[Reader-list] Ajay Raina on naive grant seekers and azaadi propagandists
meenu gaur
meenugaur at hotmail.com
Tue Jul 29 13:48:42 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 wasnt 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. Veenas
marriage took place in the very camp she now lives in, though she stressed
that there arent 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 Prophets mother prayed that all
those who lose their land and home due to oppression should find
resettlement
and that prayer was answered. Interestingly Prophets 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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