The 26th 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 13th 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.
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