[Reader-list] In Exile At Home

[Pawan Durani]

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main40.asp?filename=Ne291108in_exile.asp


*In Exile At Home*

*The election is underway in the state, but the Pandits, driven from Kashmir
18 years ago, do not get even a mention in the political battle,
reports **VIJAY
SIMHA**. Photographs by **UZMA MOHSIN*

BULLETS SLAY the flesh. Thoughts can erase a race. Sure, there were bullets
as the 1990s began with the separatist Kashmir movement. But there were even
more of the normal things, stuff that is not often associated with menace.
There were whispers, posters, slogans and loudspeakers. *"Hum kya chahte?
Azaadi, azaadi *(What do we want? Freedom, freedom)." *"Sarhad paar
jaayenge, Kalashnikov laayenge *(We'll cross the border, get the
Kalashnikov)." And the appalling *"Batao roas te Batanev san, iss banao
Pakistan *(Without the Pandit, with his wife; we'll make Pakistan)."

At times, it didn't even need the overt. A changed gaze, a different look.
That's all it took to start the clock on a people. The first to fall was
Tika Lal Taploo, a 62-year-old lawyer who was vice-president of the Jammu
and Kashmir Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) unit. On September 14, 1989, Taploo
was gunned down near Habba Kadal in Srinagar, the hub of the Kashmiri Pandit
settlements in the Valley. When LK Advani marched with Taploo's body, masked
separatists stoned the funeral procession and forced shops to open up.

Since then, some four lakh Kashmiri Pandits have vanished from Kashmir, and
Advani has evolved into the BJP's prime ministerial candidate. Advani was
powerless

then, he's powerless now. The Kashmiri Pandits, a proud race that worshipped
the principle that the brain is mightier than the brawn, were forced to
flee. Safe in the grimy setting of Jammu, their pride in the dust.

Eighteen years on, the BJP still professes loyalty to the Pandits but with
fading credence. The Congress, having learnt the value of charade
post-Partition, still goes with make-believe. The National Conference, a
party that talks of all things Kashmiri, is still scared to reach out. The
People's Democratic Party, which needs to justify everything it does, still
triggers scorn. Some of these parties may brave ridicule to seek the Pandit
votes in the forthcoming election to the Jammu and Kashmir assembly. Some
may risk an overnight stint in the emptiness of the migrant camps. This is
what they will see.

In the ghettos that house the unflagging Pandits, called migrants by
everybody else, life is mostly two steps. If you are at the centre of a
small four-walled asbestos-

roofed universe, it's two steps to empty bowels, two steps to food, two
steps to the gods on the walls, two steps to the television, and two steps
to the wife. Sex is tricky. Mothers probably visit relatives they don't need
to see. But if there's a child, he or she is still there.

If you do step out, what pass for lanes can handle one person at a time. If
there are two people taking the same path, they twist and face each other as
they pass by. A third person and it's a traffic jam. On a good day, the
older men and women wake, take a small stool and a hand-held cane fan, and
sit by the roadside. They'll be there, watching people and traffic with the
unfeeling look of those who wait to die, until they're called for lunch.
They'll be back until they can see no more in the dark.

Babita Raina is young, only 24, and pretty. She was six when her folks got
her here. She thinks she's running out of time already. "Everything is bad
about my life. Just look around you. What can I do in one room? I can't
think. I can't get angry. I can't have boys interested in me because I live
in a camp. Last week, I was talking to a boy on the phone and word spread in
the camp that I was having an affair," Babita says. For a few minutes she
stares at the wall, and cries. She is vulnerable. She'll probably respond to
anyone who offers to take her out of the camp.

Babita is not asking for the moon. She's scraping together a post-graduate
course in computers so she can get a job and leave. "I love the sound of the
word 'doctor'. I wanted to be a doctor. But I know the best I can get is a
computer job in Delhi." Sundays are especially difficult. Everyone's at home
in the same room. So she broods. She says she'll be born again the day she
stops writing 'One Room Tenement 117, Muthi Camp' in the address column.

Eighteen years is too long. When it takes too long to come home, you become
the unwanted. Kashmir is too busy burning. Radical Muslim politicians have
no interest

in getting the Kashmiri Pandits back. Muslim friends of the Pandits don't
want to risk limb and life. And the local Jammu Hindus sneer at them.

Rajnath Dhar is 44. He only got a job six years ago in a private finance
company. He gets Rs 6,000 a month as salary. He'll go to Rs 8,000 at best by
the time he's 50. He has a daughter to worry about. He's desperate to put
some money in her hand soon so she can have a chance at life. "At least now
I take a bus in the mornings for work. But for 12 years, I woke at 6 am and
threw pebbles on the gates of my friends' houses to wake them up. We
gossiped, read the papers, played carrom, volleyball and street cricket
until lunchtime. After that we watched news on television until dark. Would
you like to do that day after useless day? For years?"

