Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (33 page)

Later, I also visited the Sheikhpora Pandit settlement in central Kashmir, where some miscreants had recently thrown a carcass of a calf killed apparently by jackals. In August 2012, the residents of the settlement received a threatening letter sent by ‘Jaish-e-Mohammed’, triggering the fear of another exodus. The police dismissed the letter as a prank. The settlement is home to forty Pandit families who fled from various places in the Valley due to security issues. Many employees who returned under the Prime Minister’s package live there as well. Though the building structures are much better than those in other settlements, issues of safety remain. ‘I have asked them (the residents) to take even small signals of trouble very seriously,’ Sanjay Tickoo told me later. In many ways, these settlements are ghettoes. And the lives of many Pandit residents are restricted by the boundary walls. In Sheikhpora, a woman who has been living there for seven years says she has been out of the settlement only thrice—once to visit her relatives in Jammu, and twice to visit the Kshir Bhawani shrine.

‘
Dil chhum fatnas aamut
—my heart is about to burst,’ she said.

The next day I call Irshad.

‘Yes, I am here,’ he says.

‘Ok, I am coming.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I am near Lal Chowk. It should take me thirty or forty minutes to reach.’

In thirty minutes, I am at the gate of the University. In another five, I am climbing the stairs past the large glass jars. I walk down the corridor. Irshad’s room is locked. He must be around. I wait. I walk up and down the corridor. Maybe he is teaching a class. But the classrooms are empty. Moreover, he would have told me if he had a class. I decide to call him. The phone rings but he does not answer.

I sit on a small bench. I wait. I look at the large board hanging at the entrance of the department. His name is there next to the subject he teaches: Ecological Botany and Reproductive Biology. I read other names as well.
He will come
. Biosystematics.
He must be around
. Biological Invasions and Biodiversity.
Maybe he is stuck somewhere
. Cytogenetics and Plant Breeding.
He will surely meet me
. Plant Pathology and Nematology. I call again. No response. The last time I call, he disconnects the call. It is clear: he does not want to see me.

I don’t know why it is here that I am reminded of the young girl I had met at the Relief Commissioner’s office in Jammu. When I came out of his office, she was waiting outside. ‘What happened, why were you crying?’ I asked her. She told me her name was Supriya Bhat and she was studying in class eleven (so she was roughly the same age as I was when the exodus happened, I thought). She said she lived in the Jagti Township and each morning she took a bus to her school with her younger brother. A few days ago, the driver had suddenly applied the brakes due to which her brother’s head banged against the windowpane. ‘The driver scolded my brother badly. We pay him two hundred and fifty rupees per month for each student,’ she said. I asked her why she had come to the Relief Commissioner’s office. ‘I came to request him to reprimand the driver,’ she said. ‘Value should be given to life, not materialistic things.’

Oh yes, child, value should indeed be given to life. I am overjoyed. May be our story will not come to an end in the next few decades. Maybe some of us will still be nicknamed Sartre. And did you notice, I am saying to myself, how perfect Supriya’s elocution was? How assured her command over English? And Hindi? She spoke in Hindi as well. There was no problem of ‘ba’ and ‘bha’, ‘ga’ and ‘gha’. She was so confident. God, she was so bright. God bless you, Supriya Bhat.

I also remember how I felt during a theatre performance, where two friends recounted the story of the celebrated Urdu writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, whose forefathers were Kashmiri Pandits. One of them quoted a line used by Manto’s contemporary Krishan Chander to describe him—

By virtue of his disposition, temperament, features and his spirit, Manto remains a Kashmiri Pandit.

Hearing this buoyed me so much, I felt like whistling the way the front row audience sometimes whistled in a cinema hall.

And so, at the Kashmir University, I take out my notebook and write a short note. I hand it over to a lady in the administration department next to Irshad’s room. ‘Please give this to Dr Irshad,’ I tell her. Then I leave.

‘Chacha, cigarette,’ I ask Ali Mohammed. ‘
Aish karith
—with pleasure,’ he says.

Dear Irshad Bhai,
It seems we were not destined to meet this time. I came here on a personal journey, to walk through the corridors where many years ago you and Ravi must have walked together, brimming with youth and dreams of the future. Maybe if the catastrophe of 1990 had not struck us, you would still be together, perhaps teaching in the same department both of you graduated from. It makes me so happy watching young men and women in your department, looking at notice boards, carrying charts, and bent over their microscopes. It also gives me immense pleasure to see your name displayed so prominently on the staff list, along with your qualification and designation, and the subjects you teach. I wish all of your students the best for the future, and I wish you all good luck. I will come again. I promise there will come a time when I will return permanently.

