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| Internally Displaced Kashmiri Pandits Submits Memorandum to National Human Rights Commission | | Internally Displaced Kashmiri Pandits Submits Memorandum to National Human Rights Commission at Sanjeevani Sharada Kendra, Anand Nagar, Jammu On 22 October 2024
Hindsight
A community with more than five thousand years of recorded history needs to be dealt with socio-historical acumen especially when it had raised a kingdom whose boundaries touched upon the present State of Afghanistan to the west, Kirgizstan to the north, Tibet to the north-east and the banks of River Sutlej to the south. What more impressive antiquity can a people and their land claim than to have been mentioned in the Rig Veda?
Decline
Change is the law of nature. The five thousand -year- old Kashmir Hindu kingdom passed into the hands of the Muslims who ruled over Kashmir from AD 1339 to 1819, a total of 480 years. The only one-point mission pursued by the Muslim rulers for about five hundred years was to forcibly convert or slaughter the Hindu population of Kashmir and lay waste their religious and cultural treasures. Persecution of Kashmiri Hindus was such that the first ever Census of India of 1901 said that the population of the Hindus and Buddhists in the valley was 571 out of 10,000 which computes to 5.5%. (Census of India 1901 vol. xxxiii Part I Report by Khan Bahadur Munshi Ghulam Ahmad Khan, Lahore 1902, p (table) 35).
What happened?
The 100 per cent Hindu and Buddhist population in AD 1339 was reduced to just 5.5 per cent in 1901. It was not because of nature-made disaster but because of man-made catastrophe. We will very succinctly mention two incidents recorded in medieval Farsi history of Kashmir.
1. “Thus Sultan Sikandar (butshikan) and Malik Saifu’d Din (God bless them both) joined hands to gear their full effort towards the eradication of infidelity and other aberrant practices. They raised the banner of Islam and the standard of the chosen among the people to the highest pinnacle of glory and exaltation. Through the blessings and support of Islam and by the propagation of the commands of sharia, they were rewarded with victories wherever they led their armies confirming the saying “God helps those who help Muhammad’s religion.”(Baharistan-i-Shahi, K N Pandit, Akshayprakshan, New Delhi, 2022, pp 43-44)
2. “With the support and authority of Malik Musa, Amir Shamsu’d Din Arak undertook a wholesale destruction of all those idol houses as well as the total ruination of the very foundation of infidelity and disbelief. On the site of every idol house he destroyed he ordered the construction of a mosque. He brought honour to all infidels and heretics (zandiqah) of Kashmir by admitting them to the Islamic faith. It is publicly know as well as emphatically related that during his lifetime with the virtuous efforts and elaborate arrangements made by the fortunate Malik Musa Raina, twenty-four thousand families of staunch infidels and stubborn heretics were ennobled by being converted to the Islamic faith. Araki CE 1641, tr. Fol. 157 for a graphic description of forcible circumcision on Idgah grounds. Musa Raina had issued orders that every day 1500 to 2000 Hindus are brought to the doorsteps of Mir Shamsu’d Din Araki (an Iranian missionary of Nurbakhshiya order). They were to remove their sacred thread janev/zunnar, administered kelima, circumcised and made to eat beef. Tohfat gives a list of about 53 big temples which Araki ordered to be razed to ground.” (see tr of Tohfat by K N Pandit)
These were the conditions for nearly five centuries through which the Kashmiri Pandit had to go. We have only put our finger at the tip of iceberg but we hope the Honourable Members of the National Commission will visualize through what fire and brimstone this community has had to pass.
Current human rights violations
Even immediately after the Independence, the Pandits were not destined to taste the fruits of freedom. Their tragic saga is that they had to bear the brunt of Pakistani incursion of October 1947 in which the Hindus and Sikhs of the entire districts of Muzaffarabad and Baramulla suffered genocide, massacre, loot, arson, rape and kidnapping. During the anti-Dogra (Quit Kashmir) movement of National Conference, its campaigners orchestrated the rhetoric of “Sher-i-Kashmir ka kya irshad/ Hindu-Muslim-Sikh ettehad’ orchestrated by its campaigners, served as trail-blazers of Pakistan-sponsored invaders. When Indian troops recaptured Baramulla on 8th of November 1947, overnight, these auxiliaries and goons of National Conference who guided and fraternized the invaders, became “ham Kashmiri hain taiyyar/Pakistani khabardar.” Never was any enquiry ordered into the killing, loot and arson of the Hindus and Sikhs of twin districts of Baramulla and Muzaffarabad.
