FACT CHECK: Pakistan stamps to show ‘atrocities in Kashmir’ has photo from Kashmiri Pandit group Roots in Kashmir protest

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/fact-check-pakistan-stamps-to-show-atrocities-in-kashmir-has-photo-from-kashmiri-pandit-protest/articleshow/66027167.cms?utm_campaign=andapp&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=twitter.com

19/01/90: When Kashmiri Pandits fled Islamic terror - Kanchan Gupta

Srinagar, January 4, 1990. Aftab, a local Urdu newspaper, publishes a press release issued by Hizb-ul Mujahideen, set up by the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1989 to wage jihad for Jammu and Kashmir's secession from India and accession to Pakistan, asking all Hindus to pack up and leave. Another local paper, Al Safa, repeats this expulsion order.

In the following days, there is near chaos in the Kashmir valley with Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah and his National Conference government abdicating all responsibilities of the State. Masked men run amok, waving Kalashnikovs, shooting to kill and shouting anti-India slogans.

Reports of killing of Hindus, invariably Kashmiri Pandits, begin to trickle in; there are explosions; inflammatory speeches are made from the pulpits of mosques, using public address systems meant for calling the faithful to prayers. A terrifying fear psychosis begins to take grip of Kashmiri Pandits.

Walls are plastered with posters and handbills, summarily ordering all Kashmiris to strictly follow the Islamic dress code, prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks and imposing a ban on video parlours and cinemas. The masked men with Kalashnikovs force people to re-set their watches and clocks to Pakistan Standard Time.

Shops, business establishments and homes of Kashmiri Pandits, the original inhabitants of the Kashmir valley with a recorded cultural and civilisational history dating back 5,000 years, are marked out. Notices are pasted on doors of Pandit houses, peremptorily asking the occupants to leave Kashmir within 24 hours or face death and worse. Some are more lucid: "Be one with us, run, or die!"

* * *

Srinagar, January 19, 1990. Jagmohan arrives to take charge as governor of Jammu and Kashmir. Farooq Abdullah, whose pathetic, whimpering, snivelling government has all but ceased to exist and has gone into hiding, resigns and goes into a sulk. Curfew is imposed as a first measure to restore some semblance of law and order. But it fails to have a deterrent effect.

Throughout the day, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front and Hizbul Mujahideen terrorists use public address systems at mosques to exhort people to defy curfew and take to the streets. Masked men, firing from their Kalashnikovs, march up and down, terrorising cowering Pandits who, by then, have locked themselves in their homes.

As evening falls, the exhortations become louder and shriller. Three taped slogans are repeatedly played the whole night from mosques: 'Kashmir mei agar rehna hai, Allah-O-Akbar kehna hai' (If you want to stay in Kashmir, you have to say Allah-O-Akbar); 'Yahan kya chalega, Nizam-e-Mustafa' (What do we want here? Rule of Shariah); 'Asi gachchi Pakistan, Batao roas te Batanev san' (We want Pakistan along with Hindu women but without their men).

In the preceding months, 300 Hindu men and women, nearly all of them Kashmiri Pandits, had been slaughtered ever since the brutal murder of Pandit Tika Lal Taploo, noted lawyer and BJP national executive member, by the JKLF in Srinagar on September 14, 1989. Soon after that, Justice N K Ganju of the Srinagar high court was shot dead. Pandit Sarwanand Premi, 80-year-old poet, and his son were kidnapped, tortured, their eyes gouged out, and hanged to death. A Kashmiri Pandit nurse working at the Soura Medical College Hospital in Srinagar was gang-raped and then beaten to death. Another woman was abducted, raped and sliced into bits and pieces at a sawmill.

In villages and towns across the Kashmir valley, terrorist hit lists have been floating about. All the names are of Kashmiri Pandits. With no government worth its name, the administration having collapsed and disappeared, the police nowhere to be seen, despondency sets in. As the night of January 19, 1990, wears itself out, despondency gives way to desperation.

And tens of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits across the valley take a painful decision: to flee their homeland to save their lives from rabid jihadis. Thus takes place a 20th century Exodus.

* * *

Srinagar, January 19, 2005. There are no Kashmiri Pandits in Srinagar, or, for that matter, anywhere else in the Kashmir valley; they don't live here anymore. You can find them in squalid refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi. As many as 300,000 Kashmiri Pandits have fled their home and hearth and been reduced to living the lives of refugees in their own country.

Two-thirds of them are camping in Jammu. The rest are in Delhi and in other Indian cities. Many of them, once prosperous and proud of their rich heritage, now live in grovelling poverty, dependent on government dole and charity. In these 15 years, an entire generation of exiled Kashmiri Pandits has grown up, without seeing the land from where their parents fled to escape the brutalities of Islamic terrorism, a land they dare not return to, although that land still remains a part of their country.

A large number of them are suffering from a variety of stress and depression related diseases. A group of doctors who surveyed the mental and physical health of the Kashmiri Pandits living in refugee camps, found high incidence of 'economic distress, stress induced diabetes, partial lunacy, hypertension and mental retardation.' Statistics reflect high death rate and low birth rate among the Kashmiri Pandit refugees.

And thereby hangs a tragic tale that has been all but wiped out from public memory.

An entire people have been uprooted from the land of their ancestors and left to fend for themselves as a weak-kneed Indian state shamelessly panders to Islamic terrorists and separatists who claim they are the final arbiters of Jammu and Kashmir's destiny. A part of India's cultural heritage has been destroyed; a chapter of India's civilisational history has been erased.

Had this tragedy occurred elsewhere in Hindu majority India, and had the victims been Muslims, we would have described it as 'ethnic cleansing' and 'genocide.' We would have made films with horror-inducing titles. We would have filed cases in the Supreme Court of India. Our media would have marshalled remarkable rage in reporting the smallest detail.

But, this tragedy has occurred in Muslim majority Kashmir valley, and the victims are all Hindus, that too Pandits. What has been lost is part of India's Hindu culture, what has been erased is integral to India's Hindu civilisation.

Therefore, the government makes bold to record that the Kashmiri Pandits have "migrated on their own" and their 'displacement (is) self-imposed;' the National Human Rights Commission, after a perfunctory inquiry, refuses to concede that what has happened is 'genocide' or 'ethnic cleansing,' though facts add up to no less than that, never mind that 300,000 lives have been destroyed.

And, our jhola-wallah brigade of secular activists rudely turn up their noses to the plight of Kashmiri Pandits: Hindu sorrow, inflicted by Islamic terror, stinks.

Today, on January 19, the 15th anniversary of the forced flight of Kashmiri Pandits, look back at India's wretched history of secular politics and consider the terrible price the nation has paid at the altar of appeasement because the Indian State has, and continues to, toe the line of least resistance.

