DISCUSSION

Selective Memory, Collective Amnesia

Rahul Pandita

n her review of my book Our Moon Has Blood Clots in the 27 April issue of the Economic & Political Weekly (A Moon of Many Shades, Vol 48, No 17), Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal makes some errors of fact and misrepresents my argument, which I would like to rectify. I begin with her view of the night of 19 January 1990 the night when hundreds of thousands of people from the Muslim majority assembled in mosques all across Kashmir and shouted antiIndia and anti-Pandit slogans: Kashmir mein agar rehna hoga, Allah ho Akbar kehna hoga (If you wish to live in Kashmir youll have to say Allah ho Akbar); La sharqiya, la garbiya, Islamiya, Islamiya (No eastern, no western, only Islam, only Islam); Yahan kya chalega, Nizame-Mustafa (What will work here? The rule of the Prophet [of Islam]). A Contentious Slogan In her review, Anuradha relies on what her Muslim friends from Kashmir tell her that the slogan Assi gacchi panunuy Pakistan, batav rostuy, bataenein saan (we want our Pakistan, without Pandit men, but with their women) may have been used by a few odd people in some places. Some places? The Kashmiri Pandits we met at Jammus Geeta Bhawan right after the exodus had all heard it. After my book was out, many people from Kashmir contested it on social media networks by saying that the slogan was a gment of my imagination. Around that time, I conducted a random poll on Facebook, where I am connected to over 4,000 people, many of them Pandits whom I do not know. I asked them whether they had heard this slogan in 1990. In no time, I had testimonies that covered the entire valley, including one testimony from my own locality. Someone called Nirja wrote how her family spent
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

that night hiding behind the bushes in an empty plot next to her house in Hyderpora. Nishi wrote how her grandmother slapped her that night in Zaindar Mohalla to give her false assurance that everything was normal and how she held on to a knife the whole night. The Jagmohan Complication Like many in Kashmir who are permanently in a denial mode, Anuradha also blames the then governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Jagmohan for engineering the ight of the Pandits. She inaccurately states that Jagmohan reached Srinagar from Jammu on 19 January after he was made the governor. The fact is Jagmohan was in Jammus Raj Bhavan on the night of 19 January, where he received many calls from frightened Pandits in the Valley, begging him to save them. Jagmohan landed in Srinagar only on 21 January after the weather cleared. Anuradha then goes on to quote an interview Jagmohan reportedly gave to the weekly Current in May 1990, where she says he stated, Every Muslim in Kashmir is a militant todaythe bullet is the only solution for Kashmir. In fact, immediately afterwards Jagmohan denied granting an interview to the weekly and both the correspondent and editor of Current were forced to tender an unconditional apology to Jagmohan for publishing, what the Current editor admitted, to have been falsely attributed to you.... In the last 23 years, many untruths have been spoken about the Pandits who were killed. One of them is that only those who worked with the police or intelligence agencies were targeted. The truth is that doctors, nurses, professors, teachers, scientists, shopkeepers, the unemployed, and even children were killed, in many cases at the behest of their own friends, colleagues or neighbours.

On 21 February 1990, a prominent Pandit leader, H N Jattu wrote an open letter to the militant leaders which was published in all local newspapers. In the letter, Jattu had appealed to the militants to make their stand clear on the Pandits. The Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front responded immediately by killing one of Jattus close associates. Jagmohan, despite such incidents, never wanted the Pandits to leave the Valley. A press note, released by his ofce on 7 March 1990, said:
Jagmohan, Governor, J&K, has appealed to the members of Kashmiri Pandit community not to leave the Valley even temporarily... Jagmohan also appealed to the members of the community who have temporarily migrated to Jammu to return to the Valley. He offered to set up temporary camps at four places...

No Mere Coincidence In her review, Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal also pronounces that my brother Ravi and his two Pandit colleagues were killed by terrorists (in 1997 in the Jammu region) because they were Hindus and not because of their Pandit ethnicity. What she does not seem to know is that there were other Hindus travelling in the bus but only the three Kashmiri Pandits were selectively killed. As police investigations would reveal later, this was done to put an end to attempts around that time to bring the Pandits back to the Valley. Is it a mere coincidence that those apologists who seek to deny that Kashmiri Pandits were thrown out as part of an ethnic cleansing process are also the people who endorse the ongoing theofascist movement in Kashmir, masquerading as a liberation movement? There are no competing narratives between the Hindus and Muslims of Kashmir, but between those who seek the vision of secular nation-building in Kashmir as part of democratic India, where Kashmiri society practises religious and democratic pluralism and all communities enjoy the fruits of development and cultural freedom, and those who seek an Islamic state.
Rahul Pandita (rahulpandita1@gmail.com) is an author and journalist.

june 1, 2013

vol xlviii no 22

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