Yours,
Rahul (Ravi’s brother)

… I will return permanently. I don’t write it. That I say to him in my head.

TIMELINE

1846: Kashmir is bought from British colonialists by the Dogra Maharaja Gulab Singh who adds it to Jammu and Ladakh region to form the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

1931: Mass uprising against the Dogra Maharaja Hari Singh. A mob of the majority Muslim community targets the minority Hindus, known as Kashmiri Pandits. Property destroyed, several killed.

August 1947: India attains independence. Partition takes place, Pakistan is formed. Maharaja Hari Singh is still undecided about Kashmir’s accession to either India or Pakistan.

October 1947: Aided by Pakistani army regulars, tribesmen from Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province attack Kashmir in a bid to occupy it. Hundreds of Pandits and Sikhs are killed, and their women raped and taken as slaves to Pakistan. Thousands are forcibly converted to Islam. Pandit families living in border towns are forced to flee and take shelter in Srinagar and elsewhere.

Maharaja Hari Singh signs the instrument of accession with India. The Indian Army lands in Srinagar and the tribesmen are pushed back.

In the 1941 census, Kashmiri Pandits constitute about 15% of the Kashmir Valley’s population. By 1981, they are reduced to a mere 5%.

February 1986: Major anti-Pandit riots break out in south Kashmir’s Anantnag area. Pandits are beaten up, their women raped and several houses and temples burnt down.

July 1988: Two low-intensity bomb blasts rock Srinagar.

September 1989: Pandit political activist, Tika Lal Taploo is shot dead by armed men outside his residence.

January 1990: Massive crowds assemble in mosques across valley, shouting anti-India, anti-Pandit slogans. The exodus of Kashmiri Pandits begins. In the next few months, hundreds of innocent Pandits are tortured, killed and raped. By the year-end, about 350,000 Pandits have escaped from the Valley and taken refuge in Jammu and elsewhere. Only a handful of them stay back.

March 1997: Terrorists drag out seven Kashmiri Pandits from their houses in Sangrampora village and gun them down.

January 1998: 23 Kashmiri Pandits, including women and children, shot in cold blood in Wandhama village.

March 2003: 24 Kashmiri Pandits, including infants, brutally shot dead in Nadimarg village.

2012: Thousands of Pandits still languish in refugee settlements. After more than two decades, the Kashmiri Pandit community has still not been able to return to their ancestral land. They are dispersed all over—from Jammu to Johannesburg.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

M
y heartfelt gratitude, first of all, to Ramachandra Guha, who mentored this book in many ways and chose it for the New India Foundation Fellowship.

In Mumbai: to Anupama and Vidhu Vinod Chopra, for making me remember long-forgotten stories of Kashmir; and to Abhijat Joshi, the most humble storyteller I’ve ever known.

In London: to Meru and Patrick French, the first believers of this book.

In New York: to Heather Gail Quinn, for her unflinching support and friendship.

In Kashmir: to Dr T.N. Ganjoo, Sanjay Tickoo, Suhail Bukhari, Zubair Dar, and Ali Mohammed, the quintessential Kashmiri.

In Jammu: to Dr Ramesh Tamiri, who allowed me to dip into his brilliant research material; and to Anuradha Bhasin, for instant access to
Kashmir Times
archives.

In Delhi: to Dr Shashi Shekhar Toshkhani; and to Geetika and Rashneek Kher, and Aditya Raj Kaul and Pawan Durani, whose belief in the book remained unwavering even during the fiercest of ideological face-offs. To Vinayak Razdan, whose splendid blog ‘Search Kashmir’ triggered off so many memories of home. To Richa Sharma, for sending talismans for this book. To Ajay Bhardwaj, whose film
Ek Minute ka Maun
kept me alive in Delhi in the beginning.

In Kasauli: to Preetie and Rajesh Dogar, Sherry and Rajinder Chopra, Ashima and Iknam Bath—friends as thick as thieves.

To Arundhathi Subramaniam, for faith that spreads like ‘the hum of crickets’; and to Hartosh Singh Bal, who knows what this book means to me.

To my parents, Shanta and P.N. Pandita, who suffered innumerable hardships in exile for my sake; and to my dear sister, Bharti.

To Anubha Bhonsle, for Moleskine notebooks, and for patiently listening to so many stories so many times over.

And, lastly, to Sir V.S. Naipaul, for his eternal lines: ‘
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it
.’