Reflect. Resolve. React.

https://m.rediff.com/news/2005/jan/19kanch.htm

Hurriyat Truth Tapes

#ITFBlive Following the India Today Expose, the case against #BittaKarate has been reopened and he has been taken to an undisclosed location for questioning by NIA #HurriyatTruthTapes

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10155897714387119&id=23230437118

When They Killed My Mom for being a Kashmiri Hindu

In 1990 Kashmir witnessed the Genocide of Kashmiri Hindus, the target killing of Kashmiri Hindus started in 1989 with the killing of ‘Tika Lal Taploo’ and continued till the massacre of 24 Kashmiri Hindus in Nadimarg. My ‘Maa’ ‘Teja Dhar’ was among those unfortunate Kashmiri Pandits who were killed in Kashmir because of only fault of their’s, for being ‘Kaffir’.

It was 30th June 1990 ‘Haar ashtami’ day, my mother and father had finished with their food. My father’s name is Roop Krishen Dhar and he was a Labour officer at that time. After having his meal he went for a stroll outside and went to his friends house. My mother along with our elderly neighbour was at home. Around 7:30-8:00 pm some persons came to our home and we’re looking for my father. They shouted for my father. My mom did not open the door instead she urged that she is alone at home and they could meet my father the next day. Instead of this they broke open our gate and came inside searching for my father. They searched him everywhere and made a mess of our place. When they were unable to find my father they went near our elderly neighbour and slapped him hard on his face thrice. My mom began shouting that “Buddha ha morukh”. (Old men has been beaten).

Meanwhile the terrorists began moving to our main door when one among them, who was hardly at a distance from my mom, shot her thrice. The bullets hit my mom’s abdomen And she started bleeding. After this the terrorist’s surrounded our entire mohalla so that they could harm my father also. But my fathers friend had heard this and did not allow my father to move out. Finally at almost 10 pm the terrorists moved from our place and my fathers friend and my father had a chance to come home. My father rushed to a hospital and asked for ambulance and the idiotic doctors told him to report the case first as it was a police case. My father then rushed to Mahrajgunj police station, lodged a FIR, and then with a help of ambulance rushed my mother to the state hospital. In between all this the time was simply running out and it was almost 12 am when my mother was shifted to hospital. She had lost so much of blood till that time. My father got busy with the hospital and police formalities and after some time he saw my mother was left behind unattended and doctors were just asking her the details of how she got shot and all. My father screamed at the doctors that till now they should have operated upon her instead of asking her the nasty questions.

The Doctors who were also sympathetic towards terrorists, gave lame excuses that they did not have blood etc. Then they shifted my mother to the OT wherein my father firmly believes that my mother was not operated. Till 8 in the morning my mom was fighting death. She wanted to see me. My father had sent me Jammu early as these terrorists used to kidnap young girls. I was her only child whom she longed to see. But she could not fight with the destiny and these morons (Doctors). She succumbed to her injuries at 8:00 am. My father with the help of army personnel’s performed her last rites there only. I could not see my mothers dead body. After the last rites my father was sent to some hotel, and once my mothers Asti visarjan was done my father left for Jammu where me and rest of the family members were mourning my mothers death.

I was just in 6th standard when they snatched my mother away from me. It is still hard for my family and me to believe that mom is not there. My Maasi (Aunty) is still in a state of shock. Many a times she asks my father that if really my mother has been killed.

http://theimmortalhimalayas.com/when-they-killed-my-mom-for-being-a-kashmiri-hindu/

Kashmiri Pandits observe 'black day' against 1931 riots

Jammu, Jul 13 (PTI) A group of displaced Kashmiri Pandits today observed 'black day' to commemorate the July 13, 1931 riots against the community in the Valley and demanded better security, especially in the wake of violence following the killing of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani.

"The situation has not changed from 1931 till today.

Kashmiri Pandits were attacked then and even today in 2016 they are attacked," Ravinder Raina, President, All State Kashmiri Pandit Conference (ASKPC) said.

He demanded better security to the community in Jammu and Kashmir after he alleged that stones were pelted at the houses of Kashmiri Pandits following the death of the Hizbul commander.

Anoop Bhat, Coordinator, Roots in Kashmir (RIK), said "whenever the majority population of the Valley has any issue with the ruling dispensation, the minority community faces the brunt." 

"The July 13, 1931 riots, 1986 South Kashmir riots or the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits are the prime examples of how the Kashmiri Pandit community has constantly lived in fear of life and honour," he said.

RIK spokesperson Aroop Rayu said the Kashmiri Pandits currently living in the state are in dire need of a "full proof security" and that the Centre should rethink its composite township model.

http://www.ptinews.com/news/7650752_Kashmiri-Pandits-observe--black-day--against-1931-riots.html

A Mind Of Winter - Twenty-five years into exile, a Pandit selects memory props to remind him like shrapnel pain of the day his family looked its last upon Kashmir Valley

 

