Outside a small temple a group of Kashmiri Pandit women hold hands and
sing Kashmiri songs as a new bridegroom drives away in a flower-bedecked
car. The women return to the temple courtyard, form a circle and continue
to sing, their traditional dejhor earrings glistening under a
feeble sun. Standing in the centre, the groom’s aunt holds out two earthen
plates filled with flower petals. The others sing, drizzling petals from
one plate to the other. Many in the gathering are unable to explain the
origin or the significance of the ritual. But it is a must after Kashmiri
Pandit weddings when the bridegroom seeks the blessings of the goddess
before he goes to the bride’s house to bring her home.
Customs, rituals and language are things that renew the energy and
hopes of these migrant Kashmiri Pandits who have been living in squalid
camps on the outskirts of Jammu for the last 20 years. Observing these
rituals, speaking a language that may be alien in Jammu but is one they
proudly call their own, offers some form of reassurance even as hopes of a
return to the Kashmir valley grow dimmer with each passing year.
Forgetting for a moment their stark surroundings and the harsh
realities of daily life, the women seem happy, singing as they now await
the bride’s arrival. Participating in the ritual with an almost childlike
enthusiasm, they are a little shy but friendly. "Look, here comes another
groom to pay obeisance to the goddess," one of them exclaims, as another
groom jumps out of his car, walks in with some friends, prays to the
goddess and then zooms off to fetch his bride.
For most of these women home is the sprawling migrant camp by the banks
of a small seasonal stream in Nagrota. Some of them were fortunate enough
to have graduated from the squalid camps to the more airy and
comparatively spacious two-room flats that have recently been constructed
just behind the old camp. The temple is situated opposite the camp, near a
few shops: a provision store, a Kashmiri bakery, a tailor, a vegetable
vendor, a spare parts dealer and even a beauty parlour. Life seems
complete in many ways for the camp’s inmates. But not quite!
Meeting a cross-section of people in the camps is revealing in many
ways. Over the last 20 years many of them have learnt to adjust to life in
the camp. But there is also a desperation to get out of there, compounded
by the uncertainty of not knowing where to go. The despair, frustration
and dilemma spring from a 20-year separation from their original homes in
the valley while they have been neglected and condemned to live in the
shabby congested camp that is now their home. It is difficult to determine
whether they would in fact be ready to return to the valley if the
government were to make a serious move in this direction. Many say they do
want to go back but they are very sceptical about the prospects of that
happening. The reasons for this are several.
The latest endeavour, inspiring both hope and doubt, is the
constitution of an Apex Advisory Committee to oversee the return and
rehabilitation of Kashmiri migrants, set up by the government of Jammu and
Kashmir in close coordination with the union government in September 2009.
This comes after several failed attempts during the last two decades. The
committee is comprised of 32 members, including, for the first time, some
Pandits who still live in the valley. Hopes were further raised when a
consensus emerged for the inclusion of valley-based Muslims in the
committee as well. But the apex committee has not met since then, except
during the union home minister, P. Chidambaram’s visit to Nagrota in
November when he inaugurated the new flats meant for migrants. Hardcore
Kashmiri Pandit groups like Panun Kashmir have so far boycotted the
meetings.
But what adds to the scepticism of the Kashmiri migrants living in the
camp near Jammu is their non-representation in the apex committee. "They
have never included us," says an angry Sunny Raina, 30. "All decisions are
taken by the Srinagar-based Pandits. What about the rural poor rotting in
the camps? After all, it is we who have borne the brunt of displacement
over the last 20 years," he says angrily.
Sunny, who has fond memories of his days in Kulgam, his original home,
recalls his early teenage years and the days they spent in a tented camp
at Jhiri, west of Jammu, after they had to leave the valley suddenly.
"From big houses and open spaces, we ended up in tents. During the windy
wintry days we had to cling to the tent poles to make sure the tent didn’t
collapse and in summer we had to brave snakebites and the heat which we
weren’t used to. From those tents we moved to these shabby tenements, one
room per family is all that we had for all these years. We lived in such
penury for all these years, you learn to get used to it. Things are better
now. We’ve shifted into these two-room flats and I just got a government
job. But is this the life for us?"
