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| Forced displacement of Pandits from their homeland | |
K N Pandita
The forced displacement of the Pandit minority in Kashmir in 1989-90, is in the sequence of atrocities perpetrated against the Hindu minority ever since the advent of the Islamic faith and its propagators in Kashmir in the third decade of the 14th century.
Islamic faith enjoins its followers to practise Allah's command of destroying atheism, polytheism, idolatry or grave worship. The Hindus of Kashmir followed their age-old philosophy of polytheism and practised idolatry. They are stuck to mythology and traditions inherited over time.
To the Muslim, the antiquity is reprehensible. Allama Iqbal, one among those who conceptualized a separate country for the Muslims of India, summed up the teachings of Allah in the choicest religions viz. Islam “jo naqsh kohan aye nazar usko mita do” meaning destroy and wipe out all that appears antiquated”.
Therefore all concepts and ideologies, all traditions and customs, all social and political systems, all judicial and legal modules, all traditional arts, architecture and intellectual skills have to be discarded, destroyed and replaced with the systems put forth by nomadic tribal traditions. Sharia meaning Islamic jurisprudence (essentially based on the customs of a tribal society) has to replace all the codes brought by the Greek philosophers and subsequent political scientists. Islam discards the concept of a state with definitive boundaries or territories; it believes not in the native place, homeland and state but in Islamic ummah means the community of Muslims.
It is here the concept of Islamic brotherhood (ukhavvat) has sprung. A Muslim is supposed to be mentally, and psychologically a different species not at all like any other extant human species. Not to talk of this world, the hereafter of the Muslims is also markedly different from other human beings. The final resting place for a Muslim is one of the three enclaves namely jannat, jahannam and barzakh meaning paradise, hell and the enclave neutral. After the demise, a Muslim is transported to the enclave of the other world which is commensurate with his actions during his life on the earth. From the tone and tenor of the commandments in question, the message is generally for men folks and women folks are mentioned only in specific places.
The Arab warriors carried out these commands in their initial swoop over the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Southern Spain and the vast Central Asian Steppes. With the central authority in Arabia enfeebled by the schism which threw up the substantial Shia ideological segment and the rising crescendo of local satraps, a new phenomenon of projecting the Islamic religion of the Sunni faction emerged on the scene. This sect also expanded in Iran, Iraq, Northern Afghanistan, pockets of Trans-Oxiana and the Levant.
The rise of a strong dissident faction became the catalyst to terse radicalism first in the Sunni sect and later on in the Shia sect as well because both tried to vie with one another as being the custodians of true Islam. Destruction of non-Muslims categorized as kafirs, heathens, polytheists, idolaters, Gunnar-bands, murtads, zinnias et al became targets of the zealots. Thus began a great era of competition between various fanatical Islamic groups in both factions vying with one another and spreading Islam (in reality respective factions and schools) through the power of the sword.
Kashmir was a sitting duck for them. The Hindu kingdom had begun to become hollow soon after the Silk Route running across Central Asia with arteries connected to it, was taken into control by the Mongol warriors in the 13th century. Kashmir was associated with the Silk Route through two exit points viz. in the east through Shahidullah Pass arriving at Yarkand and Kashghar, and to the north-west via Swat to Mazar-i Sharif and then turning north and crossing the Oxus to Merv (in present Turkmenistan) and finally the Trams-Caspian region and then Europe.
The Kashmirian Hindu Kingdom was very adversely affected by the insecurity and predatory phenomena overtaking the Silk Route. The arrival of a Shia missionary from Hamadan in Kashmir by the closing years of the 14th century brought great factional and ideological strife to Shaivite Kashmir. In Kashmir, they found every aspect of life diametrically opposed to the teaching of their (missionaries') faith, and the rituals, traditions, customs, etc. of local Hindus all appeared detestable to them.
The missionaries whether from Iran or Central Asia, were of Aryan stock, ethnically different from the Arabs. Arabic was not their mother tongue; it was acquired by them. Not only that, the region from which they came was once a great stronghold of ancient religions different from Islam. For example, the region of Hamadan, from where Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani hailed, was a stronghold of Jewish and Zoroastrian people in pre-Islamic times. The people converted to Islam (mostly of Shia faction) with the conquest of Iran by the Arabs. Since Islam emerged as the new faith, the proselytized community, owing to its ethnic, cultural and linguistic distinction had the compulsion to project itself more Islamic than the Muslims themselves. The general rule is that a person abandoning his ancestral faith and converting to a new faith has the psychological compulsion to present himself as rabidly fanatical.
Extirpation of Kashmiri Hinds after the Muslim rulers, to be precise the Shahmiris, established sway over Kashmir in CE 1339, were fully conscious of their responsibility of promoting the Islamic faith through whatever means they could. For mass indoctrination, the half-baked missionaries from Iran and Central Asia accepted a role. The missionaries, posing as Islamic scholars given to puritanical life, influenced the prominent local commanders (the Damras, Lavanyas, Margishas, Tantrins, Ekangas) and others, and carried the mission of converting the masses of people through their instrumentality. The destruction of Martand and many other temples was undertaken at the behest of Muhammad Hamadani, the son of Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani, who had developed serious differences with his father and abandoned the faith of his father, had owed allegiance to the Sunni faction. Ladi Magray, a commander of the Margesha clan surrendered before Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani (1379 CE) and began attending his five-time-a-day prayer congregations. Musa Raina (a convert from the Chandaravanshi Rajanaka house of Chadura in Budgam) was instrumental in mass conversions. Baharistan-i-Shahi records: “Thus in the year A.H. 924 (A.D. 1518), corresponding to 94th year of Kashmiri calendar, during the 'Ashura, about seven to eight hundred infidels were put to death. Those killed were the leading personalities of the community of infidels at that time: men of substance and government functionaries. Each of them wielded influence and sway over a hundred families of other infidels and heretics. Thus the entire community of infidels and polytheists in Kashmir was coerced into conversion to Islam at the point of the sword. This is one of the major achievements of Malik Kaji Chak”.( his Hindu name was Kanchan Chakra).
Exodus of the Hindu minority of Kashmir took place during the reign of Sultans, Mughals and Afghan Pathans. These are sporadically reported by local and foreign historians.
But the forced displacement in 1989-90, is the biggest and almost the irretrievable of all exoduses the Pandit community has gone through in the last 650 years. The mass expulsion of the community was the result of meticulous planning by the murderous planners of the Islamic faith sitting hundreds of miles away from Kashmir. A community with ten thousand years of written history, a community with glorious heritage and a community that contributed immensely to the enrichment of Indian civilization, was hounded out of their ten-thousand-year-old homeland.
The worst is that the community somehow survived the onslaughts of religious zealots of the majority community during six centuries of autocratic monarchical rule, but alas! their decimation happened when India, of which Kashmir became a part of the instance of the local Muslim leadership in 1947, declared itself a secular democracy. Much worse is that at a critical time when the zealots openly gave a call to the Kashmiri Pandits (kafiro aur limo) to leave Kashmir minus their women folks, hundreds and thousands of fully armed Indian troops did not move a step out of their barracks to protect the hapless Hindu minuscule minority and the nationalist elements in the city or the towns. It has to be said that an Indian soldier, after completing his training and induction into his respective battalion is administered an oath that he will protect his country from external aggression and internal subversion. In the case of Kashmir in 1990, both things happened simultaneously. Yet the conscience of the Indian soldiers and their officers and their supremos did not revolt. God save the country whose defenders betray their conscience.
(KN Pandita is the former Director of the Center of Central Asian Studies at Kashmir University.)
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