The Pandit question in Kashmir conflict - II

The Pandit question in Kashmir conflict - II

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. 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. This is the second part of the interview
On Kashmiri identity
Whatever the numbers might be, being uprooted from ones life - to live in camps in an alien environment, reliant upon food rations - must have been traumatising. How has this impacted the Pandit community, their sense of identity and, crucially, their idea of 'home'?
Yes, indeed, the uprooting from their homeland has been a traumatic experience for most Kashmiri Pandits.
Accounts from Pandits living in miserable conditions of deprivation in camps suggest a variety of tolls taken on them as a community that range from the decline in their birth-rates, since the accommodation in these camps allow so little privacy, to large numbers suffering from mental illnesses, such as depression and paranoia.
The mental toll has also taken the form of extreme insecurity. For many of them the experience of living in exile has been a humiliating one of being reduced to the status of refugees, a term that has connotations of mendicancy and social dishonour.
This sense of humiliation is often fed by surrounding communities who do not welcome them as exiles amidst them; they see them as threatening their jobs (given the Pandit records of literacy) and as competitors for the political, social and economic resources of the state.
Even for those who have managed to recover from the economic losses of migration, there is the intangible but not less real sense of loss that comes from their separation from their homeland; it has meant severing them from access to the places that were associated with their ancestors, their cultural legacies, their personal and familial memories and their own sense of pride in belonging to a land so widely celebrated for its beauty, its traditions of learning and its spiritual and religious sanctity.
Many Pandits have also expressed the very real fear of losing their specific cultural identity through assimilation in the wider Indian environment; the loss of their language, of their regionally specific religious traditions and indeed even of their numbers through their younger members marrying outside the community.
Kashmiris hold their identity close to their chests. Would you say that they are equating 'heritage' with 'national identity' and why do Kashmiris feel so threatened by assimilation and entitled to their own, distinct, separate national identity?
I don't think Kashmiris are peculiar in doing this. Most South Asians are equally wedded to their regionally specific identities, whether based on linguistic difference, historical separateness or religiously informed cultural uniqueness.
In the case of Kashmir, this sense of regional otherness was also enforced by its separate history of integration with India. The accession to the Indian union was brought about, first of all, not by a representative government but at the hands of an unrepresentative monarch whose legitimacy as a ruler had been denied and inveighed against until 1947 even by the premier political party of India, the Indian National Congress.
Therefore, it is not surprising that many Kashmiris question the same party's easy acceptance of the same illegitimate ruler's decision of merger with India. Of course, this was true of the situation in the other 600 odd princely states, too.
However, the specific location of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir and its demographic configuration of a Muslim majority meant that its merger with the Indian union was not a self-evident outcome. The Indian leadership was clearly aware of this when Jawaharlal Nehru promised that the Maharaja's signing the instrument of accession that brought the state within the boundaries of independent India, and not of Pakistan, would have to be followed by a plebiscite to ascertain that the accession had the consent of the Kashmiri people. That plebiscite, as is well known, has never been held.
And what is seen as a broken promise made specifically to Kashmiris has also sharpened the awareness of Kashmiris as a people specially betrayed. These are some of the reasons why Kashmiris are justified in believing that their place in the Indian union is not only far from being a settled fact but that its inclusion did take place in circumstances unique to their state.
Pandits who left the valley appear to have become very radical in their views of the valley. What has influenced this? Hardship on the outside? Hindutva? The fear of 'militant Islam'?
Part of their radicalisation, of course, stems from their experiences of 1990 and after, which has led many of the Pandits in exile to see Kashmiri Muslims as a whole as either rabid Islamists themselves or as passive followers of such elements.
They see the valley also as being in the grips of Islamic terror sponsored by Pakistan.
However, Hindu supremacist groups from mainland India preying upon their insecurities have also fortified these impressions in no small measure.
Ironically, these right-wing groups who have found easy targets among Pandits living in miserable conditions in camps but have demonstrated no interest in actually helping them out of those camps.
Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, Kashmiri Pandits have seen themselves for some time as Indian nationalists so it is no surprise that they perceive the situation in the valley in the same terms as the Indian state does - as a region driven by Pakistan-sponsored Islamic terrorism, denying that the insurgency demanding azadi (freedom) is a popularly backed one and the reflection of genuine political and economic grievances that have nothing to do with religious radicalism.
Both in line with recent Indian government policy and as with the Hindu chauvinist groups in India, common cause is made with a wider global conservative alliance against the so-called 'War on Terror'.
Pandits complain that while the state is trying to bring Pandits back and offering relief packages they have done little to help Pandits who remained behind. Why would the Indian state not try to empower those who remained behind?
