Dr. Mahesh Kaul
The great tragedy of humanity is that when the people who are subjected to genocide are not aware that they are subjected to such gruesome crime because they have a great social and political value.Persecuted communities are targeted for their cultural value and originality in the place of their origin to establish hegemonies that are artificial and meant to uproot the aboriginals to establish the theocratic order and fascist rule.This process is a comprehensive mechanism oriented to systematically destroy and vandalise the communities from their homelands so that even traces of their civilisation and ritualistic symbols are erased.
The religious cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir their ancestral homeland signifies this reality of genocide.The killing of selected people in the first phase of genocide was an ignition to light a fire that turned into an unending inferno.14th September is not just a symbolism but it signifies a day in the contemporary evolution and progression of the Kashmiri Pandit community revealing the failures at various levels of the Indian state and the national consciousness of India.Not only that it exposes the religious fault lines that exist vividly even after the partition of the Indian nation in 1947 but questioning the secular nation building as well.
It exposes the myth that the creation of the Muslim homeland has solved the communal problem that plagued the unity of India.The so called founding fathers who basked in the glory of India will be a peaceful state after the partition have failed the nation as this false premise has cost the minorities like Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir their existence leave aside the right to life and limb.
They failed to internalise that though Pakistan was created on the basis of Muslim majority character of the provinces and states but it left aside an appreciable Muslim minority within Hindu areas where they enjoyed an approximate parity keeping in view their birth rate. Not only did they fail to recognise the fact that there are states like Jammu and Kashmir where Hindus are in minority in terms of Muslim population but never thought of providing constitutional safeguards in such places.And this error of judgement or deliberate slumber has cost a religious minority of Kashmiri Pandits their existence in a secular,democratic post-independence India.
Martyrdom to Kashmiri Pandits has not come instantaneously in 1990 but it has been a continuous process that started with advent of theocratic jihadi Islam that established itself in the 14th century through invasion,subversion,conversion and to be more precise through proselytization in Kashmir.
Baharistan-e-Shahi and Tofat-ul-Ahbab; these Persian accounts are not written by indigenous writers but by core Muslim fanatics who themselves participated and witnessed rape, plunder, arson and massacre of the Kashmiri Pandits in Kashmir.It is the genocide inflicted by these Muslim hordes from Central Asia and other Muslim states that led to the continuous exile of Kashmiri Pandits and forced them to seek refuge in the hot and humid plains of India.
1989-90 concerns us even more as the genocide of this period has happened under the nose of secular India that claims itself to be doing equitable justice to all the communities after independence. It is a national shame for India that the religious cleansing that took place in 1990 and has rendered Kashmiri Pandits as people without homeland till date exposes the tragedy and paradox of secular India;where Kashmiri Pandits being Hindus and Indian nationalists are made to languish as stateless and homeless people even when the Muslims of the sub- continent got their separate state in terms of Pakistan and not only that they got a second homeland in India where they enjoy equal rights in secular India but Kashmiri Pandits are denied their ancestral homeland in their own state and country at the cost of their human rights.
In such a grim situation when exile of this community is to enter the 30th year – martyrs have a special place in the collective memory of the community. They were killed because they represented a civilizational value that posed a threat to the alien jihadi order based in exclusivity ; rejecting every tenet of the inclusive progressive society.The martyrs of the Kashmiri Pandit community are a collective heritage of not only the community but the idea of India that survives on the Sanskrit civilsational values.And Kashmiri Pandit martyr becomes important as it is the Kashmiri Pandit community that has Sanskritised the Himalayas and enabled the Indian nation to develop its identity as the Sanskrit nation.The partition of India cannot deny this reality as the rulers like Lalitaditya from Kashmir made their sway all across India and overseas to establish the centres of the Sanskrit civilisationnalvalues.Kashmir being the epicentre and nucleus of the Greater Sanskrit India.
Enemy knew it well to balkanise India ,it is imperative to hit at the nucleus of the Sanskrit Indian nation that is the Kashmiri Pandit community. It is this community that has developed the Sanskrit identity and Northern frontier in the Himalayas.Thus defining the very idea of India that is now being boasted loosely by the so called Kashmir experts without having any sensitisation of the Kashmiri Pandit civilizational and cultural values.
Thus jihadi separatists were bang on the target when they religiously cleansed the Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir.They knew to annihilate this community means to balkanise India and this has become clear over the decades.The more the Indian state has denied the genocide of the Kashmiri Pandits more it has created vigorous break India forces all over the India having roots in Islamic jihadi theocratic order of Kashmir.The same order that subjected the Kashmiri Pandits to genocide with the tacit support of the secular political class of India whether it was from the left,right or centre of the Indian state.Indian state allowed itself to be used as the hand maiden by the subversives in the state apparatus to help the jihadis to facilitate the Kashmiri Pandit genocide and label it as a mere law and order problem.
It is in this context that the martyrs have to be seen.They were killed for representing the entire civilisation and the Sanskrit Indian nation. It is now the role of the Indian state and above all the India nation to work for the resurgence of the Kashmiri Pandits as they have already been sacrificing from the 14 th century to defend the NorthernFrontier in the Himalayas to act as bulwark against the de-Sanskritisng forces.
The present government at the centre led by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi has the mandate not only for the good governance but to make India a resurgent Sanskrit nation.It was a conscious mandate and the next mandate will be based on how much Sanskritisation has been enabled by converting the 2014 mandate into a tangible reality.The litmus test of this Government lies in re-Sanskriting the Kashmir that has been left de- Sanskritised after the religious cleansing of the Kashmiri Pandits.
The only way to make India resurgent lies in upholding the Sanskrit Himalayas in Jammu and Kashmir and the key lies in the reversal of Kashmiri Pandit genocide and religious cleansing by enabling the resettlement of the community with full constitutional powers to govern and shape their own destiny in Kashmir with a free flow of Sanskrit Indian nationhood free from subversive Article 370 and its illegitimate child so called Article 35 A.
(The author is Chairman, Himalayan Heritage Foundation.)
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