Today is the 24th anniversary of the worst genocide
that India had seen since independence – 24 years ago on the intervening night
between 19th January and 20th January 1990, death was
what a whole community of about 500,000 population faced and hundreds of them were killed, hounded and eventually the whole community
was thrown out of their homes of thousands of years. Yes, I am referring to the genocide and ethnic
cleaning of the Kashmiri Pandits in the Kashmir valley, perpetrated by Islamic
terrorists and widely supported by the local Muslim majority population.
In late 1989 – “Aftab”,
a local Urdu newspaper, publishes a press release issued by Hizb-ul-Mujahideen,
set up by the Jamaat-e-Islami to wage jihad for Jammu & Kashmir's secession
from India and accession to Pakistan, asking all Hindus to leave. Another local
paper, “Al Safa”, repeated this
expulsion order. In the following months, there were near chaos in the Kashmir
valley with Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah and his National Conference Govt. abdicating all responsibilities of the State.
Masked men run amok, waving Kalashnikovs, shooting, killing Hindus and shouting anti-India
slogans. Inflammatory speeches were made from the pulpits of mosques, using
public address systems meant for calling the faithful to prayers. A terrifying
fear psychosis griped the Kashmiri Pandits as walls were plastered with posters
and handbills, summarily ordering all Kashmiris to strictly follow the Islamic
dress code and forced people to reset their 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 civilisation history dating
back to 5,000 years, were marked out. Notices were pasted on doors of their
houses, asking the occupants to leave Kashmir or face death. In villages and
towns across the Kashmir valley, terrorist hit lists were floating around with names of Kashmiri Pandits. With no government
worth its name, the administration collapsed and disappeared and the police nowhere to be seen, despondency
set in. On 19th of January, the administration imposed curfew in the
valley but throughout the day, Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen
terrorists used public address systems at mosques to exhort people to defy
curfew and take to the streets. Masked men were firing from their Kalashnikovs
marching openly in the streets terrorising Pandits, who by then, had locked themselves
in their homes. As evening fell, the exhortations became louder and shriller.
Three taped slogans were 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). By then 300 Hindu men and women, nearly all of them
Kashmiri Pandits, had been slaughtered including the brutal murder of Pandit
Tika Lal Taploo, noted lawyer and BJP national executive member, by the JKLF in
Srinagar. 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, Lassa Koul, the
then Director of Doordarshan Kendra, Srinagar was shot dead. 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. Since then as many as 400,000 Kashmiri Pandits
had to flee 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 and the rest in
Delhi and in other Indian cities. Many of them, once prosperous and proud of
their rich heritage, now live in grovelling poverty. During the last 24 long years, we have seen a
generation passed away withering in the hopes to go back to their homes in the valley
and die peacefully in their homeland. This generation that lived the prime of
their life in the serene valley had to live their twilight years in horrendous
conditions prevalent in uninhabitable refugee camps. They had to suffer the
humiliation of being refugee in their own land and still not recognised by
their Government and other so-called human rights organisations. During the
same time, another generation has born in-exile and 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. They are acutely aware of the atrocities their fathers
and forefathers had faced at the hands of Islamic terrorism and what it means
to lose a homeland.
But even after 24 years of this tragedy, on this day neither Rahul
Gandhi nor Arvind Kejriwal nor Mulayam Singh Yadav nor Mayabati nor Nitish
Kumar nor Lalu Yadav nor Sarad Pawar nor Karunanidhi nor any of the communist leaders
or their political parties could find time to remember this humongous tragedy
and show solidarity with the Kashmiri Pandits & meet them to share their grief.
It was only Narendra Modi whom the so called secular political parties or the media,
never tires to call communal, went to meet them in their camps and showed solidarity
as well as determination to send them back to their homes. Not surprising, as this
community of Kashmiri Pandits don’t determine winners or losers in any
election and also are not backed by Fatwa following, fundamentalist, jihadi religious zealots. Therefore, these so called secular politicians and their
parties, who were competing with each other for appeasing the Muslim community
when 4000 people were displaced during Muzaffarnagar riot can conveniently
afford to forget some 400,000 of their country men, who are living as refugees for last 24 years
in their own country of origin. An entire population 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 & Kashmir's destiny. A part of
India's cultural heritage has been destroyed, a chapter of India's civilisation
history has been erased. Had this tragedy occurred elsewhere in Hindu majority
India and had the victims been Muslims, the same Govt. and vote hungry
political parties backed by pseudo secular historians, intellectuals and media would have
described it as 'ethnic cleansing' and 'genocide.' They would have made films with
horror-inducing titles and filed cases after
cases in the Supreme Court of India. The Govt. also would have constituted
judicial commissions after commissions and SITs. Our media would have demonstrated 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 and erased is part of
India's Hindu culture and civilisation. Therefore, the govt. can afford to
make bold, blatantly false statements that
the Kashmiri Pandits had "migrated on their own" and their
'displacement is self-imposed'. The
National Human Rights Commission, after a sham of an inquiry, refuses to
concede that what had happened is 'genocide' or 'ethnic cleansing,' though
facts add up to no less than that, never mind that 400,000 lives have been
destroyed. And that there is no room for plural society in highly Islamised
Kashmir valley. 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 the 24th anniversary of the forced flight of Kashmiri
Pandits, do we have the heart and mind to 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. Did any Muslim Group ever condemned the mass genocide
of Kashmiri Pandits? Which incident took place first- Babri Masjid, Godhra or Kashmiri Pandit’s genocide? Why Hindus can’t retaliate for any
incident & why Muslims create so
much of fuss even if one Muslim is killed, that too even if he were a proven
terrorist? On every 6th December-
media, pseudo secular intellectuals and political parties celebrate black day
but today after 24 years why does no secular political leader has the guts to
speak about Kashmiri Pandits? What is even more unfortunate is the fact that a
man-made calamity of such a huge scale has not been given the same media
coverage and not aroused the same public sentiment as the Babri Masjid
demolition, Godhra riot (though they conveniently forget the train burning
which killed dozens of Kar Sevaks which triggered the riot) or the recent Muzaffarnagar
riots have. It
is ironic that not a single judicial enquiry commission has ever been set up to
investigate the exodus and killings of Kashmiri Pandits. The killers have not
been punished and rather they are roaming freely in Kashmir and have many
supporters in the valley. The root cause of all problem of India is
these so called pseudo-secular intellectuals, historians, politicians and the
highly biased media. They are like those people in history who cheated their
own people and allowed Md. Ghauri’s or British in this country. Truth is
stranger than fiction.
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