Of Kashmiriyat and Pandits

In the discourse surrounding the putative return of the Kashmiri Pandits to the Valley and the talk of their enclaving in “composite townships”, what lies in the backdrop is Kashmir’s enduring legacy of a composite culture in a bigger and historical time frame. But the fear and intimidation of the last few decades in the Valley must also justify why the tree should sometimes be more visible than the wood in a narrower and more provincial time-frame.

Recently, a hitherto unknown militant group which, the police say, is a front organisation of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, has mounted an attack on Jammu and Kashmir’s telecommunication network in various parts of north Kashmir. Pakistani green flags continue to be waved in Kashmir since April 15 as was seen in a rally held to welcome hardline Hurriyat Conference chairman Syed Ali Shah Geelani upon his arrival from New Delhi which was followed by Geelani’s recent proclamation that people will “continue” to wave Pakistan flags at its rallies in Kashmir, as it considered Pakistan a "well wisher". In a rally at south Kashmir’s Shopian district, separatist leader Shabir Ahmad Shah expressed concern over the “growing communalism” in the state due to “conspiracies” by BJP and RSS and ruling PDP’s “collaboration” with them besides spewing venom on all political parties “hell bent upon eroding the Muslim majority status of the state”.

According to Rahul Pandita, a very large number of Muslims took active part in the brutality against the Pandits in 1990 since which time, no substantial change has taken place in the Valley. A cycle of paranoia and hubris rolls on. Every state excess and act of omission – and there are many in number – is lapped up hook, line and sinker by agents of partisanship. What is worse, Kashmir was set apart from the two volatile regions of Afghanistan and North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan for long because its problem had begun as an ethnic conflict where religion had no role to play. But there is no denying that secessionist outfits such as the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), its so called “secular” pretensions notwithstanding, and the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen played an active part in the exodus of the Pandits from the Valley.

It was from the beginning of 1988 to June 1989 that the mass exodus of the Pandits occurred, following the rigged 1987 assembly election. During that time, the total number of terrorist incidents in the state numbered 45,852, as per the records of the Ministry of Home Affairs, in which about 21,039 people were killed including the Hindus and the Muslims, government officials, politicians and top political leaders. In that period of wholesale mayhem, innocent people were found hanging from trees, ailing men shot dead in hospitals, decapitated bodies with limbs chopped off recovered from rivers, men dragged from their homes, women raped, children killed in school compounds. Terrorists killed or abducted prominent personalities, neither sparing women nor children and nobody – Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and members of the Press, Christian missionary institutions, and foreign nationals – was off limits.

In 1989, when VP Singh appointed Mufti Mohammad Sayeed as the Union home minister, Pakistani-trained JKLF activists abducted the home minister’s daughter – Dr Rubaiya Sayeed – and demanded the release of five militants, one of whom was Hamid Sheikh, a kingpin of the separatist movement in the Valley. Ironically, the talk of the return of the Pandits has resurfaced at a time when Sayeed is again seen to make room for the secessionist constituency – nurtured since his daughter 's abduction in 1989 – ceding not only space to hardline separatist Masarat Alam Bhat recently but also to the chairmen of hardline and moderate factions of the Hurriyat Conference Syed Ali Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, and chairman of the pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) Mohammad Yasin Malik – effectively serving to recoup them from their state of hibernation.

At the height of terrorism, National Conference under Farooq Abdullah looked singularly clueless as to how to put an end to the cycle of violence right at the heart of Srinagar and the new governor Jagmohan had no option but to ask for army intervention. But militants took to killing officers, other officials and Kashmiri Pandits with ruthless glee. Such was their gumption that the governor could not attend the 1990 Republic Day Parade and the director of the TV and radio station Lassa Kaul was shot dead for refusing to adhere to the demands of the terrorists. In the same year, on March 1 the army fired in Rawalpora and Zakura causing the death of 17 Kashmiri civilians, an immediate trigger to stoke anti-government feelings. Some 300,000 Kashmiri Pandits were expelled from their native Kashmir valley after a combination of violence and explicit threats, peaked during the two years from 1989 to 1991, by Islamic terrorists aided and inspired by Pakistan.

The trouble in invoking a vintage Kashmiriyat as a concept of ethnic identity distinct to the Valley and any talk of uniting Hindus and Muslims drew serious flak from not only fundamentalist groups such as the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen but also from the association of the displaced Kashmiri Pandit community supported by the Sangh parivar. Kashmiri Pandit migrant organisations like Panun Kashmir, holding the view that the accession of Kashmir to India by Maharaja Hari Singh was final (Kashmir being “ atut aang” of India) and the ongoing self-determination movement a part of the Islamic terrorism supported by Pakistan, and seeking Kashmir’s full integration into India and advocating Hindu Rashtra, is just but one narrative among the swirling discourses. The recurrent perception that Kashmir needs ‘deliverance’ from India, following the Mughal, Afghan, Sikh and Dogra chapters of its history is another one. The recent incidents in the Valley following the killing of a teen in police firing and re-arrest of Masarat Alam Bhat reaffirmed not only the roiling seeds of secessionism but also the fragility of the peace process. The grander vision of history for Kashmir and subsequently the return of the Kashmiri Pandits can wait till a time when the immediate and the expedient are taken care of.

At the onset of Islam in Kashmir, the culture of the indigenous people was neither purely Hindu nor Buddhist. Islam, opposed as it was to the caste-oriented social system, evolved there as a vehicle of social protest against the Brahmanic culture. India’s real challenge is to restore Kashmiriyat in Kashmir and to earn a semblance of moral legitimacy for its secular experiment.

The author is a teacher and social commentator