[Reader-list] paper on kashmiri pandits

Sat Jul 26 18:44:21 IST 2003

Dear Meenu,
I find many galling innacuracies and inconsistencies in your 'research paper' but since you say its based on your interactions with some of the inmates I would take them at face value as perhaps 'problems of language and translation'. But i am alarmed at the confidence with which you have set out to dismantle and discredit the 'narratives' of Pandit refugees in India - as contradictory - through your subtly biased analysis.

Just look at this, 
"Many recounted stories of how Pandit women were being forced to marry Muslim militants though these incidents and stories often took place in an elsewhere which nobody seemed to have been much familiar with. all of them had heard of such a thing happening from someone else." (In one sentence you state what you have been told and in the next sentence you put a question mark on its telling.)
(for your benefit i have studiously underlined all that i find inaccurate / biased / and outright propagandist in your study paper.)

More than anything I wonder if you or anybody could ever feel the courage to 'research' the narratives of 'atrocities' on Kashmiri women in Kashmir..and then also have the courage to analyse or to question the veracity of their versions...

Have you actually ever come across anybody in Kashmir... met anybody in Person or even ever been shown a grave of someone in Kashmir who could show you the scars of torture at the hands of security forces or even at the hands of terrorists.  This is not to say these atrocities did not take place...but because you would not have a tangible proof of these events, would you discount the events in the same vain as you have in the case of Pandit refugees. 

And why pick up on Kashmiri Pandits when you do not have the guts to ask Muslims of Kashmir about 'atrocities' on them and about their narratives of the rebellion of the winter 1990. I am asking this because of your own self confessed lack of courage (In your film on Kashmir) when you set out for  / but did not go to the 'Kunan poshpura' village where the alleged mass rape is said to have happened...Why was that? 

And yet when 'safe' in the plains of India you happily saunter off into camps of Pandit refugees to probe the hapless people & analyse the narratives of real or imagined atrocities on them.
I have also read your earlier paper about your 'research' in Pandit refugee camps. There is nothing in your study which indicates that the inferences drawn do not confirm with what the 'azadi propagandists in kashmir have had to say about Pandit refugees. ...I have begun to wonder What you are?...a naive grant seeking researcher or a propagandist sympathiser for the 'azadi' brigade in Kashmir. At the risk of sounding insensitive and gravely offensive to you, I would still hope you'll someday soon tell us about what you saw at Kunan Poshpura and how you'd have analysed the narratives of 26 'allegedly' gangraped women.

Ajay Raina

----- Original Message ----- 
Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2003 3:51 PM
Subject: sarai mail
      In this posting I would like to focus on the narratives of the women that I interviewed in the course of this research. 