National / Essays MAGAZINE | JAN 26, 2015 Memory sharper The author is the boy with the toy gun ESSAY A Mind Of Winter Twenty-five years into exile, a Pandit selects memory props to remind him like shrapnel pain of the day his family looked its last upon Kashmir Valley RAHUL PANDITA I often think of a man I saw dead 30 years ago in Srinagar on the road outside the Silk Factory. The man had died after being hit by a truck; he lay face down, and the pieces of meat he was carrying in a newspaper sheet lay strewn all over him. The bus from which I saw him stopped for a moment and I remember trying to read the crumpled and stained newspaper. I wanted to read the printed matter so that it could serve as a prop to remember the dead man. I always needed a prop to remember things by. Six years after I saw that dead man, I was in a taxi, huddled with my parents, who like every Kashmiri Pandit at that time were desperate to see the light on the other end of the Jawahar tunnel. While crossing south Kashmir, we came across a man pushing a wheelbarrow on the road; he looked at us in disgust, pumped his fist in the air, and shouted: “Maryu, Batav, maryu! (Die, you Pandits, die!).” The man’s  wheelbarrow and his raised fist are among the many props reminding me of my exile. Anniversaries are also like props. January 19 this year, for example, will mark 25 years of our exodus from the Kashmir Valley. I don’t know whether this date means something to my father. I don’t think he will even remember it. His day will be the same: he will wake up, worry about what we will cook for lunch, ask me with remarkable sangfroid if I have plans to get married, recite mantras in front of a picture of our ancestral goddess. Later, he will ring up the grocer to order something, beginning with: “Hello, Mintuji, mein Uncle bol raha hun!” and then place his order. Earlier, I’d find it funny, since I thought Mintu must be dealing with 50 uncles like Father. But then I paid attention and realised Mintu never asks: “Which uncle?” The system worked perfectly for Father, the groceries always got delivered on time. That is how he operated back home in Kashmir; that is how it works for him in Gurgaon. But I know Father misses home. We never talk about it. Not even when he is watching DD Kashmir, when he is humming along with Tibet Bakal singing a Krishan Joo Razdan Leela, an ode to Shiva. Father has never returned to Kashmir since April 4, 1990. I don’t think he wants to. The Kashmir he left 25 years ago has changed. And he remembers every moment of the time that change occurred. So January 19, in his mind, is no different from all those days of fear and trauma in 1989-90. As Robert Frank writes in La memoire des Francais, “That which is sadly memorable is not co-memorable.” Somehow, in my head—and perhaps that is the way it is with every son and daughter—Father has always been ‘old’. But how old was he when we left home? He was 44. Forty-four! At that age, like thousands of other Kashmiri Pandit parents, he had to provide for the family in so uncertain times. At that age, he lost everything he had so lovingly built along with my mother: a home, its red-cemented corridor, its lawn, its kitchen garden, its windows with stained glass, its wardrobes, its false ceiling, its book-shelves. Everything my parents earned for years was diligently put into our home. And, suddenly, one day, your neighbours, your colleagues, your friends, your grocer and your milkman decide that you cannot live in a home that you built with your sweat and blood. They also decide that it is time for you to leave not only your home, but also the land where your ancestors lived for thousands of years. So they burst out on the streets on the night of January 19, 1990, and shout on loudspeakers from the mosques all over the Valley that they want Kashmir to become Pakistan, where only Pandit women (and no men) will be allowed. Oh, that night! How can I forget it! How can any Kashmiri Pandit forget it! But I am still searching for more and more props to remember that night. I want it to be like shrapnel pain. Here is one prop I acquired recently: on that night Doordarshan was playing a V. Shantaram film, Teen Batti, Chaar Raasta. Also, that night, along with frenzied cries for our annihilation, they played a song used in Afghanistan to inspire the anti-Soviet militia: Khoon-e-shahidan rang laaya, fatah ka parcham lehraya, jaago jaago subah hui (The blood of the martyrs has come true, the flag of victory has been unfurled, wake up, wake up, he dawn has appeared). It is now available on YouTube and, sometimes, when a few friends get silly drunk, we play it on and laugh as we imitate the singer’s nasal drone. This is what I believe Michael Taussig called the “normality of the abnormal” inNervous System, when he referred to the notion of “despair and macabre humour”. But I cannot play the song when Father is around. I cannot play it to a man who spent that entire night standing at his window, offering the solace of his presence to an old woman who was alone in the neighbouring house, as mobs outside were calling for the death of Pandits. I cannot play it to a woman, then a child, whose mouth was stuffed with Parle-G biscuits by her mother to prevent her from crying and attracting the attention of the mob outside her home. I cannot play it to the widow of Naveen Sapru, who at the age of 37 was waylaid by a mob outside a mosque and then shot. “Bus, be moodus wanye (Okay, I have died now),” he told his murderers, after which he was shot again and silenced forever. Naveen was on his way to collect his coat from a tailor. But he was killed before that. Two years ago, while in the US, I bought a coat from Macy’s and it reminded me of him. Did anyone collect his coat later? Twenty-five years is a long time. For a refugee, it indicates a sense of permanent exile. In exile, most of us are doing well for ourselves. But beneath our tiepins, our PowerPoint presentations, our single malts, our Harvard ‘five-foot shelf’ classics, we suffer from an acute sense of homelessness. In exile, our achievements are like pieces of meat over that man’s dead body. In exile, we are like Orwell’s Unhappy Bella, waiting for unknown fishermen to sing the sad song of our betrayal. We wait for the spring. But on January 19, twenty-five years later, the exile is winter. A mind of winter, as Wallace Stevens would have preferred to call it. (Rahul Pandita is the author of Our Moon Has Blood Clots (2013), a memoir of exile from Kashmir.) Click here to see the article in its standard web format

 

 

COVERAGE OF #REH2014

TIMES OF INDIA

JK MOINTOR

http://www.jkmonitor.org/index.php/en/14-news-views/14821-they-sing-dance-and-shout-aloud-together-till-their-voice-resonates-in-kashmir-valley

The event was covered by ANI and telecast on various TV Channels.

We’re a forgotten community: Kashmiri Pandits(The Hindu)

A group of Kashmiri Pandits gathered for a silent sit-in at Jantar Mantar here on Sunday to campaign against the community’s forceful eviction from the Kashmir Valley 24 years ago.

They demanded that their human rights be restored. Led by a youth group, Roots in Kashmir (RIK), protestors said they had faced discrimination over the years and were given step-motherly treatment. “We have been made a forgotten community. Our entire culture is fading,” they said.

The protesters said Kashmiri Hindus were forced to flee because they were a minority. “Minds were imbibed with fear and insecurity and they were made to forcefully flee their native land in the wake of a freedom movement. Not only were they living under the sustained threat of ethnic cleansing by the terrorists, over five lakh Kashmiri Hindus were forcefully evicted, defamed, killed and their wives raped brutally simply because they were Hindus.”

The youth group has also been associated with commemorating the ‘Kashmiri Pandit Exodus Day’ for the past six years. “This day marks the 24th anniversary of the forced exile on the fateful day of January 19, 1990, when hundreds of thousands of violent protestors, along with armed militants, occupied the streets of Kashmir, which led to the exodus,” said Amal Magazine , coordinator of RIK.

“That dreaded night was possibly the longest night of our lives. Mobs from all over the valley had occupied every single road in Kashmir. They shouted slogans against Pandits asking us to either join them, perish or leave the valley,” he added.

Demanding a concrete effort by the government to rehabilitate these people and restore their dignity, Amit Raina, a member of the group, said: “No single conviction has taken place against the people who have widely admitted that they were a part of the killings”.

He added: “Besides, these cases should be made to come out of the Kashmir region and brought to the forefront so that our community, which is on the verge of extinction, gets national attention and receives adequate justice.”

 

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-newdelhi/were-a-forgotten-community-kashmiri-pandits/article5595539.ece

 

That 19th January - Rashneek Kher

Posted on invadecafe.com

Invade Cafe - That 19th January

When my daughter turned eight last year, I asked her what present she would like for her 8^th birthday. She said let us visit the Shrine of Rajyna (popularly known as Kheer Bhavani) when it snows in Kashmir. For a child born in exile and having grown in an atmosphere that she doesn’t quite sync with it would only be natural for her toask her father to take her home. What however surprised me was her urge to visit the shrine of our Isht Devi when it snows in Kashmir. I left the conversation at that and hoped that she would soon forget all about it. As winter approached she reminded me of her birthday present. Her winter holidays were scheduled from 1^st to 20^th Jan. I asked her to sleep and promised her that we would go home during her vacations.

