[Reader-list] Exiles in ghettos keep fire blazing - Shankarshan Thakur

[Aditya Raj Kaul]

   *Exiles in ghettos keep fire blazing*
 *SANKARSHAN THAKUR *
*Link - **http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080825/jsp/nation/story_9739798.jsp
* <http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080825/jsp/nation/story_9739798.jsp>
**
*Muthi (Jammu), Aug. 24: *They live eight, often ten or twelve, to a room.
To call them rooms is a stretch; hovels is more appropriate — barely six by
eight, the asbestos ceilings knocked low over them, a vast and suffocating
narrow-laned warren. They do with temporary power pulled on illicit lines,
they have little access to water, they share unsanitary community bathrooms.
They live marooned in the putrid discharge oozing from them, amid foraging
pigs and pie-dogs.

These are Kashmiri Pandits uprooted from their Valley moorings two decades
ago, and Muthi, on the forsaken outskirts of Jammu, is their home — a
blistered tinderbox of frustration and rage, spewing communal pus. In Muthi,
and other similar "migrant camps" littered around Jammu, could lie some of
the clues to why this crisis has caught fires that refuse to die.

It's so angry, it doesn't even want to talk. "Go away, just go away,"
protests P.N. Dhar, a former government employee and community leader. "What
have you come here now for? To use us to douse the fires those (expletive
deleted) Kashmiri Muslims are lighting up? Too late, now it's our turn to
light the fires, to get some notice from this country."

Men from the ghetto have gathered around Dhar and it is instantly evident
they have unspent payloads of fury and hatred accumulated over the years;
they are now letting it off.

"This country has only been bothered about (expletive deleted) who carry
Pakistani flags and spit on patriots," says Sahabji Chrungoo, originally
from Baramulla. "Nobody came when we were thrown out, nobody bothered when
we were killed, nobody listened when we warned secession had gripped
Kashmir. But how long could you have ignored it? This had to happen. If we
have to light fires now to get attention, so be it. But this time, we will
have it our way."

As an unprecedented regional-communal conflict consumes the state, the
Valley's ousted Kashmiri Pandits have become Jammu's sword-arm in battle.
It's a sword smelted in decades of unassuaged grievance and of rancour and
prejudice. It's a sword that has verily stabbed the celebrated and inclusive
notion of "Kashmiriyat" to death and invoked in its place a ghoulish spectre
of intolerance that threatens to extend the current rift.

Agnishekhar, convener of Panun Kashmir, the umbrella body of ousted Pandits,
isn't even remorseful or apologetic about pronouncing "Kashmiriyat" dead.

"What about it?" he asks combatively. "Where is composite culture when all
Hindus have been driven out of the Valley, out of their homes and farmlands?
They killed Kashmiriyat, not us. Don't expect secularism of us when you are
pandering to all shades of Islam and anti-nationalism in the Valley. Who is
secular in the Valley that Jammu is being called communal in contrast? Those
who are unleashing cries of Nizam-e-Mustafa (Islamic rule)?"

The Panun Kashmir leader won't openly admit it, but the strident "Bam-Bam
Bole" movement across Jammu is an hour of vindication that he is loath to
let go of.

"We have been waiting for this for long," he says. "Jammu didn't exactly
welcome us when we were driven out of the Valley in 1989-90, we haven't had
it easy here. But now Jammu seems to have understood what the problem with
Kashmiri Muslims is, it has risen and we are with Jammu. This is not about
land in Amarnath, this is about a deeper malaise of which Amarnath is only a
symptom. Kashmir has held India to ransom for too long, now it is our turn.
Half the Kashmiri leadership deserves to be put behind bars for sedition, we
deserve to be reinstated to our homes."

Does he realistically believe, though, that he and his fellow Pandits can
make their way back to the Valley laden with such loathing? That they can
even, in this surcharge, visualise the "yatra" to Amarnath proceeding next
year?

"That is for the government to ensure," Agnishekhar says. "Why does the law
of the land not run in Kashmir, can Indians not go there? The government and
secularists of this country have nothing to say of the anti-national
Islamists of Kashmir, all they can do is blame us. What for? For agitating
with the national flag?"

As his Muthi compatriots gather, a little clutch that has mushroomed in
minutes, Agnishekhar, also a Hindi writer of fair renown, crossly throws off
the burden of bigotry from his doorstep.

"I was once known as a progressive writer, until they threw me out for
protesting the ouster of Pandits and began calling me a religious zealot.
But should I not even protest my circumstances? Won't you if you were thrown
out of home? *Hum aah bhi karen to ho jaate hain badnaam, woh katl bhi karen
to charcha nahin hota* (I get defamed if I so much as complain, they commit
murder and yet get no blame)."

Agnishekhar claims no allegiance to the BJP or the Hindu rightwing, he's
been a Congressman all his life, paid obeisance to Nehru. He does concede,
though, that today his worldview is closer to the Hindu rightwing.

"Where are Nehru's children, where is the Congress, feeding the Muslim
communalists of the Valley?" he asks. "It's the BJP that helped us in
crisis, if anybody did, we have to be grateful. And now we have to fight its
battle to the very end."

The assemblage behind him, virulently anti-Muslim and sporting saffron
bandannas, is ominously nodding approval.