EXODUS-13

The 26^th anniversary, 19 Jan, of Kashmiri Pundits banishment from their homeland has gone by without a ripple in public conscience. A culture with 5000 years of history is at the brink of extinction but we have not a single tear to shed for them.

This is not the first time the Pundits have faced terror and persecution in their homeland. Six hundred years ago Sikandar Butshikan (1389–1413), the seventh Muslim ruler in Kashmir, unleashed a reign of terror and persecution of non-Muslims, destruction of their symbols and temples and their forced conversions to Islam that forced them to flee – turning the valley, till then a non-Muslim majority region, into a predominantly Muslim region.

The Muslim riots of 1948 forced the Pundits to flee their homeland yet again, an emigration that continued, so that they were reduced from 23.72% of population in 1901 to 4% of the population in 2003. By 2010, the Pundits in the Kashmir Valley were reduced to 808 families, 3,445 persons; 150 -300,000 Pundits had been forced to flee and were scattered around the country, mostly in refugee camps in Jammu and in NCR. Attempts to return them to their homeland were only a pretense. Result: as of October 2015, only one Pundit family had returned to the Kashmir valley since 1990.

 al-Qiyāmah, the Qiyamat (End time), arrived for the Kashmiri Pundits on 19 Jan 1990. It had begun some time ago with two local newspapers asking the Hindus to pack-up and leave; with walls plastered with posters and handbills ordering all Kashmiris to strictly follow the Islamic dress code, to re-set their watches and clocks to Pakistan Standard Time, prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks and imposing a ban on video parlours and cinemas. Masked men with Kalashnikovs were out on the streets to enforce the edict.

As the freezing-cold morning of 19 Jan 90 dawned, three taped-slogans were incessantly played 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); ' ‘Be one with us, run, or die!’ The slogans reverberated throughout the night.

Massive crowds assembled in mosques across the valley, shouting anti-India, anti-Pundit slogans. Masked men ran amok, waving Kalashnikovs, shooting to kill, shouting anti-India slogans, terrorising cowering Pundits who locked themselves in their homes; shops, business establishments and homes of Pundits were marked out, notices  pasted on them: you have 24 hours to “Be one with us, run, or die!" The air reverberated with “Ralive, Tsaliv ya Galive (either convert to Islam, leave the land, or die).” The ominous threats became louder and shriller by the hour.

The pundit fearfully recalled 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; Ms Bhat, a Kashmiri Pundit nurse working at the Soura Medical College Hospital in Srinagar, was gang-raped and then beaten to death; another Pundit woman was abducted, raped and sliced into bits and pieces at a sawmill; Baldev Raj Dutta, was kidnapped, brutally tortured and killed. And many other episodes of brutality and rape and killing.

As the night wore, gloom turned into despair. The only way to save their lives and their women’s honor was to run from the rabid jihadists – the Pundits painfully concluded.

And thus began the 13^th Exodus in the history of the world. The Exodus of Kashmiri Pundits.

More than 2000 pundits were massacred, their women raped, more than 20,000 of their houses destroyed, 95% of their homes looted. Lakhs of Pundits remain refugees in their own land, living in 8x8 tents in refugee camps, struggling with stress and disease and poverty and unemployment.

Is the Pundits’ Exodus 'genocide' or 'ethnic cleansing'? No, says the NHRC. The govt holds that the Pundits "migrated on their own" and their “displacement [is] self-imposed.”

Pundits’ epitaph: a Kashmir MLA askes the Pundits to apologize to the Muslims for running away from the massacre!

[Israelis also ought to apologize for running away from the Holocaust]

A REQUIEM FOR PUNDITS

The street is empty

as a monk’s memory,

and faces explode in the flames

like acorns—

and the dead crowd the horizon

and doorways.

No vein can bleed

more than it already has,

no scream will rise

higher than it’s already risen.

Outside they’re blocking the exits

and offering their blessings to the impostor,

praying, petitioning

Almighty God for our deaths.

 TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI

THEORY OF JUSTICE

Forget ‘A Theory of Justice,’ the acclaimed tome of John Rowls. Follow ‘A Radical Theory of Justice,’ the dreaded primer of A. Kejri.

John sees ‘Justice as Fairness;’ Kejri sees ‘justice as parti pris.’

Two axioms from ‘A Radical ’:

-          If a man loses an election, he is a man of no-reputation, ergo, he can’t sue for defamation.