      When a community encounters a threat, its fears are often expressed through discourses on the honour and dignity of the women of the community. The narratives of Kashmiri Pandit migrants (REFUGEES) about 1990 focus on how it had been getting difficult for the women from Pandit households to move around in the Valley with self-respect and dignity. Many recounted stories of how Pandit women were being forced to marry Muslim militants (I know about rapes and threats to similar effect, but its for the first time i hear that any of the Pandit women were forced to marry militants. Only some of those Pandits who stayed back were forced to marry and convert. This happened in a few villages. If you have been told this by the refugees, did you cross check this with anybody else? You ought to have because this is a grave provocation VHP kind of guys would have much liked to propagate)
      though these incidents and stories often took place in an elsewhere which nobody seemed to have been much familiar with. all of them had heard of such a thing happening from someone else. (Similarly i have only heard from lots of people but never from the victims themselves of atrocities done by security forces. What are we to make of this hearing business only!)
      I make this point not to suggest that atrocities were never committed on Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley but that rumour mongering and criminal mischief by rogue elements took on an acutely ugly turn for a community whose sense of security had already been completely eroded by 1990. (So are you suggesting there was some atrocities and much rumour mongering. Can we say the same about Gow kadal / Bijbehara / Kunan Poshpura / Chrar Sharif / Aga Shahid Ali poems....) So much so that the militants found willing partners in these criminal/rogue elements who did all they could to create confusion in the Valley (the former Chairman of the Hurriyat had once called "confusion" a desirable goal for the ends of Pakistan in the Valley). The ubiquitous posters and the notorious hit lists could be drawn up in a militant hideout or by schoolboys in the back alleys of downtown Srinagar.(So you say there were militants who were purely militants and there were criminals and rogue elements who were purely that. In whose side you are is plainly obvious. Does this absolve the separatist leadership of its role in encouraging the exodus of Hindus) nobody bothered to stop anybody in the interests of "confusion". But a more sinister goal seems to have been at work here.to instill fear in the hearts and minds of not just the Pandit minority but that of everybody in Kashmir. The State did nothing to restore the confidence of the people or allay the fears of the Pandit minority, protect them or in the least dispel many of these rumours. it already had too much on its hands faced with a complete collapse of civil administration and first stirrings of rebellion even in the J&K Police. Even then the State wasn't interested in anything but "national security". (So only the state machinery was responsible and not the militants. Perhaps you could have mentioned here that the state apparatus was in the Hands of National Conference of Faroukh Abdullah - the benefactor of a legacy that commanded the hearts and minds of Kashmiri Muslims at least till Rubiya Sayeed was Kidnapped. Perhaps you could have asked your Pandit interviewees what they thought of National Conference and its Goonda'''brigade...) 
      Someone in the Sultanpuri camp mentioned to me, that though Kashmiri Pandits may well now be living impoverished lives in refugee camps of Delhi but at least their women live with honour and dignity. However, if you imagine a camp such as the South Extension camp in Delhi housed in a "community centre". one large hall. a "baraat ghar", as these halls are called. 27 families, which would approximately mean 104-110 people, in this hall or "baraat ghar". each allotted 2 feet X 5 feet minuscule spaces, it is difficult to understand the rhetoric about self-respect and dignity. (so incase of Pandits if they speak of self respect and dignity it is a rhetoric, but for Kashmiri secessionists, its a cause)

      But the women I spoke with frequently brought up this lack of space in their narratives and this is understandable, as it is the women who spend most of their time inside these camps (very few are employed outside the camp). The refugee camp is a space where the notion of the private is all but non-existent and the only available spaces are shared spaces between the men and women, the young and the old. and, as is often the case, men dominate even these matchbox spaces. The women feel they were better off in a traditional society, which at least offered its own spaces for them. 

      Veena, one of the women I interviewed, told me that most Pandit households in Kashmir had segregated spaces for men and women and they did not share the same space even with the men from their own families  I do not know and i have not seen in Pandit households if there were any segregated spaces for male and female. Not even in Muslim households would you find segregated spaces for males and females. The concept of 'zenana' as we know it does not exist among kashmiri's (the reason she cited for the existence of this practice was the shared culture between the Hindus and the Muslims in the Valley). In the camps, they had to abandon their traditional ways of living. The women of the camps see the loss of their private space as a loss of dignity. There are small common bathrooms in the camp, women have to sleep cramped in corners in their small cubicles next to other members of their own family or as was the case in the earlier days, in the large unpartitioned halls next to the members of the other families. 

      The complete lack of intimacy between couples and the impossibility of any real emotional engagement due to the constant gaze in which each of them found themselves every single moment all these years is also spoken of by these women to highlight the strain every personal relationship has gone through over the last 12 years. Some in the camps speculated about the drop in birth-rates and the dangerous implications it carried for the community. Many of them often talked about "extinction". For many women who were already married in the 1990s this migration has meant a separation and isolation from their parental homes and larger families which were often seen by them as support structures (most of the community is getting scattered even now as families move out of the camps to resettle into small flats in Delhi suburbs and the links with even the camp community have begun to weaken). 

      In my interviews in the camps, most women were nostalgic about marriages, festivals, Shivratri celebrations, frequent visits to neighbours and the rest of the family, shopping in bazaars, close friendships with Muslim women, when they spoke of their life in Kashmir. The younger women recalled their days in high school and college, and contrasted it to their present life, which is constrained and often surrounded by unfriendly neighbours. One of the women explained to me, using the allegory of birds building a nest that however far and wide the birds may travel, in the evening they must 'return' to their nests and that the Pandits have no nests anymore, "we can never return home in the evening". 

