The
most shameful chapter in the history of independent India was the genocide of
Kashmiri Pandits. Although it has been going on for decades, the events that
were triggered on January 19, 1990 led to the mass exodus of nearly
half-a-million Kashmiri Hindus. Only a few other events in world history
compare in scale and magnitude to the tragedy that befell the unfortunate
Pandits. They were warned through posters and loud speakers that they had two
choices: either convert to Islam or be prepared to be killed. Their men were
brutally tortured and killed and their women were raped and killed. The
population of Kashmiri Pandits in Srinagar valley was about 15% when India
attained Independence. It came down to a fraction of 1% by 2010. Between 1990
and December 6, 1992, 160 Hindu temples were razed to the ground. The excuse of
retaliation for Babri Masjid does not hold good.
Members
of an elite community that provided intellectual leadership to the Kashmiri
society were suddenly rendered homeless and became refugees in their own
country! After the Pandits fled, some 25000 standalone houses belonging to them
were burnt down. Others were simply occupied. Some of the Pandits who had the
foresight to see what was coming sold away their properties ─ ancestral homes and
other precious heirlooms ─ at throw away prices and fled to Jammu and other
Indian cities.
What
followed (in January 1990) was even worse. The state government led by Farooq
Abdullah abdicated its responsibility leaving the victims to the tender mercies
of barbaric butchers. Abdullah himself went away to London where he merrily
played golf and other ‘adult games’. His behaviour is comparable to that of the
Roman emperor, Nero who famously or notoriously ‘fiddled while Rome was
burning’!
The
central government did nothing to ameliorate the situation; the human rights
activists remained uncharacteristically silent; the secular intelligentsia
turned a deaf ear and the world ignored the humongous tragedy. The Pandits
themselves stoically accepted their fate. There were no protests; no
demonstrations; they did not resort to violence or destruction of public
property and they did not produce suicide bombers.
They
did not have godfathers in the human rights circuits in New York and Washington
and the matter was scarcely if ever was raised in the human rights debates in
the UNO. Just to give you an idea of how the human rights ‘activists’ treated
the issue, the New York based ‘Human Rights Watch’ which produced a 68-page
report on the 2002 Gujarat riots (in which 890 Muslims and 294 Hindus were
killed) has all of one paragraph comprising about 75 words on the Kashmiri
Pandit genocide (which victimized more than half-a-million people), on its
website. A famous electronic media journalist, who in her budding years
reported from Kashmir, glibly explained that the ethnic strife in Kashmir was
the result of ‘social tensions’ between poor working-class Muslims and
prosperous, elite Hindus. A clip of her reportage has been doing the rounds on
social media for quite some time now.
All
that the governments would do was putting up the Pandits in camps outside Jammu
and Delhi. Just imagine three generations of a family living in a (eight feet
by eight feet) room made up of canvas walls and partitioned by bedsheets! Life
in the camps was harsh. They had to live in unfamiliar surroundings in subhuman
conditions. There is already an underlay of fear, of persecution, torture,
violent death and an uncertain future. They were not used to the harsh hot
climates of Jammu and Delhi. All this led them to suffer from a number of
physical and mental disorders from diarrhoea and dysentery to skin rashes and
phobias and manias. Menopausal age in women dropped from a national average of
55 years to 35 years. It was reported after a survey that in a ‘relief camp’
comprising 300 families there were more than 200 deaths in the five years
between 2001 and 2005 while there were only 5 births. How can genocide get
worse?
There
is a most poignant postscript to the (unending) saga of the misery of the
Kashmiri Pandits. It was the death in 2013, of an inmate of a relief camp in
Jammu due to starvation. Because the authorities did not provide rations to the
camp in time. An incident for which every civilized Indian should hang his head
in shame!
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This is the reply posted to a question on Quora
