Rahul Pandita’s interview on the Exodus of Kashmiri Pandits

Over 20 years ago, some 350,000 Hindus fled the Kashmir Valley to escape a separatist  insurgency..  A number of the valley’s Hindus were killed by militants in violence at the start of the fighting in 1989 and 1990. One of those who died was the brother of journalist and writer Rahul Pandita. Militants dragged his brother and two others off a bus and shot them dead. Mr. Pandita, then a teenager, had fled the Valley with his family. In a new memoir, Our Moon Has Blood Clots, Pandita writes about the scars that the exodus left on the Pandit community and why he may never be able to return home. He spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the book, launched in New Delhi this week. 

The Wall Street Journal: Why did you choose to write the book now? 

Rahul Pandita:  This is the first book I ever wanted to write and it’s the reason I became a writer and a journalist. This has been brewing in my mind since the time I was in college between 1993 and 1996. But then I was young and my experience as a writer and a journalist was nonexistent. My language was very raw and crude. I seriously started writing it from 2000 onwards. I found it extremely difficult to write because personal history was involved. I just put it away because it wasn’t working and, at many levels, I wasn’t sure about the kind of voice it should have. From 2005-2006, I ended up writing ‘Hello Bastar’ (a book on the Maoist movement) and co-authoring ‘Absent State’ (a book on insurgencies in India.) This book always remained in the back of my mind, and in the last few years I’ve realized I’ve been getting more and more angry about the kinds of untruths being spoken about the circumstances that led to our exodus.

WSJ: What are those untruths? 

Mr. Pandita: That the Indian state was responsible for the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, or the former governor Jagmohan, or because the Indian state wanted to deal with the majority community – the Muslims – more firmly. I think the essential thing I want to portray is that in 1989-90 there was a deep divide between two communities in Kashmir – the Muslims and the Pandits. And the Kashmiri Pandits became victims of the brutal ethnic cleansing which was perpetrated by the majority community backed by Islamist militants, not the other way around. That is one distinction that has to be made very clear.

WSJ: Does the Kashmiri Pandit community feel cheated by the political attempts to solve the 65-year long dispute between India and Pakistan?

Mr. Pandita: The biggest tragedy of this whole conflict is the betrayal at the hands of the majority community. All said and done, we faced what we did in 1989-90 for two reasons: for upholding the national flag and for upholding our religious identity. But once we were in exodus, no government bothered about the Kashmiri Pandits’ rights from Rajiv Gandhi to the current political scenario. Today, thousands of Kashmiri Pandits are languishing in refugee camps and some are living below the Planning Commission’s ridiculous definition of the poverty line.  My fear is that, in the next few years, whoever is in power might have an agenda to push us back to Kashmir or enter into some kind of forced settlement.

WSJ: In the book, you describe how Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh tried to get you to join after the exodus but your parents barred you from doing so. When right-wing Hindu leader Bal Thackeray died in November, you put out a tweet acknowledging his support for the Pandits. What is your attitude to the Hindu right?

Mr. Pandita: As a journalist and writer, my attitude to any kind of extreme ideology is the same: I debunk them. Tweets are not about my work. The tragedy of the Kashmiri Pandit narrative has always been this overall bracketing with right-wing discourse and I wanted to get rid of that tag. Every Kashmiri Pandit is not an RSS supporter. Even if he is one, that does not take away, in any case, from what happened to us in 1989-90. These are two different things. The comment about Bal Thackeray was in my personal capacity as a Pandit. I think the whole community owes a lot to him because of the help and support he offered us. I never agreed with his personal politics.

WSJ: What kind of help and support did he offer the community?

Mr. Pandita: Some community leaders had approached Mr. Thackeray for help and we asked him to offer us some kind of reservation in colleges across Maharashtra because, as a community, we lay a lot of emphasis on education. That opened up a floodgate of opportunities for many of us. We went to engineering colleges and polytechnic institutes in Maharashtra and I think that helped many in my community to stand on their own feet.

WSJ: Is there still some hope among the Kashmiri Pandits for a better future? Or is there a sense of resignation that they will now be in permanent exile? 

Mr. Pandita: I think we have no hope vis-a-vis the Indian government. A solution, if it comes, will have to come from the Kashmir Valley. But there is no possibility as of now.  In the process of writing this book, I was thinking about my community and there were times when I really lost hope, especially with my generation who have seen a lot of financial insecurity and don’t pursue scholarship. For them life is about moving from a two-bedroom house to a three-bedroom house. But while I was working on this book, I went to Jammu and saw a lot of determination in the next generation which was really surprising. Since the overall intellectual class of this country has not been interested at all in our story, we have to rise from within and tell our story.

 http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/01/22/rahul-panditas-book-on-a-kashmir-exodus/