Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (32 page)

Bhat may have installed an air conditioner. But I knew from visits to numerous other quarters in Jagti that many were leading a very difficult life. Rajinder Kumar Pandita was sleeping when I visited him. His wife was fanning him since there was no electricity, while his four daughters sat nearby. In the refugee camp, he had run a small shop and worked as a typist in a court. After he came to Jagti, he had to forego his shop and his job. He developed a kidney infection and suffered from high blood pressure. He was advised not to do any hard work or venture out in the heat. A few years ago, he had taken a loan of fifty thousand rupees towards which he was paying a monthly instalment of thirteen hundred rupees. So, out of the relief money of five thousand rupees, he had only thirty seven hundred rupees with which to feed six mouths. Each family member lived on twenty rupees a day, which is even lower than the Planning Commission’s ridiculous definition of poverty. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how do I even send my children to school?’

Often, Bhushan Lal Bhat told me, impoverished families would come to him, requesting him to give them a handful of grain or some fruits. He did what he could, dipping in to the small supply he kept aside to offer to a priest on his father’s death anniversary. Many, he said, reeled under heavy debt. Outside, old men playing cards spoke in hushed tones about a man who kept his front door locked and slipped in late at night through a window to escape the wrath of money lenders. Bhat said his business had failed.

‘This is worse than the first exodus,’ Ajay Chrungoo said.

When I land in Srinagar, Ali Mohammed is waiting outside the airport. He hugs me and takes my bag. ‘It has been raining for days, but today it is sunny. You’ve brought the summer with you from Delhi.’ I sit next to him. He takes out a pack of cigarettes, and I take one. We both smoke silently. From the Ram Bagh bridge, we turn left. I know he knows, but I tell him anyway. ‘If we turn right, I will reach home.’ He just nods. We pass by the Iqbal Park and the Bakshi Stadium where a farce of a parade is held every Independence Day and Republic Day. It is early afternoon and I think of going straight to the university after dropping my bag off at the hotel. The academic session is on at the university and I will find Irshad there.

I haven’t been to the university in two years. The last time I was there, I was following a huge crowd of protestors agitating at the death of a teenage boy in a police firing. As the police charged at the crowd I took refuge inside the university. After a few minutes I came out only to be chased by a police vehicle down a street where I was pulled into a house by a helpful boy who was also a stone-pelting veteran. He looked at me, smiled and said, ‘
Bacch gaye!
’ I was offered water and an invitation to the attic from where the action on the road was visible.

I remember coming out of the house and returning to a spot near the university gate. A boy rushed across the street. He had been hit on his head by a stone and blood was fast spreading over the rabbit on his Playboy T-shirt. There was teargas smoke all around. A magistrate wearing a cricket helmet stood at the gate. ‘I don’t know when this will end,’ he said.

I remember walking with him for a short distance. A man in shabby clothes passed by us. The magistrate tried to stop him. ‘Ashfaq, it is me,’ he said. Ashfaq looked at him blankly, mumbled something and ran away. ‘Allah!’ the magistrate sighed. ‘Can you imagine? This man has a PhD, and now I don’t know what has happened to him.’

Meanwhile more teargas shells were being fired at the protestors. At one end of the road, a constable holding a transparent shield with ‘Sexy Ayoub’ scribbled on it, smoked a cigarette. Without looking at me he said—‘This teargas smoke doesn’t bother me any longer; even my tears have dried up.’

A little later, another police party made an appearance. The protestors had been chased away. A paramilitary soldier walked past a fallen motorcycle and smashed its rear-view mirror with a blow of his lathi. ‘They might turn on us now,’ whispered a fellow journalist, a Kashmiri, who had experienced this many times in the past. Another policeman walked by, a little edgy. ‘Are you from Delhi?’ he asked me; and for lack of better words, or perhaps just overwhelmed by emotion, he muttered—‘
Mohabbat aur jung mein sab jaayaz hai!
’ (All is fair in love and war).

And now I am back at the university, looking for an old friend of Ravi’s. The botany department is at the end of the road that leads from the university’s main gate. I enter. There is a garden outside. On the ground floor is the zoology department. In the main hall animal species lie preserved in formaldehyde in large glass jars. I climb the stairs to the first floor and walk down a corridor. At the end is a room outside which hangs Irshad’s name and designation. It is locked. There are two classes in progress in adjoining halls. The doors are half open. I peep in. But he is not there. A student walks by. ‘Do you know where I can find Dr Irshad?’ ‘He must be busy with the Science Congress,’ he replies. Science Congress! ‘Do you have his number? I’ve come from Delhi.’ He doesn’t have it. But he gets me the number from another student. I call.

‘Dr Irshad?’

‘Yes?’

‘Hi, where are you? I just wanted to meet you.’

He doesn’t ask me who I am.

‘Oh, I am busy. But I’ll be there tomorrow; why don’t you come tomorrow?’

I should tell him now.

‘I have come from Delhi to see you. You wouldn’t know who I am. I am Rahul. Rahul: Ravi’s brother.’

‘Oh!’

There is silence. ‘Why don’t you come tomorrow?’ he asks.

‘Ok, I’ll come tomorrow.’

‘Till when are you here?’

‘I will be around for a few days.’

‘Oh, in that case come any time. I will be at the university.’

