The Pandit question in Kashmir conflict – I

The Pandit question in Kashmir conflict – I

Author Mridu Rai about how the minority Hindu community fits into the Kashmir dispute.
The story of Kashmiri Pandits is an extraordinarily difficult one to tell. One the one hand, when the insurgency erupted in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1989, thousands of Pandits left the valley, suggesting that the community suffered enough intimidation to abandon their homes. On the other hand, the accounts of Kashmiri Pandits who stayed behind in Kashmir contradict claims by Pandits in the diaspora who say that Kashmiri Pandits suffered 'a genocide' and were forced 'into exile'. Indeed, understanding the experience of the Pandits, caught between Kashmir's Muslim majority and the ambitions of the Indian state, is an intricate affair. Even the semantics describing the flight of the Pandits from Kashmir are highly politicised and contentious. AZAD ESSA speaks to Mridu Rai, the author of Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights and the History of Kashmir about the Kashmiri Pandit community and how they fit into the dispute.
On migration
Putting the flight of Pandits into perspective: Was it a 'migration' or an 'exodus'?
Given the large numbers involved and the relatively short time frame in which most of the departures of the Kashmiri Pandits happened, the more accurate term would have to be an "exodus".
Why is language so important here? And why do you conclude that the language used by Pandits, like 'expulsion' and 'exile' as an indictment of the Indian state?
The language used to describe the departures is important because it involves the question of making claims on the state. The term 'migration' suggests voluntariness to their departure, which most Kashmiri Pandits would rightly deny. Many Kashmiri Pandits prefer the term exile or expulsion as being a more accurate description of their situation and descriptions of themselves as 'refugees' and 'refugees in their own country'. Others have even used more extreme terms such as 'genocide', 'ethnic cleansing' or a 'holocaust'.
The indictment of the Indian state is forcefully expressed in these descriptions and their decrying of both the Indian state's inability to protect them when in Kashmir and then its failure to rehabilitate them after their forced departure. The expression 'refugees in their own country' is, of course, also a statement reminding the Indian state of the Kashmiri Pandits' nationalism, which entitles them to the protection of the state and also honourable rehabilitation in return for their 'sacrifices' for the nation. For some this has earned them special protection in terms of reserved quotas for admission to educational institutions and employment in certain states in India. This special treatment would not be possible to demand or obtain had the departures been entirely voluntary.
This is not to say that most displaced Pandits have been rehabilitated. Many thousands still live in camps in Jammu, Delhi and other parts of India in atrocious conditions of deprivation.
How do we understand this flight then? People who remained behind say that others felt intimidated and left, but there are also suggestions that those who left might have been encouraged to do so.
This is an issue that is mired in a great deal of controversy. It still awaits a careful sifting of evidence.
However, I think it is safe to say that there were probably elements of both circumstances at work in explaining the departure of the Pandits from the valley. A large number of Pandits have testified to the fact that there were threats issued to them both individually and indirectly to the community.
An important element of the background is also the killing of a number of senior Pandit officials in various organisations. The militants claimed that they were only targeting Indian agents but, from the Pandit perspective, the fact that the targets were exclusively Hindu was an indication that the threat was a communal one.
At the same time, several separatist leaders have claimed that it was the Indian state, working through its governor in Jammu and Kashmir at the time, Jagmohan, that engineered the departures of the Hindus so as to leave the government a free hand to deal with Muslim militants. The government, and Jagmohan himself, have denied this.
In any case, the idea that encouragement was the sole trigger that incited the departure of such large numbers is hard to believe.
If this had been the case, it would have required the mobilisation of state resources on such a large scale that it would have left behind concrete evidence, not just traces in the form of rumours.
However, there are many Kashmiri Muslims who have witnessed departing Pandits boarding vehicles organised by the state. Wajahat Habibullah, who was a senior Indian administrator in the state, allows that there may have been some instances of transport being organised for a few groups of Pandits but he denies that this was part of a widespread concerted policy.
He adds, however, another element to the various explanations on offer for the Pandit migrations.
He recalls groups of Muslims appealing to him to stop the Pandits from leaving, which led him to suggest to Governor Jagmohan that a television broadcast be made advertising the request of hundreds of Muslims to their Pandit compatriots not to leave the valley.
According to Habibullah, Jagmohan did not agree to this suggestion.
Instead he made several announcements that reassured Pandits that if they did decide to leave, refugee settlement camps had been set up for them and also that departing civil servants among the Pandits would continue to be paid their salaries. The political scientist, Sumit Ganguly, adds another important factor - that Jagmohan had also announced that his government would not be able to guarantee their safety, if Pandits decided to remain in the valley.
Although not an indication of a coordinated government policy to engineer the departure of the Pandits, these were signs certainly of a government not making great efforts to prevent the Pandit exodus.
The reality is probably a combination of all these elements. What can be said with as much certainty as it is possible to have in these circumstances is that Kashmiri Pandits must have felt a distinct threat to their safety - whether an immediate threat or a sense that their future, that of their families and their property was no longer secure in the valley.
This sense must have varied from family to family and individual to individual. If they had not felt endangered in this way, it would be extremely difficult to explain how such large numbers would give up and leave the place that had been their homeland for centuries.
On the confusing numbers