I knew I had made her a promise that would be difficult to keep. It isn’t that I have not been to Kashmir since we were forced to leave; it was just that these dates brought me terribly bad memories. I somehow wanted to avoid being in Kashmir during exactly the same period, the events of which led to our being uprooted from the land of our forefathers.

                                               

Bagat-i-Kanipora is now a bustling city skirt of Srinagar though it falls under District Budgam. Back then in 89-90 it used to be a small hamlet 13 kms from the stone which read Srinagar 0 kms. We lived on a connecting road which connected our village to another called Kralpora. Kralpora was a bus stop en route the holy shrine of the mystic poet Nund Reshi. The village lay scattered close to the road and presented a poignant picture of pastoral Kashmir. A Small Rivulet ran through the village.There were orchards the prominent being the Pomegranate Orchard near the Green Mosque,big Chinars, and willows of all kinds would co-exist with tall Poplars. Our home was a little outside what would constitute the main village. A small habitation of five-six houses had cobbled up around our home. All around this small habitation were fields that came alive in summer to the songs of men and women sowing and reaping paddy.

One October 89 evening, Mrs. Kaul a neighbor of ours, the only ones who owned a phone in our village, knocked a tour door to inform us that my father’s cousin living in the Fateh Kadal area of down town Srinagar had been shot .She possibly knew that Tathe of Aima’s had not just been shot but shot dead. A month later a MES man was shot at close range in Kralpora and left to die. Meanwhile JKLF cadres went around killing people,mostly Pandits, the convenient alibi was to brand them Mukhbirs or Informers of the State. This winter was very different from any other winter in my or even my father’s living memory. Every day we would hear stories of this or that boy going for training across the border. Yet no one ever thought that the events happening around were just a precursor to something more sinister.

Behind our home an empty piece of land was used as a playground by us. One day as we were going about our usual bat and ball, when our neighbor screamed at us for playing cricket when the “young of the nation” were organizing a Tehreek. From that day onwards our Muslim friends would not turn up to play. We stopped playing too. The winter was setting in.

                                       

 

Television sets were beaming out images of the Romanian revolution and the taking over of Bucharest by rioting crowds. Many in Kashmir were getting ideas and inspiration from this. Since theRomanian uprising lasted not more than a fortnight and had brought victory to the protestors a belief had taken home in the minds of the terrorists that a similar “mass uprising” if organized could bear propitious fruit for them a swell.

On 4^th Of Jan, 1990 Aftab published a Press Release of Hizbul Mujahideen asking all Hindus to leave.Another news paper Al-Safa published the same press release. Soon notices to leave were pasted on the doors of Pandits. A notice on our door read“Ralev,Galev ya Chalev”.Join,Die or Leave.Through all this there was “news” ofMujahideen having made hit-lists of all those who were “against” the Tehreek.The list , we were told, is compiled by “Mehman Mujahids” read foreign terrorists in consultation with local civil society. Thankfully no one in your family is recommended to a hit list yet a “concerned” neighbor told my uncle.

                                             

During one of these days my brotherhad gone to get some air into the wheel of his cycle when suddenly two young men carrying guns killed a man in the Kralpora Bazar. Both men lived close to our village and my brother was naïve to tell someone that he knows one of them.A well wisher visited us that evening and told us to send him out of Kashmir.This advice fell on us like a pack of bricks. My grandmother cursed my brother for being stupid and my mother started sobbing. It was too late to do anything.My brother thankfully knew how to ride a scooter. We had some petrol in the fuel tank of the scooter which would have been enough to take him to Lal Chowk.My father put some money into the pocket of his Pheran and told him, if there is a knock on the door just jump from the back window and don’t stop the scooter till you reach Tiku’s who lived near Central Telegraph Office in Lal Chowk. We kept awake all night hoping against hope that no one would come asking for Rinku, and no one did.

Strange diktats started appearing on walls. Some would tell us how to dress, others what not to drink but the most interesting were the ones asking us to time our watches with Pakistan StandardTime. Mohalla Committees were made to check vice. It was like a Taliban Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice. What constituted vice included watching something as harmless as Doordarshan. Everything Indian was the new untouchable. During all this time the writ of the terrorists went unchallenged.The National Conference government had run away and abdicated all its responsibilities. There was no administration at all.

The timing was just right for the“mass uprising” to be engineered. From here on I write the account that my brother had written in his dairy many years after that fateful night.

“We were about to have dinner when the final call for prayers was heard. It was normal for us to hear the call to the faithful. A soulful Allah-u-Akbar rendering went up in the cold mist ofJanuary. As soon as we finished dinner the soulful voice of our pious localMuslim priest was replaced by someone who sounded not just hoarse but uncouth too. He didn’t sound like a Kashmiri .At first his words sounded like cacophony but it took us little time to realize that he was provoking the people of the village to come to the mosque and hit the streets. The nearest mosque was almost seven hundred meters from our home. People were possibly awaiting the call. A song blazed out of the loudspeaker and went something like this.

 

Jago Jago Subah Huyee;Rus ne Baazi Haari Hain,Hind par larzaan tarehain,Ab Kashmir ki baaree hain

 Wake Up,Russia has fallen and India eyes defeat,It is the turn of Kashmir to be freed.

We looked at each other in complete silence. No one even had the guts to move from his/her place. The song was played for a long duration, many times over and as soon as it ended it gave way to sloganeering of a different kind, the kind that did not just target the establishment of India but the one which targeted the Pandits directly.

The slogans that were now filling the air left us in no doubt that we were about to be defiled or killed.

Hum Kya Chahte Azadi…(We want freedom)

Azzadi Ka Matlab Kya,La Illah Il lallah(Freedom means La Illah Il Laalh)

Agar Kashmir Main Rehna Hoga,Allah-u-Akbar Kehna Hoga(If you want to live in Kashmir,you have to sayAllah-u-Akbar)

Ae Zalimo Ae Kafiro,Kashmir HamaraChod Do(Oh Cruel people,you the Kafirs,Leave our Kashmir)

Yahan kya Chalega Nizam-e-Mustafa,

The rule of the Prophet will reign here…was still resounding in our ears when we started hearing; We want Kashmir to become Pakistan without Pandit men but with their women. It is then that we realized that the Kaul’s were in real danger because they had two grown up daughters. It wasn’t as if we were not used to dirty limericks of Muslim men sounding out to our women. The one that was most common was…Batni batni wale gachav dal,ye karev tikarav bistaras tal …O Pandit woman let us go to Dal,whatever we will do  ill be under the quilt.

                                              

At one point my father almost opened the door to go to their house, but all of us prevented him for doing so. Never before and never after in my life did I feel so impotent and helpless as I felt at that moment. Since I had no sisters of my own the Kaul sisters had quietly filled in that space yet neither me nor anyone in our family could do anything for them. We were too scared for our lives to be able to do anything for the ones we truly loved.

