in
separatist politics. But its warning – ‘Kashmiri Pandits responsible for duress
against Muslims should leave the Valley within two days’ – published in the Urdu
daily Alsafa on April 14, 1990, was critical in triggering a fresh
exodus. Subsequently, it warned the Pandits against returning to the Valley
because they had joined hands against the enemy forces, referring to India. The
HM declared that Pandits would be allowed to return only after they had proved
themselves to be part and parcel of the movement. The essentially Hindutva-centric
approach on Kashmir in India, especially during the ’80s when the BJP and its
allies were becoming a power to reckon with, was being complemented by a
jehadi Islamic approach from Pakistan. Kashmir was the chessboard and the
victims on both sides, swayed by the burden of their prejudiced histories, were,
but naturally, the Kashmiris – be it the Hindu or the Muslim.
Both New Delhi and Islamabad’s intentions to reap the harvest of engineered
divisions on communal and ethnic lines did not stop at the Valley, which had
become a successful experiment for both sides. In the early ’90s it continued in
the Doda region, where, unlike the Valley in 1989-91, militant groups carried
out massacres on a purely selective basis. While the militant operations were
designed to create communal polarisation between the Hindus and Muslims, the
State’s role complemented these designs by scuttling all efforts at joint
community initiatives. Instead, armed village defence committees were created to
provide arms training and .303 rifles mainly to Hindus. The army crackdowns in
Doda also created further divisions. In the first half of the ’90s, army
crackdowns to trace militants in Doda, which has a 55 per cent Muslim and 45 per
cent Hindu population, followed a deliberate pattern. People were asked to come
out of their houses and the soldiers asked them to identify themselves. The
Hindus were asked to form a separate queue and sent back after just a dose of
abuse. The Muslims were often also beaten up. Thankfully, despite much
provocation, Doda did not go the Kashmir way. But the bid to play politics of
division amidst the conflict continues, now in the twin border districts of
Rajouri-Poonch, where active militancy surfaced in the second half of the ’90s
though the two districts were popular routes of infiltration for militants in
the first phase. The divisions here, unlike in the Valley and Doda, are not so
much religious but mainly on ethnic lines. Rajouri-Poonch has an interesting
demographic pattern. While the districts have a majority of 80 per cent Muslims,
in the two major towns of Rajouri and Poonch the Muslims form a minuscule
minority of 20 per cent. Most of the Hindus in these two districts have settled
in the towns. Much of the militancy here is concentrated in the rural areas. The
forces thus play on the Gujjar Muslim versus Pahari Muslim divide, projecting
the former as a ‘patriotic’ victim and the latter as perpetrator at the behest
of Pakistan. In recent years several village defence committees formed in these
two districts have an overwhelming Gujjar domination. Such engineered divides
boded ill for the Valley. If this carries on unchecked, Rajouri and Poonch may
fast slip into the same mould. And, as in the Valley, the damage will then be
irreversible.
On a personal level, in most cases, traditional bonds of Kashmiriyat
between neighbours and friends still exist as they did even in the initial
period of militancy, and even though in the collective memory there is
bitterness on both sides. But it is difficult to keep building on the hopes
imbued by such personal bonds; bonds demonstrated for instance when Kashmiri
Pandits visit the Valley every year during the famous Khir Bhawani festival at a
Hindu shrine. Let down by their community leaders, many Pandits living in relief
camps avow that they still maintain good relations with their old Muslim friends
and neighbours, who also occasionally visit them from Kashmir. But as one such
camp inhabitant, a man in his forties, Gopi Krishan says, "We know them, but do
we know their children, they have not grown up amongst us. Who knows what is on
their minds?" His words echo the fears of those on either side of the divide. n
(Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal is executive editor, Kashmir Times).
Notes
1Navnit Chadha Behera, State Identity and Violence:
Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh.
2PS Verma, Jammu and Kashmir at political crossroads, New Delhi 1994.
3Alastair Lamb, Incomplete Partition: The Genesis of the Kashmir Dispute
1947-1948, Roxford 1997.
4Ian Stephens, Pakistan, New York 1963.
5Public lecture, ‘Partition of 1947, some memoirs’ by Ved Bhasin, organised
by SAFHR, Jammu University, September 2003.
6India, District Census Handbook, Jammu & Kashmir, Jammu District, 1961.
7Public lecture, Ved Bhasin.
8Pankaj Mishra, Kashmir: The Unending War.
9Cost of Conflict between India and Pakistan, Report, International
Centre for Peace Initiatives.
10Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and The
Unending War, New York 2000.
11Estimate of population of Hindus in Kashmir Valley in 1990:
The 1981 census in the Kashmir Valley records 125,000 Hindus (1981 Jammu and
Kashmir Census Report). Taking the 30 per cent increase in the total population
over the period 1971-1981 and extrapolating it to the period 1981-1990, we get
an estimated total Hindu population of the Valley in 1990 as 162,500.
12Pankaj Mishra, Kashmir: The Unending War.
13Sumantra Bose, Kashmir: Roots of Conflicts, Paths To Peace. |