And yet there are no precise numbers regarding the migration/exodus of Pandits. Figures from within and figures from the outside are so different. Some say 700,000 left, others say 100,000 left. Why is there such ambiguity over the numbers?
One of the chief causes of the ambiguity is because the numbers of Pandits in the valley in 1989 can only be adduced from the census of 1941, the last time the Pandits were counted and listed as distinct from the category of Kashmiri Hindus and that census listed a little fewer than 79,000 Pandits in the valley.
It's from this baseline that demographers have sought to work out the number of Kashmir Pandits in the valley in 1990. Using the rough measure of the average decennial growth rate in the state as a whole, available through the censuses up to 1941 and then the 2001 census, the number of Kashmiri Pandits living in the valley before 1990 that they arrive at is about 160,000 to 170,000.
So the number of 700,000 as representing the number of Kashmiri Pandit departures after 1989-1990 is not credible because that exceeds by many hundreds of thousands the total of the Kashmiri Pandit population at the time.
Another potentially misleading aspect of the counting of Pandit departures is that the total put forward often also includes those Pandits who had left the state voluntarily between 1947 and 1990.
According to the political scientist, Alexander Evans, 95 per cent of the Kashmiri Pandits living in the valley left in 1990, i.e. anything between 150,000 and 160,000. However, a 2010 report of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre of the Norwegian Refugee Council suggests that 250,000 Pandits have been displaced since 1990. And a CIA report suggests a figure of 300,000 displaced from the whole state.
How do you respond to claims then, that a genocide took place - that 3,000 to 4,000 Pandits were killed? The state says that no more than 219 were killed and the KPSS says the figure will probably touch on 650 (between 1990 and 2010). Are these figures important to flesh out or do they merely detract from the issue?
The question of whether the killing of Kashmiri Pandits after 1990 constitutes genocide is as difficult to answer as it has been difficult to define genocide.
There is still a great deal of disagreement on this among international legal experts and scholars. In some instances, when involving very large numbers such as in the Jewish holocaust or the Rwandan massacres, the term has been less controversially adopted.
However, there is agreement at least that the number has to be a substantial proportion of the total population of the group. And here the numbers of Kashmiri Pandit killings do not technically support the use of the label of genocide. There are [also] several other factors, beyond the question of numbers, according to which the Pandits cannot be considered to be the victims of genocide.
For one, they were not the sole victims of targeted killings in Kashmir since 1990.
Kashmiri Muslims who dissented from the ideologies of various militant groups have also been systematically liquidated in the way in which Pandits had been. This does not conform to the accepted definition of genocide that is waged against a group defined collectively as the 'other', since Pandit claims of genocide rests on their being targeted for their religious identity.
Secondly, genocide is preceded and accompanied by the dehumanisation of its victims. There is no evidence of such denial of humanity of the Pandits having taken place among the Kashmiri Muslims accused of perpetrating their mass destruction.
And finally genocides are extremely well-organised acts involving the training of armed groups, indoctrinated fully into an ideological inflexibility so severe that it can override wider social opinion and consensus.
There is no evidence of this having been the case in the valley.
The question of whether or not this was genocide is important for the Pandits to determine. It is crucially linked to the question of their protection, and in turn, on this question of safety rests the possibility of their return to the state.
It affects also their demands for compensation and rehabilitation not just in Jammu and Kashmir but also in the rest of India. But the definition has serious implications for Kashmiri Muslims, too. Among these is the unstated but still real assumption that Kashmiri Muslims, guilty of such a heinous crime, can expect no sympathy for their demands for self-determination or independence.
Furthermore, portraying Kashmiri Muslims as genocidal killers also puts them beyond the pale of the law and serves indirectly to justify the use of draconian laws against ordinary civilians as well as the heavy militarisation of the valley with the army acting with unchecked impunity against them.
On Muslim silence
It has been suggested that Kashmiri Muslims were complicit through their silence when Pandits were intimidated. Is this accurate or unfair?
Once again, the complicity - active or passively through silence in the face of the threats issued by Islamist groups - of Kashmiri Muslims is an allegation that is enmeshed in controversy.
There are Muslims themselves who have expressed guilt for not having intervened more decisively to prevent the departures of their Pandit neighbours and friends.
But this guilt is mostly retrospectively expressed; even if some people are inclined to take this self-implication as evidence of complicity, it must be remembered that in the early months of 1990, when the largest numbers of Pandit departures took place, the situation was a highly unstable and confusing one for all those living in the valley, including the Muslims.
Muslims were also the subjects of intimidation at the hands of extremist groups and many of them the victims of extortion and retributive violence if they refused to comply either with the ideologies of militant or extremist groups or with demands for money or other forms of support.
As was also true in the context of the partition of 1947, neither Muslims nor Hindus were certain of their own futures, so it is hard to imagine that most Muslims could have been in a position to guarantee with any confidence the safety of their Pandit neighbours.
However, despite this, as Habibullah's account mentioned earlier has it, there were still large numbers of Muslims who did try actively to dissuade the Pandits from leaving.
There is another reason why it is hard to believe that the valley's Muslims, as a whole, would have wanted the Pandits to leave and that is the fear prevalent among large numbers of them - spread through widely circulated rumours - that the evacuation of the Pandits was preliminary a government plan to then hit at all Muslims to stem militancy without the risk of collateral damage to the Hindus.
So it is hard to imagine that they would have wanted to force the departure of the Hindus.
-(To be continued)

[Al Jazeera]