On occasion, the state moves. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited the
migrants months ago. He saw what everyone knew: that the tenements protect
from rain and heat, but they strip you of selfconfidence. Singh cried when
an 80-yearold man, only a few years older than the Prime Minister, pointed
to the tiny door of his tiny tenement and asked, "How will they take my body
out when I die?"

Almost in response, Singh announced a multi-crore package for the Pandits.
He said the Pandits would be resettled in a new township some distance from
downtown Jammu. That's just about the best the Prime Minister can do. He
can't heal the fear and suspicion in the Pandit mind. He can't erase the
anger in the extreme Muslim mind.

SCARS TEND to linger, more so if you were a Kashmiri Pandit who the fleeing
Pandits turned to for help. Vijay Bakaya was the District Collector in 1989
in Jammu when the migrants began to pour in. He had no answers. He had no
money. He had nowhere to keep them. "They used to park their trucks right
outside my house. They were so disoriented. Youngsters had come out of
colleges and old women had come out of villages for the first time in their
life. I couldn't mix with them because I was a professional civil servant.
My wife and my mother started to argue with me on why I wasn't doing
something for them," Bakaya recalls.

Until they were driven out, the Pandits knew only the climes of Srinagar,
India's coldest big town. Jammu was a different world: hot, dusty and scary.
As the mass began to fill out in Jammu, they upset the snakes in the area.
Some Pandits died of snakebite. Others died of heatstroke. "We had no
anti-venom serum in Jammu. We had to get across to Delhi and order the
anti-venom," Bakaya says. Then, there were the ice slabs. To create lower
temperatures in Jammu, the administration began to order ice slabs in bulk
and keep them in the camps.

The administration was overwhelmed. Senior officers groped for a way out.
Suddenly they figured it out. The way to solve the migrant problem was to
get them to return. To get the Pandits to go back, their life had to be
miserable in Jammu. The administration planned the one-room tenements, which
were ramshackle and didn't serve any purpose except to save people from heat
and rain. The idea was to make the Pandits uncomfortable. Keep them at
subsistence level so that they'd know they had to go back. "There were 10
people to a room. Pathetic, you know," Bakaya says.

For its efforts, the administration got bad press. This made the officers
resentful. They began to refer to the Pandits as cowards who ran away when
they didn't have
  [image: Cover Story]

*The politician* Vijay
Chikan has helped float a
party for the Pandits, with
15 nominees in the fray

to, and created problems in Jammu as well. "There was a question mark always
— why did they flee?" Bakaya says. He got his answer late one night in
Srinagar some years later.

"It was in the 1990s and I was in Srinagar because the Chrar-e-Sharif (a
holy Muslim shrine) was burned down. There was curfew in Srinagar. It was
late at night, past 12. Suddenly there was a burst of noise from a mosque
nearby. I rushed to the balcony. There was a big procession of people
outside the mosque. They were playing a tape from the mosque at full volume
with nasty slogans.* 'Kashmir mei agar rehna hai, Allah-O-Akbar kehna
hai*(If you want to stay in Kashmir, you have to chant
Allah-O-Akbar)'.
*'Yahan kya chalega, Nizam-e-Mustafa* (What do we want here? Rule of
Shariah)'.

"My heart began to palpitate. If my heart could beat faster because of the
tapes, imagine what happened to the Pandits, who were surrounded by these
people. The Pandits were right. Our neighbours weren't there. There was no
security, no patrols. The question mark in my mind was resolved," Bakaya
says.

QUESTIONS IN the camps are not resolved, however. Each family gets a maximum
of Rs 4,000 cash assistance every month, nine kilos rice and two kilos wheat
flour per person, and a kilo of sugar per family. It is defined as
subsistence relief, just enough to keep them alive.
  [image: Cover Story]

*The father* PK Tiku is at an age when he could do with help. But, he lives
alone because his son works
for the state police. Tiku banks on neighbours to see him through

Sanjay Razdan, 39, lives with his mother, wife and two sons in the Muthi
camp. He married at 33 and began to work at 35. Three years ago, he sold his
Srinagar house to a Muslim for Rs 5 lakh. He doesn't see a life away from
the camp. "It's been too long. Even the Pandits in the Valley can't mingle
with us anymore. My story, in all probability, will end as a migrant," he
says.

Sanjay Razdan, 39, lives with his mother, wife and two sons in the Muthi
camp. He married at 33 and began to work at 35. Three years ago, he sold his
Srinagar house

to a Muslim for Rs 5 lakh. He doesn't see a life away from the camp. "It's
been too long. Even the Pandits in the Valley can't mingle with us anymore.
My story, in all probability, will end as a migrant," he says.

Ashok Pandita, 28, is one of the relatively successful migrants. He is a
Senior Engineer with Alcatel in Delhi, and is putting together the internal
communications network of the Delhi Metro. It was a struggle getting there.
"We were a well-off Hindu family in Kupwara. We had a chinar tree and we
also grew walnuts. As a child I used to be puzzled when some people in the
village disappeared for a couple of months and returned. Where did they go?

