19/01/90: When Kashmiri Pandits fled Islamic terror

January 21st

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19/01/90: When Kashmiri Pandits fled Islamic terror

January 19, 2005

Srinagar, January 4, 1990. Aftab, a local Urdu
newspaper, publishes a press release issued by Hizb-ul
Mujahideen, set up by the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1989 to
wage jihad for Jammu and Kashmir's secession from
India and accession to Pakistan, asking all Hindus to
pack up and leave. Another local paper, Al Safa,
repeats this expulsion order.

In the following days, there is near chaos in the
Kashmir valley with Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah and
his National Conference government abdicating all
responsibilities of the State. Masked men run amok,
waving Kalashnikovs, shooting to kill and shouting
anti-India slogans.

Reports of killing of Hindus, invariably Kashmiri
Pandits, begin to trickle in; there are explosions;
inflammatory speeches are made from the pulpits of
mosques, using public address systems meant for
calling the faithful to prayers. A terrifying fear
psychosis begins to take grip of Kashmiri Pandits.

Walls are plastered with posters and handbills,
summarily ordering all Kashmiris to strictly follow
the Islamic dress code, prohibiting the sale and
consumption of alcoholic drinks and imposing a ban on
video parlours and cinemas. The masked men with
Kalashnikovs force people to re-set their watches and
clocks to Pakistan Standard Time.

Shops, business establishments and homes of Kashmiri
Pandits, the original inhabitants of the Kashmir
valley with a recorded cultural and civilisational
history dating back 5,000 years, are marked out.
Notices are pasted on doors of Pandit houses,
peremptorily asking the occupants to leave Kashmir
within 24 hours or face death and worse. Some are more
lucid: "Be one with us, run, or die!"

* * *

Srinagar, January 19, 1990. Jagmohan arrives to take
charge as governor of Jammu and Kashmir. Farooq
Abdullah, whose pathetic, whimpering, snivelling
government has all but ceased to exist and has gone
into hiding, resigns and goes into a sulk. Curfew is
imposed as a first measure to restore some semblance
of law and order. But it fails to have a deterrent
effect.

Throughout the day, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front
and Hizbul Mujahideen terrorists use public address
systems at mosques to exhort people to defy curfew and
take to the streets. Masked men, firing from their
Kalashnikovs, march up and down, terrorising cowering
Pandits who, by then, have locked themselves in their
homes.

As evening falls, the exhortations become louder and
shriller. Three taped slogans are repeatedly played
the whole night from mosques: '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, Nizam-e-Mustafa' (What do we want here? Rule
of Shariah); 'Asi gachchi Pakistan, Batao roas te
Batanev san' (We want Pakistan along with Hindu women
but without their men).

In the preceding months, 300 Hindu men and women,
nearly all of them Kashmiri Pandits, had been
slaughtered ever since the brutal murder of Pandit
Tika Lal Taploo, noted lawyer and BJP national
executive member, by the JKLF in Srinagar on September
14, 1989. Soon after that, Justice N K Ganju of the
Srinagar high court was shot dead. Pandit Sarwanand
Premi, 80-year-old poet, and his son were kidnapped,
tortured, their eyes gouged out, and hanged to death.
A Kashmiri Pandit nurse working at the Soura Medical
College Hospital in Srinagar was gang-raped and then
beaten to death. Another woman was abducted, raped and
sliced into bits and pieces at a sawmill.

In villages and towns across the Kashmir valley,
terrorist hit lists have been floating about. All the
names are of Kashmiri Pandits. With no government
worth its name, the administration having collapsed
and disappeared, the police nowhere to be seen,
despondency sets in. As the night of January 19, 1990,
wears itself out, despondency gives way to
desperation.
And tens of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits across the
valley take a painful decision: to flee their homeland
to save their lives from rabid jihadis. Thus takes
place a 20th century Exodus.

* * *

Srinagar, January 19, 2005. There are no Kashmiri
Pandits in Srinagar, or, for that matter, anywhere
else in the Kashmir valley; they don't live here
anymore. You can find them in squalid refugee camps in
Jammu and Delhi. As many as 300,000 Kashmiri Pandits
have fled their home and hearth and been reduced to
living the lives of refugees in their own country.

Two-thirds of them are camping in Jammu. The rest are
in Delhi and in other Indian cities. Many of them,
once prosperous and proud of their rich heritage, now
live in grovelling poverty, dependent on government
dole and charity. In these 15 years, an entire
generation of exiled Kashmiri Pandits has grown up,
without seeing the land from where their parents fled
to escape the brutalities of Islamic terrorism, a land
they dare not return to, although that land still
remains a part of their country.

A large number of them are suffering from a variety of
stress and depression related diseases. A group of
doctors who surveyed the mental and physical health of
the Kashmiri Pandits living in refugee camps, found
high incidence of 'economic distress, stress induced
diabetes, partial lunacy, hypertension and mental
retardation.' Statistics reflect high death rate and
low birth rate among the Kashmiri Pandit refugees.
And thereby hangs a tragic tale that has been all but
wiped out from public memory.

An entire people have been uprooted from the land of
their ancestors and left to fend for themselves as a
weak-kneed Indian state shamelessly panders to Islamic
terrorists and separatists who claim they are the
final arbiters of Jammu and Kashmir's destiny. A part
of India's cultural heritage has been destroyed; a
chapter of India's civilisational history has been
erased.

Had this tragedy occurred elsewhere in Hindu majority
India, and had the victims been Muslims, we would have
described it as 'ethnic cleansing' and 'genocide.' We
would have made films with horror-inducing titles. We
would have filed cases in the Supreme Court of India.
Our media would have marshalled remarkable rage in
reporting the smallest detail.

But, this tragedy has occurred in Muslim majority
Kashmir valley, and the victims are all Hindus, that
too Pandits. What has been lost is part of India's
Hindu culture, what has been erased is integral to
India's Hindu civilisation.

Therefore, the government makes bold to record that
the Kashmiri Pandits have 'migrated on their own' and
their 'displacement (is) self-imposed;' the National
Human Rights Commission, after a perfunctory inquiry,
refuses to concede that what has happened is
'genocide' or 'ethnic cleansing,' though facts add up
to no less than that, never mind that 300,000 lives
have been destroyed.

And, our jhola-wallah brigade of secular activists
rudely turn up their noses to the plight of Kashmiri
Pandits: Hindu sorrow, inflicted by Islamic terror,
stinks.

Today, on January 19, the 15th anniversary of the
forced flight of Kashmiri Pandits, look back at
India's wretched history of secular politics and
consider the terrible price the nation has paid at the
altar of appeasement because the Indian State has all
along toed, and continues to toe, the line of least
resistance.

Reflect. Resolve. React.

Next week: The Kashmiri Pandits' living nightmare.




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