Skip to main content

Kashmiri Pandits: Some Facts

 


The latest issue of India Today [April 4] carries a detailed feature on the Kashmiri Pandits. It is worth looking at some of the facts presented by the weekly especially because the recent Bollywood movie has struck a raw nerve and evoked diverse reactions.

First of all, why were the Pandits targeted? The attack was not simply because of religious animosity as the film tries to make it out. India Today says that the Kashmiri Pandits accounted for just 4% of J&K’s population, “but their influence over the affairs of the state far exceeded their numbers.” The Pandits were an integral part of the ruling elite during the harsh Dogra rule. After Independence, the Pandits continued to occupy high positions in both the state and central government offices. Though they were only 4% of the population, 30% of the farmland in the state was owned by them. A major share of commerce was under their control.

India Today points out that there was “the famed spirit of Kashmiriyat or the centuries-old tradition of religious syncretism and communal harmony.” But, at the same time, there was resentment over the Pandit dominance in social, economic and political affairs. That resentment reached its peak in the late 1980s. Religion was not the major issue, in other words. It was more about exploitation from one side and the longing for justice on the other.

Secondly, it is not the BJP alone that looked after the interests of the Pandits after the 1990 massacre and exodus took place. The following illustration from India Today is eloquent in itself.


Manmohan Singh did quite a lot for the welfare of the Pandits. He did not advertise it. He did not use it for fomenting communal clashes and hatred in the country.

Thirdly, India Today argues that the Babri Masjid issue had its tremors in J&K. When the Masjid was opened to Hindus in 1986, Ghulam Mohammad Shah constructed prayer rooms for Muslims inside a Hindu temple in the civil secretariat, “provocatively declaring, ‘Islam khatre mein hai’ (Islam is in danger)”. This led to widespread communal riots in Kashmir. It set off the first wave of the exodus of Hindus from that state.

Fourthly, the appointment of Jagmohan as Governor of Kashmir in Jan 1990 did no good. The crackdown ordered by him alienated the Muslims of Kashmir from the Indian government. India Today says that Jagmohan was biased against the Muslims. He had asked the Pandits “to leave the Valley so that he could launch a crackdown on militants uninhibited by the fear that they would wreak revenge on the community.” Many things were done not in good faith, in other words.

Good faith is hard to get in politics especially in hard times. But solutions are impossible without good faith. Why the BJP under Modi’s leadership is least likely to solve the Muslim problem in India is precisely this lack of good faith. Jagmohan was as much responsible for the flight of the Pandits as the militants. Later he joined the BJP, the place where he would fit in neatly.

The killing of Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq, the Valley’s popular spiritual mentor, and the subsequent killing of 52 Muslims by CRPF made Kashmir a complete chaos. There were still Muslim sheltering Pandits in good spirit. But such sporadic instances of camaraderie would be nothing more than lilies caught in a tempest. By the time Jagmohan was asked to resign as Governor, most Pandits had fled from Kashmir. Jagmohan’s governance caused as much havoc as Muslim militancy.

Kashmir saw more and more deaths in the years that followed. No government could bring peace to that state which once was a Paradise on Earth.

Now this movie, The Kashmir Files, is only adding fuel to the fire. You cannot solve a communal problem by projecting one side as villains and the other as victims. Solutions can never come from hearts that carry hatred in them. “The way forward is to win people’s hearts,” as Farooq Abdullah says in India Today’s interview. “Not a single Kashmiri Muslim will tell you that they don’t want the Hindus to come back,” says Abdullah. “But will this film promote their coming back?” And that’s the vital question whose rider is: Does Modi’s India want Hindus and Muslims to live in harmony together?

 

 

 

Comments

  1. Pooja MahimkarMarch 28, 2022 at 10:28 PM

    This was super informative

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 29, 2022 at 5:34 AM

      India Today has a right wing bias. Even they aren't happy with The Kashmir Files.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
17 comments
Read more

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...
8 comments
Read more

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...
5 comments
Read more

A Curious Case of Food

From CNN  whose headline is:  Holy cow! India is the world's largest beef exporter The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is perhaps the only novel I’ve read in which food plays a significant, though not central, role, particularly in deepening the reader’s understanding of Christopher Boone’s character. Christopher, the protagonist, is a 15-year-old autistic boy. [For my earlier posts on the novel, click here .] First of all, food is a symbol of order and control in the novel. Christopher’s relationship with food is governed by strict rules and routines. He likes certain foods and detests a few others. “I do not like yellow things or brown things and I do not eat yellow or brown things,” he tells us innocently. He has made up some of these likes and dislikes in order to bring some sort of order and predictability in a world that is very confusing for him. The boy’s food preferences are tied to his emotional state. If he is served a breakfast o...
6 comments
Read more