Jaitly lost Amritsar, 2014, ergo, he is a man of no reputation, ergo, he can’t sue for defamation.

Hmmm . . .

Bajpai lost Mathura, 1957, Gwalior (by a huge margin), 1984; Bajpai is a man of no-reputation. Indira G lost Rai Bareilly, 1977; Indira G is a woman of no-reputation. Abraham Lincoln lost every election he fought – eight of them (in one of these he got less than 100 votes) - except for two; Lincoln is not only a man of no-reputation, he is definitely a man of ill-reputation.

Kejri himself lost Varanasi, 2014; ergo Kejri is a man of no-reputation.

-          You sue everyone or you sue none. Jaitly didn’t sue Kirti Azad, ergo, he didn’t sue everyone, ergo, he can sue none, ergo, he can’t sue Kejri for defamation.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

ONE DAY

On a one-day visit to my favorite city of the 1970s, Bengaluru, the first thing I note as I drive from the airport to the city is that the traffic snarls are no worse than in Delhi. But my favorite haunts are an eye of serenity and dignity in the storm of bevy and traffic. Just as they were four decades ago.

My first port of call is The Bangalore Club. As I enter I see - as is bound to happen in clubs that have a waiting period of 30-40 years for membership – the list of defaulters – those who have not paid their bills. The List is headed by none other than Winston Churchill, Esq, owing the club the princely sum, those days, of Rs 13. That must be 1898 when he was posted to Bangalore as a young army officer. The club, started in 1868, was then 30 years old.

Next, to the Bangalore Golf Club. Inaugurated on 24 June 1876, it is the oldest Golf Course anywhere outside the British Isles. Sixty acres of lush green in the heart of the city! Lounging on a vintage rattan cane-chair in The Boulangerie overlooking a wide expanse of green, sipping coffee made from roasted Arabic seeds and munching on the choicest pastries and croissants - a life of luxury, won’t you say?

And then across the road to The Taj West End. Twenty acres of greenery. Sip a drink or two under the 125 year old banyan tree. And then it is back to the airport and to the madness that is Delhi.

Bangalore Club then (1902)

BGC, looking out from The Boulangerie (Main traffic artery, Sanki road, on the right of the fence)

BGC Greens

BGC sunset

Nightfall: The Taj West End

Bangalore Club now

HATSHEPSUT AND THE DJESER-DJESERU

On the west bank of the Nile, opposite the city of Luxor, Egypt, is Deir el-Bahari, a complex of mortuary-temples and tombs. Its pièce de résistance is the Djeser-Djeseru - "the Holy of Holies," or the "Wonder of Wonders," or the “Sacred of Sacreds” - The Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut.

One of the most beautiful of the royal mortuary temples, its terraces had gardens of frankincense trees and other rare plants, its walls and colonnades were decorated with painted reliefs. Its location was unique: in a valley sacred for over 500 years for being identified with the principal feminine goddess of the funeral world, on the axis of the temple of Amun of Karnak, and at a distance of only a few hundred meters in a straight line from the tomb that Hatshepsut had excavated for herself in the Valley of the Kings on the other side of the mountain.

Hatshepsut was the longest reigning (22 years) of the seven female Kings (Pharaohs) in the 3000-year history of ancient Egypt, though Cleopatra the Great, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, was the most famous. Hatshepsut was one of the most successful pharaohs: successful in warfare early on, her reign was prosperous and peaceful, and she raised the Ancient Egyptian architecture to a standard not rivalled by any other culture for a thousand years.   She was "the first great woman in history.”

A woman with pendulous breasts and rotten teeth who died of cancer at age 50, Hatshepsut was much more powerful than the more famous and more beautiful Cleopatra the Great.

Famed for her beauty and intellect, Cleopatra was in fact ordinary looking, but a great conversationalist: that is how she charmed two leaders - Julius Caesar and Mark Antony - from the greatest empire in the world. She was manipulative and ready to kill for her right to rule but also ready to die for her honor: when she and Mark Antony lost the war to Rome, she killed herself to avoid being paraded through the streets of Rome in chains in Octavian’s ‘triumph.’ Legend says that she killed herself by the bite of an asp (Egyptian cobra); but such death is painful, and she would have wanted to avoid pain. Research shows that she consumed a cocktail of poisons.

Two great women, two great Pharaohs.

Dance at Hatshepsut Temple – film: Singh is King, Akshay Kumar & Katrina Kaif