Land grab
The first anti Hindu step taken by the popular government in 1948 under the leadership of Sheikh Abdullah was the Land to Tillers Act. Land was taken away from petty landlords and given to the tillers as was stipulated in the Naya Kashmir Manifesto drafted by a London-based Leftist named BPL Bedi. We concede that the right of ownership of land should be given to the tillers but those for whom the land was the only means of sustenance deserved to be meted out humanitarian treatment by paying them compensation for the acquired land as was done in the rest of the country.
It should be the concern of the Honourable members of the Nation Commission to find out how come the Pandit petty landowners lost all their land whereas the Muslim landowners in the same category retained their landed property without losing an inch. This is a bizarre story of discrimination against and deprivation of the right to sustenance to the Kashmiri Pandits. The ground situation is that while the land reform bill was under process and the Muslim landowners came to know they were about to lose their landed properties, they manipulated the revenue officials and managed to convert hundreds of their shali producing land into orchards confirmed by making true or false entries into the revenue records. Orchards were exempted from application of land reforms. Thereafter while the Hindu erstwhile landlords turned into paupers, their Muslim counterparts became the owners of huge orchards and fruit industrialists rolling in millions.
The State Constitution does not recognize any community of the state a minority on any count, religion, language, ethnicity, economy, culture etc. J&K is the only state of the Indian Union which does not recognize any group as a minority group. But at the same time, it does not discourage valley Muslims to claim minority status in the light of four or five religious minorities admitted by the Indian Constitution. In other words, a Muslim state subject claims and enjoys all the privileges which any Muslim in India enjoys plus the privileges of being a majority in state demographic chemistry. Thus a Muslim chief minister in J&K has the minority tag and hence entitled to all the privileges of a religious minority but his peon, who is a Pandit or a Sikh, has none of the privileges which the chief minister has.
Non- recognition of Kashmiri Pandits as a religious minority in the state deprives them of so many privileges like employment, scholarship, admission to professional institutions, civic benefits, bank loans, awards and many other things.
Armed insurgency in Kashmir
Pakistan denied sponsoring the attack on Kashmir in 1947. Sheikh Abdullah declared that Pakistan had no right to claim Kashmir because it wanted to annex Kashmir through arms but was repulsed. However, the undercurrent in Kashmir, in which National Conference was an accomplice, was secession from Kashmir and accession to Pakistan on the strong plank of religious commonality. Pakistan began its subversion on religious count.
Why did the Pakistani infiltrators, who were armed, undertake the killing of Kashmiri Hindus in 199-90 and even later as well. Farooq Abdullah, the then chief minister resigned and left for London. Why a Commission of Inquiry was never set up to clarify why about 1400 Kashmiri Pandits were killed in 1990, why a spate of life threat was undertaken against them, why they were give 24 hours to quit Kashmir, why their vacated hoses were illegally and forcibly seized, looted, vandalized and finally burnt and the foundation area grabbed. Why the vernacular papers splashed humiliating threats to the Pandit miniscule minority, why they had no option to leave Kashmir to save life and honour. Why the Union Home Minister then did not take any action to control the uprising in Kashmir. Why the Army commander in Badami Bag Cantonment did not deploy a single platoon to confront the anarchists. Do not our defence force personnel take an oath of defending the country from external invasion and internal subversion when they are formally inducted into armed services? Has our army become so slavish and spineless that it refuses to react to a national calamity like the armed insurgency on 19 January 1990 in Srinagar? Did not our armed forces understand that the then Home Minister was an accomplice in the subversive activities taking place in Kashmir? The police, the army, the paramilitary forces, the state bureaucracy and the state ruling coterie one and all took to their heels and left the hapless miniscule Pandit minority to the wolves.
Does not this all demand a high powered inquiry why militancy happened, why hundreds of Kashmiri Muslim youth freely crossed the border, joined terrorist camps in PoK and returned with arms and ammunition and a deep brainwashing? Neither the central government nor the state government nor any NGO ever spoke a word about who should be held responsible.