      Also, there are no interactions for them outside the camp, all social and festive occasions mean hopping over to the next cubicle in the camp. Veena's marriage took place in the very camp she now lives in, though she stressed that there aren't any intra-camp marriages (meaning marriages between people of the same camp, this being a necessary invention to act as a safeguard and deterrent for young people in the camp). She also spoke of how all the promise and potential in the younger women was not realized, their education and all other career opportunities were throttled as there was so much paranoia about honour of the community with which the Kashmiri Pandit women found themselves burdened. Thus most girls were married in their teens because of the fear of things "spiralling out of control" (to express the gravity of the situation Veena went to the extreme of saying that the practice of "baal vivaha" or child marriage has been revived by the community). Again a revelation to me because i have not seen or heard of this practice having flourished post 1990. However, she was also quick to point out that in many cases like herself the migration provided a much needed exposure to new worlds and opportunities. Even though her own education had been disrupted for some years, today Veena has a good career in a multinational corporation. She mentions how the quotas and reserved seats in various institutions like medical colleges, engineering colleges devised by various state governments for the Kashmiri Pandits such as by the government in Maharashtra has been the biggest boon for the young in the community. This is what a well celebrated 'Human Rights Activist' told me in Kashmir. I had asked him why he did not talk about atrocities on kashmiri Pandits in same vain as atrocities on people of his own faith. He had replied, "Pandit exodus has actually benefittted them...they are better off than they have ever been" thus implying they are not a human rights case.
      Its true that Maharshtra Government has reserved Quotas for kashmiri Pandits...DO YOU HAVE ANY STATISTICS ABOUT HOW MANY KASHMIRI PANDITS CAN STUDY IN KASHMIR's ENGINEERING AND MEDICAL COLLEGES?)
      She narrated a story about the Karbala massacre.in order to speak about a community building their lives after displacement. "kehte hai jab shiao pe zulm hua tha, unka paani roka gaya tha, unhe ghar se beghar kiya gaya tha, at that time Prophet Muhammad ki ma ne, unhone ek dua dee thee ki jo bhi beghar hoga bhagwaan usko bahut jaldi settle bhi kar dega, jisko zulm ki wajah se apni zameen chornee paregee, unka bahut jaldi settlement hoga, aur who dua sach hui." ( It is said that when the Shias were facing oppression and were forced to leave their homes, the Prophet's mother prayed that all those who lose their land and home due to oppression should find resettlement. and that prayer was answered). Interestingly Prophet's mother had died long before Karbala when Prophet Muhammad himself was very young.but what I wanted to emphasize through this story is the threads, which often come up through such cultural references which still connect the Pandits in the camps and the Muslims in the Valley. 

      Veena remembered the night of 16th January 1990 when they left the Valley vividly. She remembered the exact objects they had carried with them that night. "chaar bartan, petromax, ek chula." familiar objects.this is the home they carried with them to the cubicles in these camps.She remembered how as a young girl, she and her siblings were most excited at the prospect of travelling on a truck, unaware of the seriousness of the situation when they were leaving the Valley. She remembers that the older members of the family cried throughout the journey while she fought with her siblings as to who would occupy the window seat. Most people left their houses with very little as they were sure that they would be able to return home that spring. (They also took little because most of them including my family and our neighbours left in a single truck in the dead of the night. Remembring to not mention things in all encompassing detail as you do, makes your study a very subtle propaganda)

      Geeta, from the Hauzrani camp, in response to my query about the memory of home, pointed to a young adolescent boy and said that he was only a year old when they had left the Valley, but he often tells his friends in school "Hum Kashmir mein baraf se khelte the." (We used to play with snow in Kashmir) and all the older members in the camp tease him and ask him, "lekin aap kabhi Kashmir gaye hain?" (But have you ever been to Kashmir?) . In many ways, she said, they are all like him carrying their fragile identity and memories of home in their hearts and minds. _________________________________________________________________ 
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AJAY RAINA
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