Kashmir on the National Mind

ARVIND MUNSHI WAS all of 16, having just cleared his Class 10 examination, when he was woken up one night, February 10, 1990, at 3AM, and bundled into the family Maruti 800. His father was at the wheel, his octoge­narian grandmother, his mother, and his sibling crammed into the small car along with him. The house they were leaving behind in Chanpora was constructed a mere three months ago. The family had just moved into it, from their quarters in Srinagar’s Lal Ded Hospital, where both his parents were doctors.

In that one moment, when his father turned on the ignition, everything changed. The family stayed in Jammu for two years, 10 to a room, before Munshi left for an engineering college in Man­galore, his dream of studying medicine shattered forever. He has done well for himself, now a senior executive with Paytm Bank, but he often thinks of the Valley he left behind, the stories not told, the childhood lost, and the relationships ruptured.

He has written and read about it often, watched some movies based on his beloved Valley as well, but he has always felt rejected and gaslighted by the Republic of the Stonehearted. Until he saw The Kashmir Files, which caught his attention with the very first scene in which a young boy playing cricket mentions Sachin Tendulkar’s name and is beaten up for it. “It was me, playing as a 16-year-old in my home, with boys I thought were my friends,” he says.

He is one of the many Kashmiri Pandits who have finally seen their stories told on screen with the respect and integrity they deserve. For so long erased from the discourse on Kashmir, left to fend for themselves or allowed to live subhuman lives in camps where they fell to sunstrokes and snake bites, Vivek Agnihotri’s film, now running in theatres nationwide, has created a cultural moment, a point of no return, an instant when the pain of an in­visible community has been seen, heard and felt. Theatre-goers, some Kashmiri Pandits, others not, are at one with the horrors visited upon them, from the young lab assistant Girija Tickoo’s brutal murder in 1990 to the Nadimarg massacre of 24 Kashmiri Pandits, including a young boy, in 2003.

There is still no consensus on the numbers of Kashmiri Pandits who were killed, or even of those who were forced to abandon their homes, but there is a new certainty to call the “exodus” what it was: a genocide, where one community was virtually erased from the geography of its own homeland. Dr Ramesh Raina, presi­dent, All India Kashmiri Samaj, says, “when the political class of the country lets you down on flimsy grounds, it has always been art which has kept such issues alive. The Holocaust has been told and retold by films such as Schindler’s List. The Kashmir Files may not belong to that class of cinema, but it brings to light the terrible injustice done to our beleaguered community.”

Enough work has been done by many Kashmiri Pandit organ­isations since 1990 to highlight the horrors. There have been sear­ing accounts of the exodus in movies such as Onir’s I Am (2010), memoirs by writers Siddhartha Gigoo and Rahul Pandita, and appearances on TV debates by activists such as Sushil Pandit and Rashneek Kher. But with the establishment putting its muscle be­hind The Kashmir Files, with no less than Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying the entire ecosystem is trying to continue suppressing the truth of what happened to Kashmiri Pandits, it has become a flashpoint for the Pandits. Do they seize this moment to return to the Valley, will it have space for them, and indeed, do they even want to go back? Or do they forgive, but not forget?

And what is it that will help them remember? Actor and ac­tivist Ashwath Bhatt says the exploitation of their pain has to stop, and the investigation of what went wrong must begin. “The government needs to establish a commission with proper repre­sentation to record the testimonies of victims and uncover the reasons for their exodus.” No government, he points out, has had the audacity to publish a white paper in the last 32 years and place it in Parliament. Rehabilitation is a distant dream, he believes.

What makes the film different from the rest on the same sub­ject? Perhaps it has come at a time when the political narrative of the film is aligned with that of the establishment. The enemies are clear—the Muslim, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) academic, and the media—so much so that its critics have called it propaganda rather than a political film. The terrorists are not seen as mere Pakistani-trained operatives but as young men who went berserk with the gun in their hand, targeting many prominent Kashmiri Pandits. Farooq Bitta, in particular, the main terrorist in the film, is a cross between JKLF’s Yasin Malik and Bitta Karate, who confessed in a TV interview that he had killed 20 Kashmiri Pandits. The academic, represented by the figure of Radhika Menon, is clearly an amalgam of Nivedita Menon of JNU and the Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy. And the media is shown as doing what it is told to by those armed with guns.

Management consultant Bharat Wakhlu believes the movie has placed the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits front and centre of the idea of India. “It’s been done in a way that our community can no longer be pushed aside, especially when it comes to deal­ing with the future of the Kashmir region.” He believes Kashmiri Pandits can definitely return to their homeland, not necessarily as “employees” with government jobs but on their own terms, and add value to the lives of the people of Jammu and Kashmir as entrepreneurs, artists, philosophers, peace activists, teachers, investors, politicians, doctors, builders, consultants and hoteliers. “They will connect Kashmir to the globe, and bring the great gifts of our ancient homeland, for the benefit of the world,” he says.

Many Kashmiri Pandits are torn between gratitude at the much-delayed recognition of their suffering and going back in time to re-examine the damage to their soul. As the singer Aabha Hanjura posted on Instagram recently, she may not agree with the politics of the makers of the film, but is she to pretend that nothing happened? “I was a kid when I saw a cousin who was not even 16 die of snakebite in her sleep, in a refugee camp in Jammu; people in my family, who were rich businessmen, turned paupers overnight; so many elderly in the community have dementia, de­pression and are battling serious mental health issues even today.” As a young mother, she says she gave birth to another refugee in her own country, and she doesn’t want a world for her where her story is brushed under the carpet.