Asked whether he would like to return to the valley, he is quick to
respond: "Of course, we all want to go back. But what are the
possibilities? When – a hundred years from now? We won’t even know our
next-door neighbours when we return. The only option is to keep us in safe
zones, not isolate us in a jail-like camp but just shift us with minimal
security. If the government is serious about shifting us back and has a
genuine plan, why are we being settled in these new colonies here instead
of there?" The government’s indecisiveness seems to compound his dilemma.
Many of Sunny’s contemporaries at the camp oscillate between similar
doses of pessimism and optimism from one moment to the next. Take, for
instance, Ashwini Raina and his younger, college-going brother, Sonu.
Ashwini considers himself lucky to have found a job in the private sector
after getting his MBA degree and claims that many of his friends at the
camp who have come back after completing their studies in Pune or
elsewhere are jobless.
"You see, there is so much frustration and despair here. We do want to
go back but is that really possible?" Sonu, the more talkative of the two,
shares his sense of hopelessness but he is nonetheless an enthusiastic and
bubbly youngster. He was born in the camp. "It was only when we went to
Khir Bhawani that I visited our village in Ganderbal for the first time
and saw our huge but dilapidated house and the open space around it. Until
then, I had no idea what I had missed. Hearing stories was one thing but
the one-room accommodation at the camp was the only place that I could
think of as home in all these years." He wants to return and is sad that
he cannot. "Things are still not secure; we don’t even know our next-door
neighbours."
His enthusiasm however is undiminished as he proudly escorts me to his
newly constructed two-room flat which the family shifted to four months
ago after years spent in a shabby one-room tenement. The flat is airy and,
with a small terrace and a separate kitchen and toilet, relatively
spacious. His mother welcomes me with a smile and serves us tea and fresh
biscuits from the bakery, a Kashmiri favourite. Life has been difficult in
the past 20 years but traditions and customs have not changed. On that
cold November morning, as I sit on a Kashmiri namdah on the floor,
she offers me a blanket to keep me warm and insists that I eat another
biscuit. Sonu ensures that I have enough cushions for a backrest. These
are such typical gestures of Kashmiri hospitality that I am at once
transported to the valley. But the conversation brings us back to the
reality of their forced existence in camps like this one, set up in the
wilderness on Jammu’s outskirts, for almost two decades now.
There are other camps located in Udhampur and Delhi where conditions
are much the same as in this one.
The majority of Kashmiri Pandits were once well off, mostly literate
and held government jobs or owned sizeable portions of land in the
villages. Pushed into these congested spaces, life seems to have frozen
for the internally displaced Pandits torn between the Kashmiri identity
they cherish and the bitterness they harbour against the valley’s Muslims.
The younger generation, which has few or no memories of the valley, is
particularly ambivalent. Many of them don’t even speak the Kashmiri
language. They make a conscious effort not to do so and to adjust to their
new surroundings. Sonu agrees that his generation is not very happy
speaking "our own language".
"Youngsters still speak Kashmiri in the camps but elsewhere they speak
a mixture of Hindi and Dogri, the local language of Jammu," he maintains.
"They’re not just confused, they are frustrated, and anyone can exploit
that situation. Last year [2008] we allowed the BJP to exploit our youth.
We took the lead in shouting ‘Bam Bam Bhole’ during the Amarnath
agitation but later realised our mistake. You see, the frustration runs so
deep that if anyone exploits our situation, we may even be ready to take
up guns and become terrorists."
Do they feel hatred, harbour bitterness against Muslims? Both Sonu and
his brother are quick to respond that though there is some bitterness,
there is no hatred. "We don’t hate them but we just don’t know them," says
Ashwini. Sonu chips in, "There are some Kashmiri Muslim boys also studying
in my college and we often argue about what happened in 1989-90 and
thereafter. Earlier, I only blamed them for our plight. But now I do
understand that they have also suffered. We don’t want to suffer but we
don’t want them to suffer either."
