The day Kashmiri Pandits lost their homeland
When my daughter turned eight last year, I asked her what present she would like for her 8th birthday. She said let us visit the shrine of Rajyna (popularly known as Kheer Bhavani) when it snows in Kashmir. For a child born in exile, it isn't all too natural for her to ask her father to take her home. What surprised me was her urge to visit the shrine of our Isht Devi when it snows in Kashmir. I left the conversation at that and hoped that she would soon forget all about it. As winter approached she reminded me of her birthday present. Her winter holidays were scheduled from January 1 to 20. I asked her to sleep and promised her that we would go home during her vacations.
I knew I had made her a promise that would be difficult to keep. It isn’t that I have not been to Kashmir since we were forced to leave; it was just that these dates bring me terrible memories. I somehow wanted to avoid being in Kashmir during exactly the same period, the events of which led to our being uprooted from the land of our forefathers.
Bagat-i-Kanipora is now a bustling suburb of Srinagar though it falls in district Budgam. Back then in 1989-90 it used to be a small hamlet 13 km from the milestone which read Srinagar 0 kms. We lived on a connecting road which connected our village to another called Kralpora. Kralpora was a bus stop en route the holy shrine of the mystic poet Nund Reshi. The village lay scattered close to the road and presented a poignant picture of pastoral Kashmir. A small rivulet ran through the village. There were orchards, the prominent being the Pomegranate Orchard near the Green Mosque, big chinars, and willows of all kinds would co-exist with tall poplars. Our home was a little outside what would constitute the main village. A small habitation of five-six houses had cobbled up around our home. All around this small habitation were fields that came alive in summer to the songs of men and women sowing and reaping paddy.
One October '89 evening, Mrs. Kaul, a neighbour, the only ones who owned a phone in our village, knocked at our door to inform us that my father’s cousin living in the Fateh Kadal area of downtown Srinagar had been shot. She possibly knew that Aima's tathe had not just been shot but shot dead. A month later, an MES official was shot at close range in Kralpora and left to die. Meanwhile JKLF cadres went around killing people, mostly Pandits, the convenient alibi being to brand them Mukhbirs or Informers of the state. This winter was very different from any other winter in my memory or even my father’s memory. Every day we would hear stories of this or that boy going for training across the border. Yet no one ever thought that the events happening around us were a precursor to something more sinister.
Behind our home an empty piece of land was used as a playground. One day as we were going about our usual game of cricket, a neighbour screamed at us for playing cricket at a time when the “youth of the nation” were organising Tehreek. From that day onwards our Muslim friends would not turn up to play. We stopped playing too. Winter was coming.
Television sets were beaming images of the Romanian revolution and the taking over of Bucharest by rioting crowds. Many in Kashmir were getting ideas and inspiration from this. Since the Romanian uprising lasted not more than a fortnight and had brought victory to the protestors, a belief had taken root in the minds of the terrorists that a similar “mass uprising” if organised could bear fruit for them as well.
On January 4, 1990 Aftab published a press release of Hizbul Mujahideen asking all Hindus to leave. Another newspaper Al-Safa published the same press release. Soon notices to leave were pasted on the doors of Pandits. A notice on our door read “Ralev, Galev ya Chalev”. Join, Die or Leave. Through all this there was “news” of Mujahideen having made hit-lists of all those who were “against” the Tehreek.The list , we were told, is compiled by “Mehman Mujahids” (read foreign terrorists) in consultation with local civil society. Thankfully no one in your family is recommended to a hit list yet a “concerned” neighbour told my uncle.
During one of these days my brother had gone to get his bicycle fixed when suddenly two young men carrying guns killed a man in the Kralpora Bazaar. Both men lived close to our village and my brother was naïve enough to tell someone that he knew one of them. A wellwisher visited us that evening and told us to send him out of Kashmir. This advice fell on us like a ton of bricks. My grandmother cursed my brother for being stupid and my mother started sobbing. It was too late to do anything. My brother thankfully knew how to ride a scooter. We had some petrol in the fuel tank of the scooter which would have been enough to take him to Lal Chowk. My father put some money into the pocket of his pheran and told him, if there is a knock on the door just jump from the back window and don’t stop the scooter till you reach the Tikus who lived near Central Telegraph Office in Lal Chowk. We kept awake all night hoping against hope that no one would come asking for Rinku. No one did.
Strange diktats started appearing on walls. Some would tell us how to dress, others what not to drink but the most interesting were the ones asking us to time our watches with Pakistan Standard Time. Mohalla committees were made to check vice. It was like a Taliban Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice. What constituted vice included watching something as harmless as Doordarshan. Everything Indian was the new untouchable. During all this time the writ of the terrorists went unchallenged. The National Conference government had run away and abdicated all its responsibilities. There was no administration at all.
The timing was just right for the “mass uprising” to be engineered. From here on I write the account that my brother had written in his dairy many years after that fateful night.
“We were about to have dinner when the final call for prayers was heard. It was normal for us to hear the call to the faithful. A soulful Allah-u-Akbar rendering went up in the cold mist of January. As soon as we finished dinner the soulful voice of our pious local Muslim priest was replaced by someone who sounded not just hoarse but uncouth too. He didn’t sound like a Kashmiri. At first his words sounded like cacophony but it took us little time to realise that he was provoking the people of the village to come to the mosque and hit the streets. The nearest mosque was almost 700 m from our home. People were possibly awaiting the call. A song blazed out of the loudspeaker and went something like this: "Jago Jago Subah Huyee; Rus ne Baazi Haari Hain, Hind par larzaan tare hain, Ab Kashmir ki baaree hain." (Wake Up, Russia has fallen and India eyes defeat, It is the turn of Kashmir to be freed.)
