The passage of time has the ability to blur our memory, numb our conscience, and mellow the intensity of our reactions so much so that even the most horrendous of crimes become gradually cemented into history and becomes a fait accompli. One such horrific event is the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Kashmiri Hindu Pandits from Kashmir: over 250,000 Hindu citizens were driven from their homes to become refugees in their own country, more than 1000 were killed, 16000 homes were burnt, and 500 Hindu temples were desecrated. This is unequivocally the greatest moral lapse of independent India—unmatched in its magnitude, specificity or completeness.
The purpose of recalling the horrific, blood-curdling events more than 35 years later is to reawaken the indifferent conscience of a country that has callously brushed aside the pain and agony of over a quarter million of its citizens and moved on with its life. The events that transpired in Kashmir were so cruel in their scope that we did not have a term to describe them. Only when journalists used the word ethnic cleansing for the forced migration of Bosnian Muslims from Serb territories of the former Yugoslavia in the mid-nineties that we realized what had happened in Kashmir and were able to give it a name. A United Nations Commission has defined ethnic cleansing as “… rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” The United Nations also describes genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” The exodus of Kashmiri Pandits fits the bill on both counts. In 1995, the NHRC headed by the former Chief Justice of India, M. N. Venkatachaliah, confirmed that the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits was “akin to genocide.” So, Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide are not flippant terms concocted by Hindu fanatics but legally and judicially vetted terms. By appropriately labelling a crime, we not only define its scope for public and international understanding, but also instil a sense of urgency to seek its redress.
Machinations of New Delhi, the rigging of the 1987 elections and the Pakistani Hand have all been invoked as explanations for this atrocity, but none of these are logically sound or morally tenable to justify the killings and expulsion of a helpless minority that is an intrinsic part of one’s community. These are excuses. There is and remains only one explanation for this depravity: the Hindu identity of the Kashmiri Pandits. A brief recall of those terrible train of events. The killings began in late 1989: strategically planned murders of prominent personalities and women to create maximum panic and fear. The first to be killed was Pandit Tika Lal Taploo, a leading member of the KP community, who was killed in broad daylight in front of his house. Less than 2 months later, terrorists shot dead at point blank range Justice Neelkanth Ganjoo in a busy marketplace in Srinagar (Hari Singh Street market). Other prominent Kashmiri Pandits were assassinated in the following months.
To compound the angst, selected killings of women were carried out. Girija Tickoo, a 28 yr-old lab assistant, was abducted from her Muslim colleagues’ house, gang raped and cut into two by a carpenter’s saw while still alive. Sarla Bhat, a Kashmiri Pandit nurse working in Sher-e-Kashmir Institute for Medical Science, was abducted from within the premises on April 14, 1990. Her bullet-riddled body was found five days later in old Srinagar city. Her supervisor, Dr Abdul Ahad Guru, a prominent physician, was alleged to be complicit in her kidnapping. Mass killings—Nazi style, was another modus operandi. Groups of Kashmiri Pandits and Sikhs ranging in number from 24 to 36 were killed at Wandhama, Nundimarg and Chattisinghpora. Pahalgam is the latest.
The callous brutality of the murderers is evidenced by these instances documented by a think tank, Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies: hands and feet broken, eyeballs gouged out, skin slit open, and murderers dancing around the dead bodies of victims. Note that these killings took place in broad daylight with hundreds of onlookers. Each killing brought forth a new barbarity that was more heinous than the previous one. Friends, colleagues at work and neighbours were complicit in these killings. Friends with whom one had played cricket as a teenager were the ones who burnt down their homes. A Professor and his wife were tortured and killed by the students he had taught. The list is endless and disturbing. The overall picture that emerges from these killings is that of a society that had sunk so low on the moral scale that cruelty had no boundaries, trust was non-existent and schadenfreude had become the commanding ethos.
In this campaign of hate, one day stands out—January 19, 1990. It was the darkest day in the history of Kashmiri Pandits—their “Kristallnacht”: On that day, the pressure to leave reached its zenith. As dusk approached, families cowered inside their homes, behind the false security of their doors, while outside the exhortations became louder and shriller. The muezzin’s routine call to the Islamic faithful was replaced by three taped slogans that resonated throughout the cold January night, its eerie darkness accentuating the fear instilled by these repeated incantations: 3 “Kashmir mei agar rehna hai, Allah-O-Akbar kehna hai” (“If you want to stay in Kashmir, you have to say Allah-O-Akbar”) “Yahan kya chalega, Nizame-Mustafa” (“What do we want here? Rule of Shariat”) “Asi gachchi Pakistan, Batao roas te Batanev san” (“We want Pakistan along with Hindu women but without their men”).
In this setting, the local state government abdicated its responsibility; the federal government feigned ignorance, and the rest of India didn’t even bat an eyelid. Overnight, hundreds of Kashmiri Pandit families, women, elderly and children with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, abandoned the homes they or their families had lived in for decades or centuries and fled the Valley using any means of transport they could find. Indian Secularism did not die when the Babri-Masjid came down in 1992; it did not die when Gujarat flared up in an orgy of sectarian violence in 2002. It had been already murdered on that dark, eerie night in the valley of Kashmir long before. The little credibility that a warped Indian secularism retained was ripped to shreds and cast aside on that day.
While it is easy to shift the blame to Pakistan-sponsored terrorists, it cannot absolve us of our responsibilities. There was a total failure, at every level of the defence mechanisms that define a civilised nation: society, government, press, human rights commissions and Amnesty International—all abrogated their responsibility. What happened in Kashmir could not have occurred without the tacit compliance of the majority Muslim community, and so, despite their protestations, they must be seen as prime perpetrators of this atrocity. Rahul Pandita, the author of the book, Our Moon has Blood Clots, and himself a Kashmiri Pandit, clearly underlines this in an interview with The Wall Street Journal: “I think the essential thing I want to portray is that in 1989-90 there was a deep divide between two communities in Kashmir – the Muslims and the Pandits. And the Kashmiri Pandits became victims of the brutal ethnic cleansing, which was perpetrated by the majority community backed by Islamist militants, not the other way around. That is one distinction that has to be made very clear.
The ethnic cleansing of KPs stands as an indelible stain on the secular certificate of the country; a stain that grows larger and larger day by day as long as the issue remains unresolved. A tangible solution is required, and that is Panun Kashmir—a separate homeland for the Kashmiri Hindus in Kashmir comprising the regions to the East and North of the Jhelum River under direct control of the central government, where the Pandits can live with security and dignity. Additionally, unresolved cases of killings must be reopened. According to a 2008 J&K police report, out of 140 registered cases, chargesheets were filed in only 24, leaving the perpetrators unidentified in 115. Though only a fraction of the actual number of killings, reopening would give a semblance of justice to this hapless community. Those responsible for these heinous crimes must be tracked down and brought to justice. These are initiatives that must happen today. If not, the abrogation of Article 370 will be a cosmetic endeavour that is meaningless, and India will remain an incomplete and damaged secular polity.