I am not entirely sure of the precise reasons for the Indian state's neglect of the Pandits who remained in the valley. However, I suspect that this is for the same reason that it has done nothing to move the Pandits out of camps even 20 years after it first set them up - that it has a greater stake in keeping them in a state of permanent insecurity. The existence of an endangered minority provides additional justification for the disproportionate deployment of military power in the valley. It allows the Indian state's security agencies to act with excessive force against a largely unarmed and defenceless civilian population; it does so in the name of protecting a minority in jeopardy from Islamic terrorism.
What does it mean to be Kashmiri today, particularly for the youth who have grown up under the smog of the past two decades?
A whole generation of young Kashmiris has grown up since the 20 years of militancy not knowing their Kashmiri Pandit compatriots as significant members of their society. That has certainly affected their understanding of what it means to be Kashmiri. However, contrary to impressions created by the more rabidly anti-Muslim constituencies in mainland India, this has not turned these young Kashmiris into Muslim fanatics intolerant of religious others.
It has to be remembered that besides the small number of Pandits who have remained in the valley, there is also a significant segment of a Sikh population that has lived in Kashmir largely unscathed. It is only on March 20, 2000 that, for the first time, the 40,000 strong Sikh constituency of the valley was targeted for violence when 35 Sikh villagers were massacred at Chattisinghpora, a village near Anantnag in southern Kashmir.
However, even in this instance there is strong evidence to suggest that these killings were engineered either by state-sponsored forces or by isolated groups of extremists to make a political point - that all was not well in Kashmir - at a time that coincided with the visit of the US president, Bill Clinton, to India.
What was more telling of how the Indian state agencies have sought to push forward a cynical policy of further prising open social and religious divisions among Kashmiris was proven by what followed in the aftermath of the Chattisinghpora massacre.
Five days later, in nearby Pathribal, Indian military forces killed five men of the village, claiming they were the 'foreign militants' responsible for the deaths at Chattisinghpora, leaving behind nothing but their charred bodies so that identification would be impossible. These bodies were then buried. It is only after protests by the local population - in one of which some 9 or 10 people were killed and another 12 or so injured - and then a lot of foot-dragging by the authorities that the government finally ordered, on April 5, that the five bodies be exhumed and tests conducted to establish their proper identities.
There were more obfuscation and attempted cover-ups to follow when, nearly two years later, the DNA samples taken from the victims of the fake "encounter killing" in Pathribal were declared to have been interfered with; the samples sent to the laboratories were those of women whereas the five killed had been men.
It was only after fresh samples were collected and tested that DNA evidence proved conclusively that the bodies were indeed those of innocent locals and not of any foreign militants.
What is a worrying development in terms of the safety of religious minorities, their position vis a vis the majority, and perceptions of them in terms of their ties to the Indian state, - over the last decade - the Kashmiri Sikhs have begun slipping into the roles formerly performed by the Kashmiri Pandits and are now heavily preponderant in intelligence-gathering agencies, or employed as policemen and in other strategic sectors.
Still, despite such coldly manipulative efforts by state agencies to pit socio-religious groups against each other, and beyond the Chattisinghpora killings, the Sikhs have not felt themselves to be in any particular danger in the valley.
In a few instances when certain militant groups have issued threats to the community in more recent years, Kashmiri Muslims have been vocal in condemning such aggressive language.
Also, in terms of the dramatic transformation of Kashmiri society since 1990 what cannot be denied is something that many Kashmiri Muslim elders themselves say in that they feel the education of their young has been impaired by being deprived of a cosmopolitanism that Kashmiri Pandit teachers and students leant to their schools.
But the more immediate circumstance bearing down upon the younger generation of Kashmiris and their sense of their identity is the aggression of the Indian state's occupation that is visited upon them. If the exodus of the Pandits has altered Kashmiri society in radical ways on the one hand, equally dramatic has been the loss of a whole generation of mostly Muslim youth to violence at the hands both of extremists but even more at the hands of the Indian state's military and paramilitary organisations. Besides the thousands of dead, there are thousands of the 'disappeared' that have created a yawning gap in Kashmiri society.
The hundreds of martyrs' graveyards in the various towns and villages of the valley are a constant reminder of the precariousness of Kashmiri life. Last year in the infamous bloody summer of 2010 there were also over 100 victims of disproportionate retaliation by Indian armed forces against protestors armed only with stones if at all, most of whom were teenagers and younger. Not all of these victims were in fact even part of the demonstrations that were fired upon.
And for most Kashmiris, of all ages, the experience of Indian occupation is one of daily humiliation. There is also the ignominy of all Kashmiris being forced to carry at all times identification cards to prove their right to be in their own land, a requirement, even more egregiously, from which Indian visitors from the mainland are exempt. All of this has inevitably produced a keen sense of how fragile their existence as Kashmiris really is. And it has undoubtedly made young Kashmiris aware that their right to survive as Kashmiris with honour and in security will have to be struggled for and cannot be taken for granted.
-(Concluded)
-(Courtesy: Al Jazeera)