We looked at each other in complete silence. No one even had the guts to move from his/her place. The song was played for a long duration, many times over and as soon as it ended it gave way to sloganeering of a different kind, the kind that did not just target the establishment of India but the Pandits directly.
The slogans that were now filling the air left us in no doubt that we were about to be defiled or killed.
Hum Kya Chahte Azadi…(We want freedom)
Azadi Ka Matlab Kya, La Ilaha il Allah. (Freedom means La Ilaha il Allah.)
Agar Kashmir Main Rehna Hoga, Allah-u-Akbar Kehna Hoga. (If you want to live in Kashmir, you have to say Allah-u-Akbar.)
Ae Zalimo Ae Kafiro, Kashmir Hamara Chhod Do. (Oh Cruel people, you the Kafirs, Leave our Kashmir.)
Yahan kya Chalega Nizam-e-Mustafa (The rule of the Prophet will reign here).
It was still resounding in our ears when we started hearing; We want Kashmir to become Pakistan without Pandit men but with their women. It is then that we realised that the Kauls were in real danger because they had two grown up daughters. It wasn’t as if we were not used to the dirty limericks Muslim men sometimes shouted at our women. The one that was most common was: Batni batni wale gachav Dal, ye karev ti karav bistaras tal. (O Pandit woman let us go to Dal, whatever we will do will be under the quilt.)
At one point my father almost opened the door to go to their house, but all of us prevented him for doing so. Never before and never after in my life did I feel so impotent and helpless as I felt at that moment. I had no sisters of my own and the Kaul sisters had quietly filled that space, yet neither I nor anyone in my family could do anything for them. We were too scared to be able to do anything for the ones we truly loved.
Though we could hear the roar of the crowd now, they still seemed at some distance from our home. There were chants of "Azadi, Azadi" and they kept growing louder. We moved to the room from where we could see the road. My aunt peeped through the partly drawn curtain and shouted “Trath haye paye”. Lightning has struck. Thousands of people shouting slogans against India and Pandits in particular were approaching our home. My father locked all the doors and shut all the windows. We switched off all the lights of the house. All the women were moved to the kitchen, a canister of kerosene placed next to them just in case the crowd barged in, they were to immolate themselves.
It was past midnight but the frenzy refused to die down. One wave of screaming and shouting gave way to another as if a strange kind of adrenaline had been pumped into our village. The crowd was putting up a spectacle right outside our gate. A man climbed on top of another man’s shoulders and started shouting, "Pakistan se Rishta Kya, La Ilaha il Allah," and the crowd responded with the vigour that I had never seen before. In some time the crowd moved on and the voices died down a little. My father told us to recite Indrakshi Mantra. We were reciting the mantra to each other, when the noises started up again. The crowd from some other village seemed to have merged with the mob from our village. If it is the crowd of Machov (a village 2.5 km from ours) my father said, then the signs are ominous. There seemed to be no end to this night. At around 3.30 am in the morning my father opened the door of the kitchen to find all the women huddled together, wide awake, scared, still and almost soulless. The last surge before the first prayer of the next morning happened outside the Kaul home. Many in the mob kicked their main gate and hurled abuses at them in such loud voices that even we could hear.”
Tarini prevailed upon me and I booked two tickets for a return trip to Kashmir. We have been here since 2nd of Jan and shall go back to Delhi on 18th Jan. Dressed in our traditional Kashmiri Pandit attire,,a pheran with a ladh (a peculiar kind of stitch at the fall distinguishes a Pandit pheran from a Muslim pheran) we have walked together, the by lanes of downtown Srinagar and been to villages where the mazars of the great masters of Kashmiri poetry lie. We drank water from the same spring where Nund Rishi was given his first bath, but not before the maulvi, who could not recite one verse of Nund Rishi telling us to do a Vuzoo (ritual cleaning) because our foreheads were marked by vermillion. We also heard a teacher in Srinagar museum showing the diversity of the state pointing to a mannequin showing a Pandit woman, telling his students, look that’s a Batni and she wears no yezzar (pyjamas).
Not to be deterred we went around and looked for signs of our past. The crumbling Habbakadal locality represented the city of djinns, as did the prosperous village of Haal in South Kashmir.The ruined houses stand as a testament to who lived there once. Many temples once resplendent in their glory were dying for want of attention; the others had simply been erased from the land and the memories of the people. We drove past my village to Swoch Kral’s mazar and then onwards to the sacred shrine of Rajnya Bhagwati in Badipora to find a beautiful Kashmiri painting of the mother goddess at the site of what used to be beautiful idol. I was told that it was also broken to pieces by the iconoclasts.
Not everyone who we met in Kashmir was a fanatic, not everyone seemed happy at what had happened to Pandits, not everyone said that it was right to destroy the religious places of Hindus, not everyone liked the idea of encroaching upon the property of the Pandits, yet almost everyone we met said that it was Jagmohan’s plan to drive Pandits out and almost none seemed not to have participated in that orgy that drove the Pandits to exile.
Winter had come, and stayed.