Though we could hear the roar of the crowd now, they still seemed at some distance from where our home was. There were chants of Azaadi…Azzadi and they kept growing louder. We moved to the room from where we could see the road. My aunt peeped through the partly drawn curtain and shouted “Trath Haye Paye” Lightening has struck.. Thousands of people shouting slogans against India and Pandits in particular were approaching our home. My father locked all the doors and shut all the windows.We switched off all the lights of the house. All the women were moved to the kitchen, a canister of kerosene placed next to them just in case the crowd barged in, they were to immolate themselves.

It was past midnight but the frenzy refused to die down. One wave of screaming and shouting gave way to another asif a strange kind of adrenaline had been pumped into our village. The crowd was putting up a spectacle right outside our gate. A man climbed on top of another man’s shoulders and started shouting, Pakistanse Rishta Kya,La Illah Il-lah, and the crowd responded with the vigor thatI had never seen before. In sometime the crowd moved on and the voices died down a little.My father told us to recite Indrakshi Mantra. We were reciting the Mantra barely audible to each other, when the noises grew up again. The crowd from some other village seemed to have merged with the mob from our village. If it is the crowd of Machov,(a village 2.5 kms from ours) my father said, then the signs are ominous. There seemed to be no end to this night. At around 3.30 am in the morning my father opened the door of the kitchen to find all the women huddled together, wide awake, scared,still and almost soulless. The last surge before the first prayer of the next morning happened outside the house of Kaul’s. Many in the mob kicked their main gate and hurled abuses at them in such loud voices that even we could hear.”

Tarini prevailed upon me and I booked two tickets for a return trip to Kashmir. We have been here since 2^ndof Jan and shall go back to Delhi on 18^th Jan. Dressed in our traditional Kashmiri Pandit attire,a pheran with a ladh (a peculiar kind of stitch at the fall distinguishes a Pandit Pheran from a Muslim Pheran) we have walked together, the by lanes of downtown Srinagar and been to villages where lie the Mazars of the great masters of Kashmiri poetry.We drank water from the same spring where Nund Rishi was given his first bath,but not before the maulvi,who could not recite one verse of Nund Rishi telling us to do a Vuzoo(ritual cleaning) because our foreheads were marked by vermillion.We alsoheard a teacher in Srinagar museum showing the diversity of the state pointing out to a mannequin showing a Pandit women, telling his students,look that’s a Batni and she wears no yezzar(pyjamas).

Not to be deterred we went around and looked for signs of our past.The crumbling Habbakadal locality represented the city of Djins,as did the prosperous village of Haal in South Kashmir.The falling houses stand as a testament to who lived there once. Many temples on ceresplendent in their glory were dying for want of attention; the others had simply been erased from the land and the memories of the people. We drove pastmy village to Swoch Kral’s Mazar and then onwards to the sacred shrine of Rajnya Bhagwati in Badipora to find a beautiful Kashmiri art painting of the mother goddess at the site of what used to be beautiful idol. I enquired and was told that it was also broken to pieces by the iconoclasts.

Not everyone who we met in Kashmir was a fanatic, not everyone seemed happy at what happened to Pandits, not everyone said that it was right to destroy religious places of Hindus, not everyone liked the idea of encroaching the property of the Pandits, yet almost everyone who we met said that it was Jagmohan’s plan to drive Pandit’s out and almost none seemed not to have participated in that orgy that drove the Pandits to exile.

It is beginning to snow again……

 

Geelani - Among the Civilised!

There is an interesting take away from the following press report (on Geelani at the recently concluded India Today Conclave) of a gentleman called Arpit Parashar in the Tehelka. It nomenclates Syed Ali Shah Geelani as Chairman of the Hurriyat Conference but prefers to call us as a right wing Kashmiri group.Even by my own godless ways of life and belief in the Nietzschean ideology of a dead god I wouldn’t be apologetic to call Geelani an Islamic Bigot. Look at the inverse logic that our journos including Arpit use.Geelani to them needs no affirmative fixing label irrespective of his regular pronouncements that Kashmir should merge into Pakistan because it is a muslim majority area.That he believes Islam is the glue between Kashmiris and Pakistan obviously isn’t feeding any frenzy at all,right or left.That he got Abdul Ghani Lone killed because Lone had apparently looked towards India for a solution doesn’t set any alarm bells ringing into our friend Arpit or the likes of many such apologists of hate.That Geelani invokes religion (Islam here) to drive mobs and to frenzy is pious and just because we protest against such ideologues of hate is being right wing.

I wouldn’t mind being branded a radical Hindu provided I was one. In 22 years of our exile Kashmiri Pandits have not killed, maimed or even injured one Muslim. They have not brought down,burnt,ransacked or even partially destroyed the properties of any Muslims despite the fact their own houses lie destroyed and their places of worship desecrated.Yet Arpit and likes have a nomenclature for us.

But humko kahein kafir, Allah ki marzi Hain

The idols nomenclate me as the infidel,there must be God’s will in this.

That brings us back to the India Today Conclave. We at Roots in Kashmir do believe that we must be statesmanlike when it comes to finding solutions to issues as vexed as Kashmir. Neither is it our argument not to involve people who differ with our viewpoint on Kashmir.Infact we would welcome every move that would result in a solution to the Kashmir issue. What we all need to decide is whether people like Geelani are or can actually pave the way forward for any kind of solution at all, or are they a part of the problem itself. Before a reputed media organization like India Today decided to call Geelani(unless they wanted to call his bluff, which I do not rule out) to address the conclave don’t they believe that it is necessary to do a basic background check on the man who is a sworn Islamist and known fascist even by the most liberal standards. It is not for nothing that even NDTV calls him a hardliner. Not the first time though has India Today invited a killer of humanity to its Conclave.Earlier in 2008 they had Yasin Malik to address a session on Youth.Yasin Malik is to Geelani what Chemical Ali was to Saddam Hussein.So it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to expect the Burmese dictator or even a Qadafi next year.

If India Today believes that such people could be a part of the solution then either they are too naïve or too conspiring.

Now that he was allowed rather graciously to be a part of the Aroon Puri’s solution to Kashmir let us see what he brought to the table. He looked sheepish from the word go. Clearly this wasn’t his territory.There weren’t many in the crowd albeit some Pakistani diplomats and was Nayeem Khan there too, who would purchase his blood red wares. He was incoherent, gone was his nonchalant way with which he dismisses opponents in Kashmir.The village boy looked clearly like a cat on a hot tin roof that too in a huge city. Obviously he had nothing new to say. He mumbled the usual stuff but had neatly packaged it, though he couldn’t deliver it well. He spoke of “human rights violations” and the” brutality” of the Indian State the same state that paid his medical bills and appealed to the US government to grant him a visa. Haven’t we heard that before? He didn’t explain why it took him a week despite huge public pressure to announce a hartal when two girls in his hometown were recently murdered by forces loyal to His Master’s Voice. He tried to his best evoke some sympathy among his listeners and was getting exasperated by the second because people could see through his spiel.

