As our plane made a descent into Srinagar airport on a beautiful November wintry day in 2009, I could sense a strong unease creep into my husband sitting right next to me. It was at my insistence that almost 20 years after he was pushed out of the valley lock, stock and barrel, he had decided to go back and show his son (who was four at the time) and a non-Kashmiri spouse the place he was born and grew up in.
The visible pain and trauma of going back to a land from where he, like lakhs of Kashmiri Pandits, had been uprooted made me wonder whether the planned vacation to Kashmir was really worth it. He had avoided it all those years and more than the fear, it was going back to a painful past that held him back. But there he was two decades later, a pain masked in a smile to keep us in good spirits.
I had heard stories about the exodus and the emotional tales wrapped around it. But there was one narrative that, despite being atrocious, to say the least, kept on being thrown around by the vested interest groups who have flourished all these years milking the valley’s insurgency. And it didn’t take me long to realise how deep-rooted that falsehood was.
As we checked into a hotel we were greeted by my husband’s friend who had dropped in to say hello. But the pleasantries somehow went off track and a discussion on the Kashmir issue ensued much to the discomfiture of my husband. As he went out of the room excusing himself with some formality to be covered at the hotel reception, the friend shot off an explanation on the exodus. “I don’t know why they left. But Jagmohan played a role in it. He was the one who triggered an exodus. None would have left if Jagmohan would not have streamlined their exit and offered cash doles in Jammu,” an explanation he thought would be easy for a non-Kashmiri to lap up. But having spent close to two decades embedded into a Kashmiri family and having been part of the travails unleashed by exodus, the narrative made me cringe.
Also Read: The Kashmir Files Review: Vivek Agnihotri’s Film Makes You Face Harsh Truths and Ask Uncomfortable Questions
My father-in-law, a reputed doctor in the valley, had served both the majority and minority community for all his life with whatever it took. He was deeply in love with Kashmir, a reason why he decided to stay put almost till the end of 1991, a good one year after most of the Pandits had left. As a government servant, he had the option of moving out and getting himself posted in a relatively safer Jammu, but he chose to stay in the valley with his wife as he thought the situation would improve. He never wanted to move out, but was forced out and not because of ‘Jagmohan’.
He devoted his time at a clinic free of cost in a neighbourhood at Bemina, on the outskirts of Srinagar. That is where a microbiology student Hilal Baig worked. Hilal’s father owned the clinic and his three sons including Hilal were helping him out. My father-in-law liked Hilal immensely, and my in-laws have shared some lovely stories of how he would take care of the family.
But Hilal seems to have had successfully camouflaged his identity to the world outside. And when he was killed in an encounter with another terrorist group, it transpired that he was actually working for a terrorist organisation– the Jammu and Kashmir Student Liberation Front (JKSLF). Though his killing was a fallout of the internal rivalry between terrorist groups at that time, my father-in-law, a Kashmiri Pandit, became the target. The stories of him being a ‘mukhbir’ (informer) to the security forces and being responsible for Hilal’s death started doing the rounds, and none in the neighbourhood, not even those he had treated for years, countered that narrative. He was forced out of the valley. He was forced out of a home that he had just moved into in 1989 spending his entire life’s savings.
Posted in makeshift camps set up for Kashmiri Pandits on the outskirts of Jammu, my father-in-law could never accept what had hit him. He died of heart complications just some months later after undergoing open-heart surgery in an unknown land. “He actually died the day he was forced out,” my mother-in-law once remarked.
My 80-year-old grandmother-in-law wouldn’t have left the cool confines of her home in Kashmir to the sultry hot weather conditions in Jammu for a cash dole of a few hundred (Rs 500 was being offered at that time). Before her death in 2009 in the hot weather of Ahmedabad, where I and my husband were both working as journalists, my grandmother-in-law could never reconcile with the fact that she was mercilessly thrown out of the valley and how she had lost her 45-year-old son to a shock triggered by the forceful exodus. She would have never left the valley even if Mr Jagmohan were to tell her to do so.
Even for petty doles they wouldn’t have left. Orchards worth crores were left behind, properties worth lakhs were just dumped, not because of Jagmohan but because of threats from Islamist terrorists. They were being chosen and targeted. If my father-in-law would not have fled under the cover of darkness, he would have been targeted. None in my family nor the extended ones were ever approached by anyone from the administration telling them to leave. They left out of genuine fear from the Islamist terror groups. They left after screaming headlines in regional newspapers directed them to leave the valley within 48 hours. They left because their neighbours couldn’t guarantee them security in chaotic times.
During our trip, we managed to locate the house in Bemina where my in-laws had stayed barely for a year after moving into it. The ownership had changed hands a number of times. My mother-in-law had agreed to sell it off for a pittance, just Rs 1.5 lakh, after her husband spent his entire life savings building it. The amount dwarves before what had been spent, but it was still considered a good amount considering reports of many homes being taken over without any monetary compensation.
A retired cop was the last owner. Though the family seemed responsive when it came to acknowledging us, it was apparent that it was more to do with some pending documents pertaining to the house’s registration.
The chasm between the majority community and the minority community that was pushed out is far too wide to be filled up with mere optics. And the confidence can be restored mainly with the acknowledgement that Kashmiri Pandits are genuine victims of genocide and that Jagmohan had nothing to do with it.
Read all the Latest Opinion News and Breaking News here
Comments
0 comment