Sonu’s mother however does not share this empathy and is suspicious of
Muslims. "When we were forced to leave, they never did anything for us. So
how can we trust them now? If we go back and something happens again, they
will get swayed by that and not bother about us. Who knows if some of them
were also involved [in driving the Pandits out] earlier?" she says. For
her "there is just no possibility of return", since the trust that once
existed cannot be restored.
Most other adults in the camp are sceptical and ambivalent about
Muslims in the valley. Bal Kishen, who has been running a small provision
store at the camp ever since he retired from a government job, says: "If
conditions improve, we would surely go back. We want safe zones for
ourselves but we don’t want to be excluded. We want to be part of Kashmir.
But there is still a lot of insecurity, the situation is still not
encouraging. We fear that something untoward will happen after we return.
Of course, bonds with old neighbours and friends still exist but it is not
the same thing after 20 years. Their children have grown up and so have
ours. They don’t know each other, I don’t know their children. Sometimes
we are not even sure if they want us to come back. They come and meet us
and once when I went back to my village in Kulgam for some work, I did
stay with them. But whenever we meet, after exchanging pleasantries and
talking about the good old times, they ask us to sell our land to them,
since we are not going back. This makes us doubtful." But hope still
lingers. Kishen claims that unlike the Pandits from urban areas, most of
the migrants from the villages have yet to sell off their properties. This
is partly because they yearn to return to their homeland and partly
because village people tend to treat the land as something sacred and it
would be almost sacrilegious to sell it.
Notwithstanding the shared experience of forced migration, the
urban-rural divide among the Kashmiri migrants is apparent. The camp
inmates have a serious grudge against the urbanites, who get to play a
greater role in any decision-making about their plight and the possibility
of their return. Vijay Bakaya, a retired bureaucrat, a legislator in the
upper house of the state legislature and a member of the apex committee,
is among those who recognise the existence of this divide. He readily
agrees with the idea of greater representation of migrants living in the
camps and Pandits with rural backgrounds in all decision-making, including
the recent deliberations on the return of migrants to the valley.
Unlike most Pandits in the camps, he is quite optimistic about the
outcome of the apex committee initiative. "You see, 3,000 new posts have
already been created for Kashmiri Pandits and it was on the committee’s
recommendation that all these posts are to be in the valley so that
youngsters are motivated to move back. They are likely to be filled by
March 2010. Agreed, these are only short-term measures and we need to
evolve long-term strategies too. Setting up clusters in different
districts of the valley so that migrants from those districts can return
with a sense of security and comfort is one such idea. Even on this there
was near consensus among the apex committee members that these should be
set up as transit camps so that once things improved and intercommunity
relations improved, individual families could make a final decision on
whether to return to their earlier homes or sell them off."
Pandits who stayed on in the valley through the two turbulent decades
are the most enthusiastic about the latest initiative. Their enthusiasm is
understandable considering that at present there are only about 8,000 of
them left in the valley. The return of the migrant Pandits will add to
their cumulative sociopolitical weight in the valley and help restore its
plural identity. In addition to braving onslaughts by both the security
forces and the militants, like their Muslim counterparts, these Pandits
have also had to face the vagaries of life as experienced by a minuscule
minority. Yet, to their credit and despite their insignificant numbers,
they have attempted to organise themselves into groups and lobby both
successive governments and local leaders for greater security and the
promotion of the social and economic interests of the community.
Pandits in the valley may be a divided lot but their choice to stay put
and to defend their interests has contributed to the diversity within an
otherwise monochromatic social milieu in the last two decades. While these
Pandits have divergent voices, from the very beginning theirs has been a
voice in sharp contrast to that of the Kashmiri migrants. The valley-based
Pandits have always lamented the stand taken by hardcore migrant leaders,
as it only contributed to a greater sense of unease and insecurity amongst
themselves.
Throughout the Amarnath land dispute in 2008, when almost all migrant
Kashmiri Pandit organisations unconditionally supported the Shri Amarnath
Yatra Sangharsh Samiti that was spearheading the anti-Kashmir agitation,
Pandits in the valley felt extremely insecure, caught between Islamist
slogans on one side and fellow Pandits from the camps aligning with the
other. For their part, the migrants view the Pandits who continue to stay
in the valley as some kind of traitors.