Though he was the last speaker of the session and thus had the opportunity to reply to Arif Mohammed Khan’s fervent, logical and passionate speech but it seemed Geelani had clearly lost it. Seemed someone had understood the essence of Holy Koran better than Geelani and obviously had more to do with Kashmir’s glorious but pre-islamic or even secular past. He was stumped by Arif Mohammed’s references to Kalhan, Lalleshwari and Nund Rishi.Arif Mohammed had his day.But the worst for Geelani was yet to come.It was left to a young exiled Pandit to tell the audience how his mother wrapped him in a cloth to escape death at the hands of Geelani’s zealots when he was barely nine months old.The more inconvenient question was why Geelani had Abdul Ghani Lone(one of his own Hurriyat members killed). Aditya Raj Kaul had the audience cheering and when Geelani tom tommed the usual conspiracy by Jagmohan it was received by jeers from the crowd.

(Conclave Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGxT646o4CA )

It is well known that people with dictatorial tendencies brook no opposition and therefore are not used to civil means. They are at their wits ends when questioned about their ideology or the means that they use to achieve their ends.No one in Kashmir dares ask Geelani such questions. That person would be history. Pity Ghani Loni made that mistake.

Mobster Syed Ali Shah Geelani stands exposed at the India Today Conclave

Aditya Raj Kaul, a young journalist and Founder of Roots In Kashmir in the audience, talked about his own experience and accused Geelani of being true only to his "masters" in Pakistan and not even to his own moderate leaders, such as Abdul Gani Lone who was allegedly killed by the Hurriyat hardliners. This happened at Taj Palace Hotel where the India Today Conclave 2011 was taking place.

Reh 2011 - Kashmiri Pandit Youth Festival

Be it the chords of music or the cords of emotion, it does create ripples. Far away from home, a new generation of us has grown. Time may have elapsed and distance may have hazed our view but the moment the chords strike and the music begins ,it sets us all swinging, singing and turns back the wheel of times, the valley in us resonates.

On the 13th day of this March we will all sing together, dance together shout aloud til...l our voice resonates in the valley. As a new generation of Kashmiri musicians change tacks from Chakri to Rock to fusion or the more mellowed form of music, we will sing to the celebration of life in a new way and mark the arrival of the next gen of the Kashmiri Pandits.

Renowned bands like Prithvi, October, young Santoor masteros and the nightingales of the valley will set the stage on fire and illuminate the flame within us. The flame of continuity – Reh as it is aptly called in Kashmiri.

Reh - the flame of eternalness, the flame of warmth and togetherness, the flamer of love and brotherhood, the flame of enlightenment, the flame that keep the young generation of Kashmiri Pandits treading.

Come, lets all celebrate the joy of togetherness, the commonness of our roots, the bond of love.

Lets Rock!!!
-Entry by Complimentary Pass only.

To obtain passes contact:

Amal Magazine - 9873900479
Anoop Bhat - 9911543003
Sanjay Peshin - 8527764911

A Roots In Kashmir Initiative

I did my best to stem the Exodus-Jagmohan

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/i-did-my-best-to-stem-the-exodus/737340/0

We are not writing the editor's note on this one simply because a word that we may write may be construed as support by the jaundiced eye.

Here is what the ertswhile Governor of J&K has to say on the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits.

I am deeply dismayed to see that a national daily of the standing of The Indian Express should have given so much prominence (‘Forces, Jagmohan, Mufti Sayeed drove Pandits out: Farooq’s brother’, IE, January 10), to an apparently false allegation of Mustafa Kamal, a politician of little standing, about the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley in “early 1990”. Is it believable that practically all the members of a highly intelligent community like that of Kashmiri Pandits would leave, from every village, town and city, their hearths and homes, without caring for their properties, business, children schooling and their future, merely because some one in government asks them to do so? The concoction is writ large on the face of the allegation itself. And yet, shockingly, it has received wide publicity in your newspaper!


Let me tell your readers, on the basis of concrete facts and contemporaneous records, what the conditions were in the Valley before my arrival on the scene on January 19, 1990, and how a permissive and paralysed coalition government, headed by Dr Farooq Abdullah, had virtually abdicated all authority to the militants and allowed them to establish complete sway over the Valley.



From June 19, 1989 to January 19, 1990, that is, in six months, there were 319 violent incidents in the Valley — 21 armed attacks, 114 bomb blasts, 112 arsons and 72 incidents of mob violence. To demonstrate to the whole world their total hold over the Valley, the militants kidnapped, on December 8, Dr Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of the Union home minister, from the gate of Srinagar’s Lal Ded Hospital, and released her only after the state and Central governments capitulated and conceded their demand of freeing five top terrorists. This capitulation left the general public in no doubt about the ultimate victory of the militants. Even the doubting Thomases went over to their side and swelled their ranks.


Under a sinister plan to throw out “infidels” and “agents” of the Union from the Valley, Kashmiri Pandits were especially targeted. Prominent members of the community were picked up for slaughter, one by one. For example, Tikka Lal Tiploo, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, was shot dead on September 14, Judge N.K. Ganjoo on November 4 and journalist P.N. Bhatt on December 28.

The terror-stricken Pandit community, in a memorandum dated January 16, 1990, to the then governor, General K.V. Krishna Rao, said: “Instead of the government, it is the militants who are the de facto rulers in the Valley today... Happenings in Anantnag, Sopore, Baramulla, Tral, Nurran, Pulwama, Ishber, Vicharnag, Shopian and other places in the Valley are indicative of the fundamentalists’ designs regarding their planned targets of attack on the minorities... The pace of exodus has further accelerated now... Not even a single assailant of the minority leaders and others has either been identified or apprehended by the police.”


Soon after I took over, I did my best to stem the exodus. This would be clear from the press note of March 7, 1990, which was given wide publicity at that time. This note, inter alia, said: “Jagmohan appealed to the members of the Pandit community who have temporarily migrated to Jammu to return to the Valley. He offered to set up temporary camps at four places, namely, Srinagar, Anantnag, Baramulla and Kupwara for those who return from Jammu.”

