[Reader-list] JAGMOHAN AND THE VALLEY FULL OF SCORPIONS (Posting 3)

[meenu gaur]

In this posting I feel it’d be worthwhile to remain focused on how and why 
the migration of Kashmiri Pandits took place. The events leading up to the 
migration have always often come up in all my visits to the Camps. Most 
people seem overanxious to fix blame for the migration and convince you of 
their own explanation of the events. But most of the time people in the 
Camps were eager to see this to mean that the narrative on the migration is 
the same even if it speaks itself through different people differently.

People seem anxious to represent the migration as unavoidable.  This is 
understandable because at times they face hostility in Delhi where people 
often cite to them the example of the way the Hindus in Sikh-dominated 
Punjab chose to brave the situation rather than “flee” in the 1980s. When I 
attempted to go deeper into the reasons that catalyzed the migration, then 
most people seemed to hold the selective killings of the Pandits in early 
1989 and early 1990, threats to life and property, the honor and dignity of 
the Kashmiri Pandit women, the rise of new militant groups with a virulent 
Islamist ideology, some warnings in anonymous posters and unexplained 
killings and the helplessness and silence of the State administration as 
responsible for the internal displacement of the Kashmiri Pandits. But above 
all they seemed to be obsessed with exonerating the then State Governor 
Jagmohan from all accusations of complicity in the forced migration of 
Kashmiri Pandits which they perceive as the dominant narrative of the 
Kashmiri Muslims on the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits.

What is most important to realize is that there is no single narrative on 
the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits. There is a multiplicity of narratives which 
overdetermines the casuistry of the migration. And we must remember that 
even though the migration from Srinagar happened in the first two years of 
1990 and 1991; from rural Kashmir the migration happened even as late as 
1993 and 1994. Even then hundreds of Kashmiri Pandit families chose to stay 
on in the Valley.

The imaginary (at times even spectacular) escape of the Pandits from a 
tyrannical Muslim Valley bent on genocide, over the few nights after the 
January 19th in the backdrop of Islamic slogans that reverberated from the 
mosques of the Valley, is a retroactive memory deeply implicated in 
political fantasy (even if one were to recall the fear instilled by the 
hysterical loudspeakers from January to March 1990).
This brings us to the controversial role of Jagmohan (Delhi’s Demolition 
Man), the then Governor of J&K State and the present Minister of Tourism in 
the Central government of the Hindu nationalist BJP in the forced migration 
of Kashmiri Pandits. The simplistic response on the streets of Srinagar to 
the question on the migration of Kashmiri Pandits is something like this: 
Unko Jagmohan ne nikala (Jagmohan forced the Pandits to leave). Now in the 
Camps there is a deep concern to disprove this “Jagmohan theory” on the 
exodus of Kashmiri Pandits-a “theory” which continues to exert its pressure 
on any possible reconciliation between the two communities.

The Camp people feel compelled to defend themselves against this compelling 
though absurd conspiracy theory which seems to have so much explanatory 
power in the Valley. The Pandits are often accused in the Valley of falling 
into the trap laid out for them by Governor Jagmohan and deserting the 
Muslims of the Valley to a punitive State and gubernatorial zulm 
(oppression).
There is no denying the fact that it is during Governor Jagmohan’s 1990 
tenure that the Valley witnessed the exodus of almost the entire small but 
vital Kashmiri Pandit community from the Valley. The Janata Dal-led United 
Front Government, supported by the BJP and the Left, chose to send Jagmohan 
to the Valley which the latter himself chose to describe in his book, My 
Frozen Turbulences in Kashmir, as a “Valley full of scorpions”. It is widely 
quoted and validated even by the members of the Kashmiri Pandit refugee 
camps that the Kashmiri Muslim community leaders, Kashmiri political 
parties, including some militant organizations, appealed to the Pandits not 
to leave the Valley after the selective killings of some prominent Kashmiri 
Pandits such as the politician Tikka Lal Taploo (the leader of the RSS in 
Kashmir) or the civil servant Lassa Kaul, had instilled fear in the Hindu 
minority in Srinagar. Balraj Puri writes in Kashmir: Towards Insurgency 
about how the Kashmiri Pandit leader H.N Jatoo had welcomed and endorsed 
these appeals but soon migrated to Jammu. Jatoo later told Puri that soon 
after the Joint Committee of the prominent members of the two communities 
had been set up to deal with the emerging situation, the governor sent a DSP 
to him with an air ticket for Jammu with an offer of accommodation and an 
advice to leave Kashmir immediately. Even though it is difficult to believe 
that a whole community would have left their ancestral homes merely because 
Jagmohan urged them to do so, but it is fairly clear that the state 
machinery may have helped in the process and done nothing to look at 
possibilities that would have stopped it. It is equally difficult to 
speculate on how a Joint Committee of community leaders could have protected 
the minority community when Kashmiri Muslim leaders and intellectuals such 
as Moulvi Farooq and Dr. A A Guru themselves fell to the bullets of 
“unidentified gunmen”. Even then I feel that a process could have been 
initiated which could have either delayed or averted the migration.

The narratives in the Camp eulogise Jagmohan as some sort of a saviour. 
While the people are critical of the Congress and the BJP for their 
opportunism and political manipulation of the Kashmiri Pandit problem, they 
reject the argument that Jagmohan had any role to play in abetting the 
migrations. Rather most seem thankful for the relief measures, the flat 
allotments which Jagmohan managed for them as Urban Development Minister in 
the BJP-led Union government and other such measures taken to ease their 
suffering.

At the Camps I was told that when the Pandits were leaving the Valley, their 
neighbors and friends from the Muslim community urged them not to go, and 
ensured them of their safety. One member of the Camp told me that he had 
heard that they did this because they felt that once the Hindus left the 
Valley the Indian Army would wreck havoc in Kashmir and if the Hindus stayed 
back then they would not be able to do that
(“…agar Hindu yahan se chalegaye phir yahan par Hindustani fauj bumbaaree 
karegee…”) He said we (the Kashmiri Pandits) used to think that they are 
holding us back as hostages so that they (the Kashmiri Muslims) are more 
secure from the Indian security forces. I had been told almost exactly the 
same in Kashmir by a young Kashmiri Muslim architect. He said that the 
Pandits left the Valley because they were told by Governor Jagmohan that 
once they leave the Valley it would be easier for the security forces to 
crush the rebellion with brute force. This might well be excessive and have 
no real basis but what it does frighteningly put forward is the state of the 
psyche of the people from both communities: India and its institutions, the 
Army and the paramilitary are seen as Hindu forces that would be unsparing 
on a Muslim population however innocent they might be. It is surprising that 
it seemed plausible to people from both the communities, unquestioningly so, 
that the Muslims of the Valley could only be shielded by the Kashmiri 
Pandits from what is their own Army.
The collapse of the Indian State as Hindu by the people in the Camps was as 
spontaneous and unquestioning as that by the Muslims of the Valley.

I have chosen to bring this up in my posting as most of my initial 
interviews revolved around the more political aspects of the migration.

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