1 week Ago
There is a division in discourse. How deep down has it gone is subject to interpretation? Future would unravel it. Homecoming of Kashmiri Pandits is not to be looked at as a habitation issue that can be resolved by creating colonies, but understood in the paradigm of the stability and sustenance of a community in its historical permanence.
With a little peace in Kashmir and normal life seemingly getting restored, the possibility of the return of Kashmiri Pandits finds a place on the radar for politicians and activists. However, despite the good will from all the sides in the changed political conditions the exodus needs deconstruction – a version which melds culture to religious nationalism. The ‘myth of Jagmohan’ to a common Kashmiri Muslim, now appears to have been the ‘hypocrisy of selective upper middle-class intellectuals’, who were working on a different agenda -the colossal human tragedy was the result of the political strife.
The fact is that it was a tragedy that resulted in the loss of nativity. It is a tragedy that everyone has to face as ultimately with the passage of time and increasing cultural osmosis, nativity would acquire a universal dimension. Powerless people, insignificant minorities often face this ire.
Imagine a Kashmiri Pandit community – a site of happy neighborhood, a settled middle class having dignified livelihood, educated, functional always in the system, would in the darkness of night, abandon their houses. They did not. They were driven out because they were symbolic representation of that historical existence, the unrelenting nativity that needed to be finished.
It was one of the finest living traditions that history had witnessed -‘The Lal Ded –Nund Reshi Tradition”, a tradition of generating moral space for the world view of journeying together. Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam lived in it. It had blended the best of all the three for the peaceful existence of humankind, making it a universal tradition.
It was a lived life with faith in religion and trust on human wisdom, discovered as life esteem since 14thcentury, when the two opposite traditions met in Kashmir. This has been willfully broken by the divisive international agenda and thus came to an end a tradition that was based on interfaith harmony and co-existence that had developed over centuries.Meray dil mein hai Ghalib shauq-e-vasl-o-shikwa-e-hijranKhuda who din kare Jo us sai main yeh be kahoon woh beaThe tragedy is enormous and in many forms.
It is not only about displacement or killings. It is about the loss of cultural, moral and spiritual space of an evolved Kashmiri existence. It is about loss of a home – its environment, neighborhood, and memories.
It is the loss of abundance of invisible and heritage capital that cannot be generated again. It is leaving behind, and its loss, huge unpublished work of ages, artifacts collected over centuries, personal diaries, letters, and loss of trust in human relationships. Materiality can come back, but materiality with inherent native morality is lost.
We have lost the invaluable capital common to the two communities.Look at that historical continuity. The Reship was our lived religion; it was a part of us.
Lalded was its fountainhead. Zoon’s tragedy was our tragedy. We mourned it together.
Quit Kashmir movement was our struggle. The agenda of Naya Kashmir was our celebration, and the disappearance of Moye-Mukadas was our common anguish. We were one in thought and deed in all historical events, despite conversions or upheavals, the fundamentals of lived life experiences formed our common world view.
That had made Kashmir different place, invaded many times but nativity could not be eroded. The common bond of nativity proved overriding in ensuring peace and welfare of one and all in the historical testing times of external invasions.In 1990, the guns came roaring, when multitudes remained consented to or silent to the driven agenda of violence.
It had no precedence in history. The secrecy and silence to fight the nativity, took Pandits unaware. It turned to be a willful movement against them, where the neighbor who was like a member of the extended family remained helplessly silent, or approving of the perishing.
This was a break with the past. For the first time in history, we were given two conflicting identities. It was a spilt of our neighborhood.
It was smudging of moral space where (zecchar and keinsar) was lived expression. It was gone.The result was that loss has been permanent.
It has generated new literature, contesting and constructed in binaries. It is the death of accepted nativity. It cannot be regained.
Those who drew this agenda might not have visualized it. The mindset lives on, for it has produced divisive discourse in subsequent decades. There is now no accommodative sprit from either side.
In the past, common bond was so blended; Pandits had reconciled to the fact that in employment and admissions into professional colleges, population would determine the numbers employed or admitted. Merit list would have very little meaning. That sacrifice had a moral power, when Sheikh Abdullah yielded to the conversation of Kashyap Bandhu, Toru Takashash writes:“KB: Sheikh Sahib, you say that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru is visiting as the guest of NC.
With whose permission has he been invited?SA:What do you precisely mean?KB: Have you consulted the Working Committee? Did it permit you to extend the invitation? There are dozens of political implications involved.SA: You are putting hurdles in the way.KB: NC is a democratic organization.
We want democracy to prevail here.SA: I want to hang your democracy.KB: I want to hang your dictatorship.
SA: If you do not like dictatorship you can leave the place.Accordingly, Bandhu left the room, but after other member’s intervention, Sheikh Abdullah apologized to Bandhu and the meeting was resumed”.Where is that moral esteem now? The saga of tragedies happened; nobody accepted it as cut to the self.
It should have been foreseen. Late Great Sheikh Abdullah knew it well. His successors realized it late -when the split was total.
History may not even record it and empiricism will not reveal it. It may appear only in fiction and poetry. About six months back, a dear friend told me,“Ashok, come as a visitor and be my guest and not as native.
We both have lost it. It is binary of that self, which has different parts, each one is asking for the piece. Our children have been told that you had usurped their parental past.
Your children would say that we have usurped their present. The fact is that we are divided, in different selves. Your deprivations are our loss, which is a perennial tragedy.
Time alone will decide about us”. I told him that he was right. Nobody can bring back that trust driven and unshakable togetherness.
Will political reconciliations glue it? Its lamenting failure will be a new search for our own peace possibly requiring afresh expedition. Therefore, the State and society, despite the honesty their objective of bringing back Kashmiri pandits, do not know how to do with it. Both the separated selves require discrete healing.
Until then, the land remains cursed. Prof. Ashok Kaul, Retired Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Banaras Hindu University.
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