On The Spot: Kashmir Wants Its Pandits Back

NEW DELHI: From the shopkeeper, to the student, to the Professor, to the politician, to the separatist---everyone in Kashmir wants the Pandits to return. The objection is only to the segregated townships that have been proposed by the RSS and the BJP, but on the question of the need for them to come back there is no division in the Valley.

The primary reason seems to be the importance that most in Kashmir still lay on Kashmiriyat, reflected in a composite culture. Lacing this is a sense of failure, that the average Kashmiri does not like to live with, and a desire to prove that the Valley can still be home to all communities irrespective of religion.

This sentiment is difficult for outsiders to comprehend, but is very clear to Kashmiri pandits like Sanjay Tikku who opted to stay back in the Valley despite the exodus during the years of militancy. Tikku who is a well known figure in Srinagar, says he stayed because his mother refused to leave. He says he did not face any discrimination, although it times it has not been easy as he is conscious of being a minority in the Valley. At the same time he says they observe all their festivals and their customs without a problem. He agrees that the Kashmiris want the Pandits to return, and that the proposal for special townships is problematic in the present context where demographic concerns have been raised.

All shades of opinion in the Valley too the view one, that the government should encourage the Pandits to return by assuring them of their security; two, it should offer them land and houses in return for what they lost; and three, it should help them re-settle in the areas from where they fled and used to live in before. This Tikku believes will restore the composite character of the Valley and the different districts, and not raise alarm bells of demographic changes fuelled by a strong distrust in government.

CPI(M) legislator Yousuf Tarigami was also of the same view, saying it was imperative that the government facilitated the return of the Kashmiri Pandits to the Valley. He said it was the government’s job to provide the security, and ensure that insurgency did not return to the state. He said Kashmiri pandits would be safer living in their old areas of abode, than in special conclaves that would create divisions even where none existed. After all everyone will have to go out of these special zones, to work, to school, and will find themselves misfits in a society that is currently more than willing to accept them, he said.

Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front leader Yasin Malik was also of the same view. He said there was no difference amongst the Kashmiri leaders that the Pandits must be allowed to return to the Valley. But not in special zones or townships, but as part of the general society. Malik also said that the government should compensate those who had lost their property and help them rehabilitate in the villages or towns they had moved out of.

Interestingly Tikku echoes many of the complaints of the Kashmiri Pandits who left the Valley and stayed back in Jammu. He agrees that those who stayed on in the Valley during the years of militancy and after, had been tense and insecure but have a different viewpoint than the few who reached Delhi and were rehabilitated there. The Kashmiri pandits in the Valley have lived along with the community, and are not politicised to a point where their demands are aggressive, and their politics divisive. In fact many like Tikku have been speaking out for Kashmiriyat and a composite Valley.

Tikku echoed the Jammu KP’s complaint that when they fled the Valley they were left to fend themselves by the governments that have since politicised their migration. Many of them settled in virtual ghettos, “camps” where at least 4500 died just from heat related diseases and snake bites. And it is only now nearly two decades later that they have finally moved from these camps into resettlement colonies where water, electricity and other basic facilities like health care centre are either in short supply or just do not exist. Also as Tikku points out, those shedding crocodile tears for the plight of the Pandit migrants did little to help in their rehabilitation. Instead Kashmiri Pandits working with the government in Kashmir were not reinstated in government departments in Jammu, and found themselves jobless after leaving the Valley in fear and panic.

In fact local resistance in Jammu to them was so high that in 1991 a Kashmiri Pandit boy who passed the Class X examination in the top position, was killed two days later. As the KP’s who stayed back in the state point out, they suffered the most but as they say “somehow successive governments have not looked at us as a suffering community, only used the issue to make political points.”

Interestingly, theirs is not the language of accusations and anger that one often hears from some Kashmiri Pandit groups in Delhi but a language of reconciliation in the hope they can return to the Valley with ensured levels of security. Kashmiri separatists like Yasin Malik have visited these camps earlier, and he claimed to have been received with warmth particularly when he urged them to come back promising that the Kashmiris in the Valley would ensure their security.