THAT IS THE heart of the conundrum. The Kashmiri Pandits used education as a means of upward mobility, studying and working hard wherever they went, whether it was in engineering colleges in Maharashtra where Bal Thackeray gave them reserva­tions, or later in Delhi University colleges where they got con­cession in cut-offs. As Bhatt says: “We killed no one or advocated violence. We just wanted justice and someone to believe us. We don’t want rightwing goons to hijack this film for personal gains.”

Some of that is inevitable, and that worries those who want reconciliation, if not return. Says former RAW chief AS Dulat: “How can you get into this one-upmanship of suffering, of who has the higher body count? What will we achieve by hanging Yasin Malik after three decades? Shabbir Shah went to the camps in Jammu, appealing to the Pandits to return. Mirwaiz Umar Farooq can be used productively to make the same appeal to the Pandits, but how many want to go back?”

Perhaps the better question is what is left for them to go back to. Their homes have either been razed to the ground or offloaded in distress sales. A new generation has come into being that remembers nothing of its syncretic past. Since the abrogation of Article 370, an estimated 500 Kashmiris have been rehabilitated, adding to the 350 families who never left. More will not go unless their sense of fear is not dispelled and trust with their Muslim neighbours is not rebuilt. Farah Bashir, who wrote movingly of her trauma of living under the gun, of the Army and the terrorist, in her memoir Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir, says: “It’s an unfortunate event of displacement from a period in our con­temporary history which shouldn’t be weap­onised, but has to be looked at with empathy. It scarred ordinary people who lived through that era, as you’d remember from my book, about how my grandmother missed her favourite neighbour Laxmisree, and I could never locate my friend Renuka.” Revisiting such memo­ries is nerve-wracking, she points out, adding: “Sometimes, we want to wish our pain and loss away but unfortunately, we can’t, and have to sit and deal with it.” She talks of the battlefield that Kashmir continues to be. Last week, her 79-year-old father barely escaped a shootout while he was out to get his routine blood tests done. Bashir was shivering the whole day and flew down the following day as it brought back the traumatic years of growing up and always hoping for his safe return.

A divided land, broken relationships, the othering of two communities who once lived in separate but equally harmonious worlds. That is the reality of Kashmir now. For the Pandits, it may well be a promised land they cannot return to, but what The Kashmir Files has done has made their pain palpable to the rest of the country. Darshan Kumar, who played the young Kashmiri Pandit who has no clue of his heritage, was numbed when he did the research for his role. He had sleepless nights at times in preparing to show the pain on camera. “I didn’t know much about Kashmiri Pandits,” he says, adding that he is ashamed of himself because of that. “Just like the audience, I too was confused and unaware. I only realised it when I was shown the video testi­mony of the first-generation victims. I was totally taken aback and that’s when I thought the truth should be brought forward,” he says.

He is shown as a young man who leaves the Valley after his mother, based on Girija Tickoo, is murdered along with his brother. He lives in Delhi with his grandfather, Pushkar Nath Pandit, a man reduced by the tragedy to become like the Shake­spearean clown who speaks the truth that no one wants to listen to. Played by Anupam Kher, he is a truthteller who discomfits everyone, because he is a reminder of everything they want to turn away from. He speaks of Kashmir’s rich heritage, carries around him a garland of photographs of the Pandits who were killed, and demands the abrogation of Article 370. The tragedy is that he is a composite of so many ghosts who walked, men who lost their dignity with their livelihoods, and women who gritted their teeth to raise their children in the face of the greatest odds.

The spirit of the Kashmiri Pandits is perhaps best expressed through a vakh (poem) by Lalded, the 14th-century mystic poet. It goes like this:

‘Lyakh to thokh petha sheri hetsum/Nyanda sapnem path brontha taani/Lal chhas kal zanh nu thsenim/Ada yeli sapnis weype kyaah? (Their abuse and spit I wore like a crown/Slander dogged my every step/But I am Lal, I stayed unmoved/Full I am, where’s room for more?)’

For three decades, the Pandits have worn crowns of spit and abuse. They have famously taken to the pen, not the gun. They have focused on building their lives outside the state. They have grown weary of being effaced from the Kashmir story, either equated with the Nehru-Gandhis locked in a special relation­ship with the Abdullahs or portrayed in fiction as Boonyi Kaul, the Pandit girl who betrays her Muslim lover, Shalimar, in the twisted love affair at the heart of Salman Rushdie’s 2005 novel, Shalimar the Clown. Perhaps they need to follow Rushdie’s advice, who said when questioned about his experience with the fatwa: “I remember telling myself not to carry the hatred around, although I know where it is. I have it in a trunk in storage.”

In excavating the buried remains of our lives and telling our own story, that’s where we Kashmiri Pandits need to keep our fear and loathing. In imaginary trunks in the forgotten attics of our long-lost homes.

Anupam KhercinemaexodusJammu and KashmirKashmiri PanditsThe Kashmir Files