Some years ago a colony was built on the outskirts of Srinagar to house
migrants who were willing to return. However, only a few families, those
who had migrated from Sangrampora in North Kashmir following a massacre by
militants, were temporarily settled there. The rest of the flats remained
empty. "But the government made no attempt to bring back some Pandits from
the Jammu camps, neither did it settle those internally displaced within
Kashmir so as to discourage any fresh exodus," says ML Bhat, a prominent
Kashmiri Pandit activist based in the valley.
Many Pandits who fled to Srinagar from rural areas in the last 20 years
today live in small shanties, including one at Ganpatyar, in the heart of
the city. All they have are some rooms in a temple complex that is
occupied mainly by CRPF men. "While the migrants get relief and other
government assistance, we have been totally forgotten," says Bhat. "It is
important to protect us first because we are the link – the root – and we
can be an ideal bridge between the two communities." Many other
valley-based Pandits echo his sentiments.
It is in this context that the latest move for the return of the
migrants is being welcomed by the Pandits in the valley who have been
included in the apex committee because they are a vital link between the
Kashmiri Muslims and the migrant Pandits. Significantly, the apex
committee meeting in September 2009 ended on a promising note, with the
decision to involve Kashmiri Muslims in the process. Welcome though the
initiative is, there has been very little progress since September. As
mentioned earlier, the only other time that the apex committee members met
was during Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s visit to Jammu in early
November. All that happened during this meeting however was a reiteration
of the proceedings in September.
Meanwhile, two important but hardcore Pandit groups continue to boycott
the apex committee. There are also differences about whether the 3,000 new
posts created for Kashmiri migrants should all be within the valley.
Despite all the differences and the reservations of certain groups, the
fact remains that for the first time there appears to be a sincere effort
on the part of the authorities to chart a clear road map before embarking
on a journey: the return of the migrant Pandits to the valley.
Though it has been decided, in principle, to include Kashmiri Muslims
in the process, there has been no action so far in that direction. This is
quite critical. Although people on both sides have managed to maintain
cordial relations on a personal level, intercommunity reservations and
bitterness persist. This is especially true of the younger generation, who
are not only strangers to each other but have also grown up on two
mutually contradictory histories of the other.
Opinion on how Muslims should be included is still divided. While some
want them to be brought within the ambit of the apex committee, others
feel it would be more fruitful to encourage and facilitate greater
intercommunity interaction. Social activists have been organising informal
meetings and workshops for reconciliation. Individuals have also played a
significant role. A good example of this is ML Bhat, who continues to run
his 80-year-old school in the valley against the odds. In the current
situation, where few symbols of pluralism and diversity are visible,
Bhat’s school, where Pandit children study alongside Muslim children, acts
like a beacon.
There is also the example of Dr Sushil Razdan, a leading neurologist
from Kashmir, who was among those displaced from the valley in 1990. His
private clinic in Jammu is thronged by patients throughout the day. The
vast majority of them are Muslims from the valley who still hold him in
high esteem. "When they come, I do not ask them about their problems. I
first talk to them about the valley. It’s like a healing stimulant," the
doctor says. He talks excitedly about receiving regular letters from his
friends in the valley, with whom he still maintains very good relations.
Especially during the winter taxi-loads of Muslim patients from South
Kashmir come to Dr Razdan for consultation. "Patients from one village all
come together, having made an appointment months in advance. On the day of
their appointment they leave home early in the morning, reach here by
noon, spend the day at my clinic, consulting me and picnicking in the
lawns. They return to their villages in the evening. It gives me immense
pleasure because Kashmir is not just the name of a place, it is also about
people. When they arrive in such large numbers, it’s like a part of
Kashmir is always with me."
With their children now having settled abroad or in other states in
India, several well-to-do migrant Pandits have themselves decided to
return to the valley, for that is where their friends are. More than
anything else, it is such individual accounts that keep hope afloat. The
return of Kashmiri migrants to the valley after two decades may indeed be
a Herculean task. But there are obvious signs that this is not altogether
impossible.