Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
Heard that before. Perish the thought. Heard it before that Kashmiri Pandits who left the valley en mass in 1990 will return home and be resettled, for good. But this one is with a difference. Narendra Modi, the man who made it to the Prime Ministerial office, with a landslide win, is saying it.
Yes, it’s a commitment he made in his government’s policy statement which President Pranab Mukherjee enunciated at the newly constituted parliament’s joint session the other day. His is no tokenism. Whether it works or not is another matter.
Will the three lakh and more Pandits be able to find their moorings once more? Personally, I doubt it but Modi is a different kettle of fish as is his freshly reinvigorated party which has set a new 30-year high by securing a majority in the Lok Sabha on its own.
The Pandits, do I have to tell you, were forced out of the valley after Pakistani Jihadi terrorists hit the State on an unprecedented scale in 1989-90.
And the Kashmiri Pandits (KPs for short) once described by me in the 1970s as an endangered species, were frightened out of their wits by the unprecedented violence that confronted them. A heart-wrenching separation it was from their home and hearth; the unmatched beauty of the place, the nature’s bounty that was theirs, an inheritance some 3 thousand years old. A difficult thought it was for the KP to move out and he did it to lay anchor in lands so alien and a climate he was unused to.
And he has been there for the past quarter century, living in camps in and around Jammu, in cities as far away as Delhi, Bangalore, Pune, Bhopal, etc. The wanderer in search of a new home!
One should normally have been pleased by Narendra Modi’s commitment to have him resettled in the valley. The thought of a return may have been uppermost in his mind but the KP, a pragmatist, has suspected that returning to the valley may after all not be such a good idea.
In most cases the urban KP made a distress sale of his immovable lands, his house to the next door Muslim neighbor or to someone ten houses removed or in some cases to brokers from Srinagar who chased him to his new destination. If you ask me he has virtually nothing to return to. Except the thought that Kashmir is his home. Being a miniscule minority, the jobs that had been his, as a matter of right he imagined, are no longer available. In the Muslim majority valley, jobs are so rare to come by, and the prospects aren’t bright either.
In Jammu, the Hindu majority province, with things like the Gajendragadkar Commission recommendations etc, coming in he falls in a low priority category. The valley Muslims and Jammu Hindus were the priority people under that dispensation. Like it or not his presence even in Jammu has been resented. He is seen as an interloper out to grab some of their sunshine.
I have personal knowledge of one of Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Ministers from Jammu wanting to make a gift of a plush eight bedroom house in one of Srinagar’s prized locations – the Airport Road – to a former Muslim MP who had by then become the Pradesh BJP Pramukh or Up-pramukh. A young Haryan IAS officer and an outstanding Kashmiri journalist (a Muslim) currently occupying a senior position in a national daily published from New Delhi, helped save the day for the aggrieved KP.
The Minister had the gall to observe “aapko toh ghar bechna hi hai, hamare sadasya ko dijiye”.
I suppose the KP just the same must be grateful to the Jammuites for having let him live in shelters there. The truth, though, must be that he is not really wanted there. So, where does he go?
Obviously, as Mr. Modi suggests : to the valley. His predecessor, Manmohan Singh did allocate handsome amounts, running to several hundred crores, to initiate housing projects for the KPs’ resettlement. I really don’t know how many dwellings were built and who occupies these. Is it Badgam or Mattan or some other place that these units have come up at. And, pray, who lives there.
Mr. Modi’s may perhaps be a well-intentioned move and, I believe its broad contours have been delineated. Assuming that one of the proposals under consideration – building three small cities or towns at different locations in the valley, materialises , and if so who moves into these new creations, where will he find employment, who will ensure his safety, how about educational facilities etc. Are the Pandits expected to live in segregated, newly constructed ghettos.
The very day the President made that reference to resettlement of Kashmiri Pandits I heard someone asking “Oh, no. Not settlements of the Jewish kind, which have left the Palestinians out in the cold” That observation had a strange ring to it, yet was very understandable. Someone recalled that the reference to 3Ds in Modi’s speech in Parliament, including ‘demography’ besides democracy and development.
He recalled Modi’s poll pitch in Assam etc where he pointedly referred to demographic changes wrought by the Bangladeshi influx into the region. Is Mr. Modi, the question was asked, seeking a demographic change in the valley and making it all embracing, by locating settlements in three distinct regions. It is a dangerous thought, apart from the fact that the KP is no Jew. Yes, I do tell my Jewish friends that Kashmiris are indeed the lost Biblical tribe which had ended up in the valley. Why, I even tell them that Jesus is buried in Khanyar in Srinagar and that his grave there is well preserved by its Muslim keepers. I don’t forget to mention ” joo” rounding off Kashmiri first names such as Amajoo for Ahmad, Kalijoo for Kailash.
The right approach to my mind – if resettlement has to acquire meaning – will be to take all sections of opinion in the valley on board, the mainstream political parties as much as the separatists. You can even pin down Syed Ali Shah Geelani of the pro-Pak Hurriyat and Maulvi Umar Farouk, the Mirwaiz, who heads the moderate version of separatist Hurriyat and ask them to deliver on their often repeated invitations to “our Kashmiri Pandit brethren” to return home.
That reminds me of the full-page advertisements which leading British news papers and some Americans would carry exhorting Americans “Come back home, all’s forgiven”. It was a paid effort by the British government to attract American tourists to the British isles.
Back to consultations with Kashmiri political parties. The National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party, the latter foremost among the mainstream parties, and others, including the non-existent Congress, should be directly involved in the resettlement process if it is to acquire any meaning. Being distrustful of the valley parties and of the Muslim population would be extremely counter-productive. Threats would be meaningless.
The truth is that given the mutual distrust among the valley Muslims and Pandits, -and the mutual resentment it has spawned – it would be very silly indeed to think in terms of KPs returning to the valley for good. I know the dice is loaded against the KP in this tussle but I am also aware that the migration of the 1990s is not the first the KP has known. From Buddhist era down the way to Muslim rulers, the Moghuls and the Afghans, the KP has survived all these, numerically diminished but springing back in time to help himself and the land that was his own by rights.
A thought in passing : I hope the Modi plan for resettlement is not intended to pitch the KP against the Muslim. Y’know there is this talk about demography which has an ominous ring to it.
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