In the meanwhile, treacherous and brutal killings of innocent Kashmiri Pandits continued in the Valley. Those killed included prominent persons like engineer B.K. Ganjoo, poet Sarvanand Premi and his young son Virender Kaul, Professor K.L. Ganjoo and his wife, the teacher C.L. Pandita. Press notices were prominently put out in the widely-read Srinagar dailies Aftab and Alsafa, requiring Kashmiri Pandits to leave within 48 hours, failing which they would run the risk of being exterminated. Photocopies of these notices have been printed by me in my book My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir.


There are many other pieces of hard evidence which show that the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits was caused by relentlessly pursuing the ISI-sponsored plan of “killing one and frightening 1,000.” Disinformation was built into this plan. Tragically, for petty political ends, persons like Mustafa Kamal have been committing the crime of disinformation. They have been butchering truth, while the militants have been butchering individuals.


The writer was governor of Jammu and Kashmir between January and May 1990

The Garden of Solitude by Siddhartha Gigoo - An Extract

 To order your copy write to utpalpublications@gmail.com or visit http://utpalpublications.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-release-garden-of-solitude-by.html

Book:                The Garden Of Solitude
Author:              Siddhartha Gigoo
ISBN:               978-81-291-1718-2
Binding:            Paperback
Publisher:          Rupa & Co.
Pages:              260
Language:         English
Price:                195

‘Life teaches us that there is beauty in ugliness,’ Sridar said. 

Then Pamposh said something that Sridar was not prepared for. 

‘Every day I lead the life of a centipede. I crawl. I lick. I hide. I sting. I wake up to the fumes of kerosene in the morning and the sting of speeding ants, feeding ravenously on the sugar spilled on the floor of the tent. It feels as if I have never had a morsel of rice for ages. I wake up hungry and go to bed hungry. I lead the life of a centipede, I crawl. All around the camp, there is stench of human excrement and waste. People wake up in the morning, hungry and muddled. The awakenings are pallid. The water in the water tanker smells foul, and children lie whole day in their own vomit. The quivering smile on my mother’s face is false. I want to peel off that false smile from her face, so that she is beautiful once again. Father spends most of the time playing cards with the other migrants near the highway tea shop. I am a mute spectator to the horrors of the life inside my tent. The air inside is squalid. My grandfather barely speaks. He lost his voice while leaving the village. A young man had shown him a gun as he was returning from a butcher’s shop. He still thinks that the young man is hiding around a corner, with a gun, waiting to scare him. He stopped talking after we crossed the Banihal tunnel. I saw him look sadly at the fading mountains for long, till they disappeared completely, one by one, into his frozen dreams. And he swallowed his fright. Today I cannot hear what he says. His words do not come out of his mouth. When we are asleep, we cannot even stretch our arms and legs. There are no hangers to hang our clothes on. No cupboards to keep our personal belongings in. We have no portraits of our gods and goddesses. No pictures of our ancestors. During the day, we hide from the blazing sun. At night we live from one insect bite to another. Centipedes, millipedes and spiders are our companions. We must learn how to live with them.  

‘My grandmother does not recognise the insects. She confuses a lizard for a plastic toy paralysed on the wall. Her gaze is fixed at the crucified lizard. For hours and hours, she just gazes endlessly into a dark nothingness! It is a vacant gaze into a world of oblivion and amnesia. Petrified with a sense of desolation, she does not even feel the presence of hundreds of mosquitoes circling her head constantly, while she stares into blank space. I do not know if she is hungry or thirsty. When asleep, she resembles a corpse. She perspires. I wake up to feel her pulse and feel happy that she is still breathing. She would be happy in her death, I pray. My mother and sister wash their clothes and the utensils in a puddle of water outside our tent. They line up for hours in the morning to use the makeshift toilet made of torn shreds of canvas, pieces of cardboard and tin. They await their turn at the filthy and stinking toilets while the loitering men watch the women wait to relieve themselves. Many women prefer to go to the stinking latrines at midnight, away from the stare of men. Even the mosquitoes keep away from the foul smelling latrines. Sometimes, I hear women shriek, fall silent and then cry in solace behind the filthy tank. The nights bring squalor, pallor and heat. We live in fear of the mangled and naked electric wires, crisscrossed around wooden poles that hold the canvas of the tent together. 

‘There is a large rash on my grandfather’s leg, a rash perhaps from the bite of a millipede. The rash has swollen and become a sore now. It oozes puss and resembles a horrifying wound. He scratches the wound with a knife. The festering wound will never heal. I want to burn the wound. The old man looks at my sister change clothes at bedtime. She puts out the light. There are no curtains to hide behind. She sleeps in snatches, sandwiched like an insect between her mother and her grandmother. She dreams nervy dreams of crawling insects in the sun and the shade. The old man wants to touch her clothes hanging from the hook. He smells the clothes of his own granddaughter. And he relishes their putrid smell. We lick the hours that weigh heavy on our half-asleep existence, and tread laboriously into an endless strain of nightmares. The earthen pot in the tent is empty. A discarded plastic bottle used for the toilet contains a few drops of water. I grab it and empty the drops into my parched mouth. My tongue is dry. It can fall off anytime. My grandmother shrieks when she sees the sun. She dreads stepping out of the tent for fear of fainting in the sun. She soils her clothes every day. She can’t even use the bedpan which my mother got for her. From morning to evening she clings to the old box, which she brought along. It sticks inseparably to her chest. I wonder if there are any ornaments or valuables left in it. 

‘Never before have I felt the desire to unknow myself and others. The smell . . . the touch . . . . the breath . . . the sigh! 

‘In an adjacent tent a family of five torture an old man, their foster-grandfather, who lost his mental balance upon seeing his house fade away in a hazy distance. The old man is a burden for his son and daughter-in-law. Another mouth to feed, they feel! He moans at night constantly, and intermittently wakes up to a cold shiver - a nightmare. His son and daughter-in-law taunt him for their amusement. They whisper in his ears that his mother was dead and that she was beaten mercilessly to death. The old man groans and pleads them not to utter the atrocities. Every evening, the torment continues. The maddening laughter of the men ricochets from the tattered canvas tent. Every night the old man cries. He gapes at his son and daughter-in-law and gives them his blessings. 

‘Darkness! Darkness! 

‘I wonder what is moral and what is immoral.’

Sridar stopped breathing for a while as Pamposh described his experience and condition. He picked up Pamposh’s pack of cheap cigarettes. For the first time, he lit a cigarette and took a puff. The smoke danced its way into the air and disappeared in the whirl of the ceiling fan. 

That day Sridar wrote his thoughts in his journal. He wrote about Pamposh and the horrid mine of his consciousness. 

‘What would it be like to be Pamposh?’ Sridar mused. He remembered the last words Pamposh had told him the previous day. ‘I long for a child’s laughter,’ Pamposh had whispered in Sridar’s ear.

