January 22, 2013, 12:00 PM Pandita s Book on a Kashmir Exodus
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facebook twitter google plus linked in EmailPrint By Aayush Soni
Sam Panthaky/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Rahul Pandita at the
Jaipur Literature Festival, Jan. 23, 2011. Over 20 years ago, some
350,000 Hindus fled the Kashmir Valley to escape a separ atist
insurgency by the Muslim majority. A number of the valley s Hindus
were ki lled by militants in violence at the start of the fighting
in 1989 and 1990. One of those who died was the brother of
journalist and writer Rahul Pandita. Mi litants dragged his brother
and two others off a bus and shot them dead. Mr. Pan dita, then a
teenager, had fled the Valley with his family. In a new memoir, Our
Moon Has Blood Clots, Mr. Pandita writes about the scars that the
exodus left on the Pandit community and why he may never be able to
return home. He spoke with The Wall Street Journal s India Real
Time about the book, publ ished by Random House India and launched
in New Delhi this week. Edited excerpts : The Wall Street Journal:
Why did you choose to write the book now? Rahul Pandita: This is
the first book I ever wanted to write and it s the reason I became
a writer and a journalist. This has been brewing in my mind since
the t ime I was in college between 1993 and 1996. But then I was
young and my experien ce as a writer and a journalist was
nonexistent. My language was very raw and cr ude. I seriously
started writing it from 2000 onwards. I found it extremely
difficult to write because personal history was involved. I just
put it away because it w asn t working and, at many levels, I wasn
t sure about the kind of voice it should h ave. From 2005-2006, I
ended up writing Hello Bastar (a book on the Maoist movemen t) and
co-authoring Absent State (a book on insurgencies in India.) This
book always remained in the back of my mind, and in the last few
years I ve r ealized I ve been getting more and more angry about
the kinds of untruths being sp oken about the circumstances that
led to our exodus. WSJ: What are those untruths? Mr. Pandita: That
the Indian state was responsible for the exodus of the Kashmir i
Pandits, or the former governor Jagmohan, or because the Indian
state wanted t o deal with the majority community the Muslims more
firmly. I think the essentia l thing I want to portray is that in
1989-90 there was a deep divide between two communities in Kashmir
the Muslims and the Pandits. And the Kashmiri Pandits be came
victims of the brutal ethnic cleansing which was perpetrated by the
majorit
y community backed by Islamist militants, not the other way
around. That is one distinction that has to be made very clear.
WSJ: Does the Kashmiri Pandit community feel cheated by the
political attempts t o solve the 65-year long dispute between India
and Pakistan? Mr. Pandita: The biggest tragedy of this whole
conflict is the betrayal at the h ands of the majority community.
All said and done, we faced what we did in 198990 for two reasons:
for upholding the national flag and for upholding our religi ous
identity. But once we were in exodus, no government bothered about
the Kashm iri Pandits rights from Rajiv Gandhi to the current
political scenario. Today, th ousands of Kashmiri Pandits are
languishing in refugee camps and some are living below the Planning
Commission s ridiculous definition of the poverty line. My fe ar is
that, in the next few years, whoever is in power might have an
agenda to p ush us back to Kashmir or enter into some kind of
forced settlement. WSJ: In the book, you describe how Hindu
nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh tried to get you to join
after the exodus but your parents barred you from doin g so. When
right-wing Hindu leader Bal Thackeray died in November, you put out
a tweet acknowledging his support for the Pandits. What is your
attitude to the H indu right? Mr. Pandita: As a journalist and
writer, my attitude to any kind of extreme ideo logy is the same: I
debunk them. Tweets are not about my work. The tragedy of th e
Kashmiri Pandit narrative has always been this overall bracketing
with right-w ing discourse and I wanted to get rid of that tag.
Every Kashmiri Pandit is not an RSS supporter. Even if he is one,
that does not take away, in any case, from what happened to us in
1989-90. These are two different things. The comment abou t Bal
Thackeray was in my personal capacity as a Pandit. I think the
whole commu nity owes a lot to him because of the help and support
he offered us. I never ag reed with his personal politics. WSJ:
What kind of help and support did he offer the community? Mr.
Pandita: Some community leaders had approached Mr. Thackeray for
help and we asked him to offer us some kind of reservation in
colleges across Maharashtra b ecause, as a community, we lay a lot
of emphasis on education. That opened up a floodgate of
opportunities for many of us. We went to engineering colleges and p
olytechnic institutes in Maharashtra and I think that helped many
in my communit y to stand on their own feet. WSJ: Is there still
some hope among the Kashmiri Pandits for a better future? Or is
there a sense of resignation that they will now be in permanent
exile? Mr. Pandita: I think we have no hope vis-a-vis the Indian
government. A solution , if it comes, will have to come from the
Kashmir Valley. But there is no possib ility as of now. In the
process of writing this book, I was thinking about my c ommunity
and there were times when I really lost hope, especially with my
genera tion who have seen a lot of financial insecurity and don t
pursue scholarship. For them life is about moving from a
two-bedroom house to a three-bedroom house. Bu t while I was
working on this book, I went to Jammu and saw a lot of determinati
on in the next generation which was really surprising. Since the
overall intelle ctual class of this country has not been interested
at all in our story, we have to rise from within and tell our
story. Aayush Soni is a freelance journalist who lives in New
Delhi. Follow him on Twit ter at: @aayushsoni.
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/01/22/rahul-panditas-book-on-a-kashmir-e
xodus/?mod=WSJBlog&mod=irt