And when the Kashmiri Pandits knocked at the door of the NHRC to formally acknowledge their genocide and ethnic cleansing, the NHRC showing its munificence declared the killing of the Pandit minority community members as “akin to genocide.” What a callous joke? And again when the Pandits took their case to the Apex Court of the country, Milords scorned it away as a primitive case that cannot collect evidence. But the Milords were forthcoming to hear the petition of the Sikhs of their genocide happened at least six years before the genocide of the Pandits. We will not say that the NHRC is a prisoner of politics but the story we are telling speaks more than what we are telling.
The Constitution of the country says that providing security of life and property is the foremost responsibility of the government. The government of the State and at the Centre both miserably failed to protect the life and property of Kashmiri Hindus. Should the NHRC hold somebody responsible for the horrendous violation of the human rights of lakhs of citizens of India? Why did not the Supreme Court take Kashmir carnage and sedition as suo moto when it took far lesser threatening situation in Manipur as a suo moto case? Is it because it could lead to the culpability of the Muslims of the valley and their leadership that the NHRC shunned a clear verdict and the Supreme Court hoodwinked the Pandits. Is the NHRC convinced that in the case of Kashmiri Pandits, the state organs have been impartial and above board.
Does not the NHRC think that there has been religious cleansing in Kashmir because the entire miniscule community of Pandits was forced at gun point to give up their fiver-thousand year homeland and seek shelter in a place in the country where they felt they were safe? The paltry amount of relief which the Central government pays to the internally displaced Kashmiri Pandits is not relief in real sense of the term. It is the penalty the government is paying for its incompetence to uphold the fundamental duty it had to perform in the terms of the Constitution. It is not an obligation on the Pandits. Honourable members of the NHRC would do well to ask for a report from the Relief Commissioner about the modalities of making payment of relief money to the Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims. The bizarre story will give an insight into obnoxious favouritism at work.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing
We would like to invite the attention of the Honourable members of the NHRC to its verdict that what happened with the Kashmiri internally displaced Pandits in 1989-90 was “akin to genocide but not genocide”. We would request that this diabolical verdict be reconsidered in the light of the written statement of the Government of India to the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), a UNHRC affiliated NGO, which visited Kashmir and Pakistan in 1994 for compiling a report on the armed insurgency in Kashmir. The government of India’s written statement says:
“ .... The targeted killing of members of the Hindu minority community which has led to the exodus of over 250,000 members of the community resulting in a change in the very demographic profile of the area and blatant religious cleansing; use of indiscriminate violence against innocent civilians generally to create terror; and selective killing of media persons and attacks on media installations to cause, not merely a breakdown of independent journalism, but also to force the media to act as a mouth-piece.” (Human Rights in Kashmir: Report of a Mission, International Commission of Jurists, Geneva, Switzerland, 1995, p. 106);
In its graphic rendering of atrocities perpetuated against the small religious minority of Kashmiri Pandits with the onset of armed insurgency 1989-90, the authors of Kashmiri Pandits..... conclude: “The unfortunate Pandits had braved seven centuries of persecution under the autocratic and tyrannical rule of the Sultans, Mughals and Afghans, but in secular and democratic India within just six decades, they were forced to leave their six-thousand – years –old birthplace and live as refugees in their own country.” (Kashmiri Pandits through Fire and Brimstone by K N Pandit and Peary Lal Koul Budgami, Akshaya Prakashan, New Delhi, 2020, pp 8-9)
The NHRC does not consider all that befell the Kashmiri Pandits under the much trumpeted popular government of NC and Congress as genocide and religious cleansing. This is the boast of the world’s largest democracy and Indian nation’s social philosophy of vasudevam kutumbukam.
Representation
The fundamental question is whether in the background of Reorganization Act of 2019, Kashmir Valley Hindus will be recognized as a religious minority or not. The issue is that of criterion. This issue is also debated at the UNHRC whether demographic composition of a group or community should e be on the basis of sub-region/region or nation. Because the J&K Constitution did not recognize any community including the Kashmiri Pandits as a minority, therefore, representative empowerment in any of the four organs of the state did not arise. When there is no platform for the Pandits to give vent to their demands and grievances, they remain an isolated group. Democracy may be the game of numbers but reasonable representation to marginalised groups is a compulsion. The state government never acknowledged the compulsion and always branded the tyranny of majoritarianism.