Pamposh never spoke of his days in Kashmir. Sridar tried to strike such conversations with him to get to know about Pamposh’s childhood days in his village in Kashmir. Pamposh’s family came from a village in Kashmir. Some students in the camp told Sridar that Pamposh’s family owned an orchard in Kashmir and grew pomegranates, cherries and walnuts. Pamposh’s childhood may have been full of pranks, Sridar thought. Someone mentioned that Pamposh’s family was the only Pandit family in their village, and that they had to run away from their home in the most horrifying of circumstances. No one was able to narrate what had happened. Pamposh had lost one home and he was not in search of another. 

The migrants sat all day long on a rocky mound and discussed the affairs of their community. Days were spent sitting and talking about whatever came to their minds; their plight and their sordid condition. Waiting kept them busy. For many it was a lacerating wait. They had not yet realised that this waiting was not to end. They did not know what they were waiting for. This waiting was not for returning to their homes, not for peace in the Valley, but for a new day to dawn and the new evening to descend. They prayed for a day without a sunstroke and a night without a snakebite.

Pamposh met Sridar every day after school near an anthill. He wished to demolish the anthill with a spade and to render the snakes homeless, so that no snakebites would take place in the camp. 

There was only one question to be asked during the funeral processions that left the camp every day. 

‘Snakebite or sunstroke?’

In the coming days Sridar and Pamposh saw many camp dwellers line up, one by one, in the crematorium. Between them breathed words bereft of any meaning! Words! Silence! .....................................

...................................

The author Siddhartha Gigoo can be reached at siddhartha.gigoo@tcs.com

Living in Denial

A pastor named Martin Niemoller lived in Germany during the Nazi period left us with these moving lines:

They came first for the communists
and I didnt speak up because I wasnt a communist

Then they came for the Trade Unionists
and I didnt speak up because I wasnt a Trade Unionist

Then they came for for the Jews
and I didnt speak up because I wasnt a Jew

Then they came for
and then no one was left to speak up


If there ever has been a blog post that I am writing with such a heavy heart as this one, it indeed is this one. There is an overwhelming gloom of the unnecessary violence in our home mixed with feelings of helplessness. Just when one thought things were finally looking better in the valley we are probably back to where it all began. It never occurred to me that the incentive for mischief in Kashmir would be such that it would lead us to a point that a handful of mobsters could hold the whole state to ransom.

J is a very good friend of mine,he is someone who has stood by me through thick and thin.We have known each other for 14 years now and never ever has an unkind word been exchanged between us. Our families are good friends too. The reader must be wondering why I am bringing the nice soul into what many call a "rabble rousing blog". The reason is that for two days now my friend has a couple of lines alongside his name in the facebook.

This is how they read:

"Sometimes I wonder why people are so apathetic towards the killing in the valley.It is time'that voice of sanity' needs to speak up.It is time that the anger and resentment of Kashmiri public is acknowledged and addressed to.It is time we stop living in denial"


The answer probably lies in the lines of the Pastor. You see "the voices of sanity" in Kashmir were mute conspirators when leaders of Kashmiri Muslims were shouting from the mosque tops and asking Pandits to leave or be prepared for the worst. The voices of sanity kept shut or simply absented themselves when the mobs were shouting, We want Kashmir without Kashmiri Pandit men but their women. The voices of sanity were unmoved when our age old temples were being reduced to ruins.The voices of sanity did not say a word when people celebrated the release of the butcher of the Pandits - Bitta Karate. The voices of sanity said nothing when the separatist leaders killed small voiceless Pandit children or raped their women.The voices of the sanity did not speak up because they were simply weren't Pandits as in the case of the Pastor's lines.It makes me terribly sad to say this but it is simply a case of bad Karma catching up.When you had time to speak for someone you didn't and now except for a few usual suspects there aren't many who would speak for you.

Knowing J, I hope when he talks of resentment and anger of Kashmiris he doesn't simply mention Kashmiri Muslims but Pandits too. Unfortunately the term Kashmiris is so loosely used today that most people tend to think that the only Kashmiris that are there are the Kashmiri Muslims but that's not J's fault.There obviously is a lot of anger among Pandits but then they don't take a stone every time they find the food unpalatable or the camps in which they are forced to live as unlivable.

The whole issue of denial is at the root of the problem that Kashmiri Muslims are dealing with today.For every issue that confronts them they find an imaginary ghost sometimes in India,sometimes in IB, sometimes in the cunning Pandits, sometimes even in Parveen Togadia or Jim Morrison but never do they look inwards to see if the fault could be there's too. Since they have driven the Pandits out they have ended up as a society which has a singular strain of obscurantist Islam and where dissent is crushed by death as we have seen in case of Maulvi Farooq, Abdul Ghani Lone and Sattar Ranjoor.

The young have been coaxed into believing that the road to Nirvana lies through a way paved with stones and bricks and people any other than them are pagans of stone and snake worshiping types.

I feel terribly sorry for poor Omar when I see the young forcibly anointed Mirwaiz - yes the one more helpless than me, shouting on television that India is killing Kashmiri Muslims. It leaves me wondering as to when he will have the courage to say the same about those people who killed his father. How strange is it that he and the Lone brothers are so scared that they have been forced to make friends with the very terrorists who killed their fathers. A strange society indeed... and they ask us to speak out...

36 Shops of Kashmiri Pandits demolished by Delhi Government

It is a tense night for at least 36 Kashmiri Pandit families in Delhi. Yesterday (June 26th, 2010) morning bulldozers of MCD demolished their shops secretly with heavy Police deployment. They were not even warned to remove their belongings, not even the power supply was cut; which also resulted into a minor fire in few shops which was later doused by fellow shopkeepers and the as usual late fire brigade. Apparently for a road to be broadened for the upcomingCommonwealth Games.

The deserted look of Taploo Market just adjacent to the famous INA Market and right opposite Dilli Haat is terrible. It might not matter to us, demolition might be a daily routine in Delhi - most of which consists of illegal colonies and other such constructions. Sadly the government doesn't dare touch such illegal constructions because of obvious money laundering and mafia rule.

This tragedy is a grim reminder of the exodus of 1990 to these 36 families. In this hour of pain, we as a community need to support and stand hand in hand with our brothers in need.

The shop owners have all legal documents to prove their right over their ownership of these 6 by 7 area shops. Intrestingly, the honorable Courts have almost always favoured these shop owners and even called them Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), instead of the usual tag of 'Migrants' by the Government agencies.

No relocation plan or compensation has been promised for the victims who lie helpless on the pavements

Two people stand around demolished shops.

Shop owners sitting near the broken structure of their shops.

Some parts of the rubble.

Shop owners find space to sit around in between broken rubble.

A man looks through the rubble of the demolished shops.

A broken shop display board on the road among the rubble reads 'Kaul Sons'.

A victim shop owner sitting besides the rubble of his shop in a praying gesture.