The next day I cannot go to meet Irshad. I have to go to Vessu, in south Kashmir, where a few Pandits who returned at the government’s behest live. In 2008, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh inaugurated the country’s longest cantilever bridge in Akhnoor in the Jammu region, spanning the banks of the Chenab River. It was while standing on this engineering marvel that he announced a Rs 1,618-crore package to facilitate the return of the Kashmiri Pandits to the Valley. But no one quite understood why the Prime Minister had chosen Akhnoor to make the announcement. He should have either made it in a refugee settlement or in Srinagar. Many said it was to drive a wedge between the Pandit refugees of the 1990 exodus and those who had fled in 1947 from what is now Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to take refuge in Akhnoor and other border areas. Obviously, his advisors had not advised the Prime Minister well.

As a part of the Prime Minister’s package, six thousand jobs were also announced for the Pandit youth in the Valley. But because of the fear of being targeted by militant and radical elements in Kashmir, most of these jobs were never filled. However, 1,446 applicants, many of them women who badly needed jobs, took up the offer. They were accommodated in five settlements across the Valley. Most of the jobs offered were as teaching staff in various government schools. Hoping for the best, these candidates shifted to the Valley. One of these five settlements is in Vessu, near Qazigund, on the Srinagar–Jammu highway. About seven hundred employees live there in cheap, single-bedroom, pre-fabricated structures. One such structure is shared by four employees. There is a very small kitchen and all four have to cook their meals there. There is no drinking water facility. The water supply is erratic, provided by tankers, and the residents boil that water for drinking. Otherwise, they go to a burst water pipeline nearby and collect water. The tanker water is so dirty, the few water purifiers the residents had have gone bust. The water situation is so bad that a day before I visited them, the residents blocked the national highway in protest. The previous December, after the schools closed for winter vacations, only a few non-teaching employees were left in the settlement. For the next three months, they had to melt snow on stoves for water. There was no electricity at all.

But the lack of basic amenities in the camp is the least of the inhabitants’ concerns. The real problem arises, they said, at their workplaces where they face acute harassment from their Muslim colleagues. ‘They treat us like pariahs,’ said one female teacher. ‘My headmistress threw a notebook at me the other day and shouted, “You sixth-grade pass-outs have come now to lord over us!” I wanted to tell her that I have a double Master’s and a B.Ed degree.’ Many in Kashmir clearly resented the return of Pandit employees under the package. ‘When I ask for leave to go and visit my family in Jammu, my school in-charge does not respond at all,’ said another Vessu camp resident. Many women face harassment while commuting to their workplace. ‘I have been pinched so many times on the bus. You are standing in the bus holding the railing when someone comes and keeps his hand over yours. Or someone shouts menacingly, ordering you to keep your dupatta over your head,’ said a female resident. ‘Two of us were in the marketplace the other day when two men came up to us and commented that we were worth three lakh rupees,’ recalled another.

These troubles have led to serious health issues among many. At least two female employees had to be admitted to the Qazigund hospital after they complained of chest pains and their blood pressure shot up. ‘We are so depressed, I think most of us will leave these jobs in the coming months,’ said another resident. ‘Many women come to me in the middle of the night saying they can’t sleep,’ said a resident medical practitioner. ‘All of them are on blood pressure lowering tablets.’

But leaving their jobs is not easy. Most of those who opted for them are in dire financial straits. ‘The only other source of income is the five thousand rupee relief my family gets in Jammu. I have two children and this money is not even enough for their tuition fees. Now tell me, what do I do?’ asked a resident.

Some have brought their children with them. But over the years, many schools, particularly in the rural areas, have switched over to a curriculum that focuses on religion. ‘I put my son in the best school here, but they teach mathematics only twice a week. There is too much focus on Islamic studies; on studying the Koran,’ said a resident.

But at least inside the settlement they are relatively safe. One woman employee chose to live outside the settlement in Pulwama with one of her erstwhile neighbours. Her father stayed with her as well. One late afternoon, while returning home, she was followed by four men in a car. ‘Come, we will drop you home,’ said one of them. When she refused politely, another told her, ‘Look, I’ve not been able to sleep since the day I set my eyes on you. Let’s marry, let’s conduct a nikaah.’ The woman left her job and returned to Jammu.

Many Pandit employees told me that they did not even receive their salaries on time. ‘I have not received my salary for two months,’ said one. In Baramulla in September, after an Indian cricketer scored a century, stones were pelted at the Pandit settlement there.

The Centre-appointed interlocutor on Jammu and Kashmir, Radha Kumar, once came to visit one of the camps. The women employees met her in private and narrated their woes to her. She reportedly told them that she had taught in Jamia (Jamia Millia Islamia University) for many years and that ‘… you have to learn to ignore such unpleasant experiences [of harassment at work places].’ Some of the affected women had written to political leaders including the UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, requesting them to facilitate their transfer to Jammu. One such letter said—

There is a freedom deficit which all of us are experiencing daily. We have been many times communicated indirectly that our speaking out the truth will bring trouble to us. In this atmosphere many of us chose to keep our experiences to ourselves. We do not have the adequate confidence in the local administration because we are not sure of their maintaining strict confidentiality.

‘Each day we leave behind something of our identity,’ one woman said. ‘Yesterday, it was the freedom to sing the National Anthem; today it is the freedom to wear a bindi; tomorrow it could be our faith.’ She broke into sobs.

They all sat close to each other, on a thin rug, and soon others begin to weep as well. The women feel relatively safe inside the camp; outside, the world has changed. It is no longer the Kashmir it once was. ‘When we became refugees in 1990, our lives became restricted to eight-by-eight feet rooms. More than twenty years later, we are still stuck,’ said another woman. Her mobile rang. Her ring tone was the Gayatri Mantra. She picked up her phone, looked at the number flashing on the screen and mumbled, ‘When I am out, I put my mobile on vibration mode.’