"Our teacher would ask me and a Muslim boy the name of our country. I would
say Hindustan, he would say Pakistan. I didn't know the difference. Then,
one day Zia-Ul-Haq died. I used to study at a government primary school.
But, they declared a two-day holiday on Zia's death. I also remember Indira
Gandhi's death. There were celebrations in my school. They declared a
month's holiday," Pandita says.

One day in Kupwara, the Muslim leadership held a meeting. People emerged
from that and began attacking the police and the army, Pandita says. "They
killed a
  [image: Cover Story]

*The family* Two daughters, Goldy and Ruchi, share the tenement with their
parents and their grandparents.
Their sense of space and privacy has been conditioned so since birth

soldier. The army retaliated and many Muslims were killed in the firing.
This set the place on fire."

Pandita's father didn't have the heart to tell his son the truth. So he told
the family one day that they were going on a holiday to Jammu. *"Ghoomne jaa
rahe hain* (we are going on an outing)," he said. "I was happy because I had
not seen Jammu. I left my cricket paraphernalia behind. We also left our cow
behind. Maybe I would have resisted if I had been older.

"In Jammu, we had problems. We got admission in schools and got better merit
performances and marks. This made the locals hostile. We began to have
fights among the Hindus. Initially, we were more unsafe among the locals. We
were really under great stress. I hate people from Jammu more than I hate
the terrorists of Kashmir. The people from Jammu kicked us when we were
down. I had just one aim — study and get out.

"Life was tough. We had to keep awake at night during storms and hold our
tent in place. The local Hindus called us cowards. We couldn't do anything.
I was outraged by our impotence. Then, suddenly, Bal Thackeray announced an
education quota for Kashmiri Pandits in Maharashtra. I did my engineering
from Jalgaon because of that quota. I am deeply grateful to Bal Thackeray,"
Pandita says.

He is still upset, though, at how things have changed among the Pandits in
Jammu. They fight for flats in the apartment blocks that have come up for
them. They bribe government officials to get a better house. They are
willing to hurt their own. "It's disgusting to see them stoop to such a
level after all that we've been through," Pandita says.

Some people are finding ways to cope. For instance, the Jammu and Kashmir
National United Front (JKNUF), which is the newest political party in Jammu.
The Election Commission registered the JKNUF on August 4, 2008, as a
political party. The first member of the party: Mata Rani, a local Hindu
deity in whose name the party leadership cut a membership receipt for Rs 5.

Vijay Chikan, 57, the party treasurer, says the JKNUF has 10,000 members of
whom 6,000 are below the age of 40. The party, whose symbol is the daffodil
(nargis in Urdu), plans to contest 15 seats. Their agenda: rehabilitation of
Kashmiri Pandits, a programme to occupy the Pandit youth gainfully, and
reservation of seats for Kashmiri Hindus.
  [image: Cover Story]

*The litigant* Shyam Sunder Raina is moving heaven and earth for his land in
Kashmir. The court says it will need the ancient documents in
English. The case is stuck

CHIKAN'S MIGRATION to Jammu happened like this. He used to run a factory in
dKashmir. He says he was friendly with many people, including a young Muslim
electrician whom he particularly liked. One day, he notice that the young
Muslim was following him. "I suspected something was wrong. I was scared. I
started to remembe how one of my friends was killed. I got into a meat shop.
I didn't need meat that day, but I still bought it. I kept harassing the
meat seller, asking him about various kinds of meat. I spent time in the
meat shop. This youngster had got into a shop some distance away. I finally
left the meat shop. He also left the shop he was in.

"I turned by instinct when he came too close. I asked him, 'do you want to
say something?' He said he needed to discuss a problem with me. I said, why
didn't he tell me. I asked him to come in the morning. I dropped the meat at
home, and left in 30 minutes. I stayed at my in-laws for the night and moved
to Jammu from there. I learnt later that the electrician was given the
responsibility of killing me," Chikan says.

Life as a migrant has hardened Chikan's views. He now puts the Kashmiri
Pandit before all else. "I am worried that a mega exodus from Jammu is
already on among the Pandits. Soon, there will be cross-marriages, which
will threaten our existence. We have unique 5,000-year-old genes. We must
keep our genes pure and save ourselves from bad exposure. We have to save
our culture. At the current rate, no one will want to consult the senior
Pandits in future. They will opt for computer match-making and destroy the
race," he says.

Trust is rare among the Pandits. There was a time when they wondered why
their country didn't save them. Now they know better. There'll be some
back-slapping and small talk when the candidates come asking for votes. But
there'll be even more bile. The Pandits want to make their vote count. One
way to do this is to ensure that they're all in the same place. Which is why
the insistence on new townships specifically for the Pandits.

In Sanjay Razdan's tenement, his son Kartik is at work. "Five twos are
seven," he chants. One day, he'll get his math right. And ask for the
account. Someone better have the answers.
  *From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 47, Dated Nov 29, 2008*