The same is true in regard to right to voting. The community is in exile for last 35 years but it is asked to cast votes to candidates of their respective localities. Instead of creating constituency in exile for the Kashmiri Pandits, they are asked to vote for a candidate from a constituency they have left thirty-five years ago. What rationality is in there? How can the Pandits manage their future under circumstances in which they are more or less aliens not natives?
Temples and Shrines
UT government has undertaken repair and reconstruction of some temples in the valley. The larger question is of the landed property attached to the temples and shrines which runs into thousands of kanals. Much of it has been encroached upon, much of it has been sold by the unscrupulous caretakers (mahants from outside the state), and some has been seized by the government for construction of government structures like schools, dispensaries, access channels etc. For last three decades the displaced Pandits have been demanding creation of a Temples and Shrines Board on the pattern of Wakf Boards or Gurudwara Prabandhak Act. Even a bill was introduced in the assembly which ended in a fiasco just because the former royal house of the State claims to be the custodians of the temples and shrines under the supervision of Dharmarth Trust of which the present scionof Dogra ruling house is the Chairman. The monopoly of Dharmarth over Kashmir’s temples needs to be ended with the creation of a Board of Trustees.
Return and Rehabilitation
The return and restitution of the internally displaced persons has been politicised and the human aspect of the issue has become highly controversial. The staunchly communal chapters among the Kashmir Valley Muslims say that once the valley is cleansed of infidelity and heresy and once kufr is brushed away from the valley there is no need to bring them back. The double speak of the political leadership of the valley is not only nauseating but also meant to inflict deep wounds. For example, after forming the government recently, Farooq Abdullah says that “Kashmiri Pandits should return to their homes without loss of time”. Where are their homes, lands, orchards, shops, properties, jobs and means of subsistence? The community is banished at the point of gun, their homes have been looted and then burnt down, and their lands, shops and properties grabbed either directly or through distress sale. Where will they go in the valley?
No government either or the centre or in the State utters a word of their return and restitution. All that they say are the sweet words that Pandits are part of Kashmir. The Indian government is reconciled to their forced departure from the valley. In the Indian type of democracy, volte bank policy reigns supreme. The Pandits are no party’s vote bank and hence no party is prepared to own them. Indian nation has perhaps a different concept of secularism. Appeasement and cajoling the Muslim minority is the sum total of their political theory.
Pandits’ demand that as internally displace people (which is the precise nomenclature under the definition of refugees in the books of UNHRC) their return and restitution in their homeland should have to be according to their free will and not through imposition of any decision from above. It is three decades that the government circles are thinking whether the Pandits should be taken home or not. The plea of not taking them back till date was that security conditions in Kashmir were not conducive. Now that the government has been claiming that normalcy has been restored in the valley, why does it not initiate the return of the IDPs? The government knows that taking Pandits back means incurring the displeasure of the Muslim majority. It is loath to do so. Hence Pandits have become a victim of local and regional politics.
Tailpiece
Common Kashmir Muslims think that the valley is cleansed of kufr (infidelity) therefore Pandit return is not acceptable. State government thinks the dirt is removed why call them back. Central government says why should displease 97 per cent of Muslims of the state for 2 or 3 percent of Hindus. It is reconciled to a theocratic polity in a superficial democratic Kashmir. The peasants, farmers and working class in Kashmir think that they have either grabbed for nothing or against a paltry sum the rich properties of the Pandits, why should we support their return. And the bureaucracy thinks it completely against their interests to allow the educated community return to the valley and become partners of the spoils their power and position bring them.
Ultimately, it is the Jamaat-i-Islami that rules the roost directly or indirectly. Who among the elected MLA is there in Kashmir who is not closely linked to Jamaat-i-Islami? And it is the very Jamaat that was instrumental in dividing India. Who among the opposition in our country is there who does not support the agenda of Jamaat-i-Islami?
Honourable NHRC hopefully understands what it is to live as a miniscule minority in a predominantly radicalised Muslim majority. Kashmir is deeply integrated into Islamic theocratic model. Only recently, when the Hezbollah leader Nasrallah was gunned down by Israel, millions of Kashmiri Muslims brought out condolence rally paralysing the city of Srinagar for one full day. What connection do Kashmiri Muslims have with the Hezbollah leader? Religion is the only connection and their theologians have clarified what treatment is to be meted out to non Muslims in an Islamic state.
Drafted and report by Dr K N Pandita
(KN Pandita is the former Director of the Center of Central Asian Studies at Kashmir University.)
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