I will give you an instance. My aunt has a home in Srinagar and my mother and sister go to Kashmir every year now. They are old, and they wear saris like all Pandit women do. Whenever my mother has been out of the house some stranger will come up to her to say that it was so nice to see them back… Now if you tell this story to some people they will say those people on the street are hypocrites. But I am saying, if in my mother’s experience Srinagar is full of only people who have the time to be hypocritical, then I am okay with it, it still means something. Even if they are hypocritical, it means something... Muhammed Afzal P interviews Sanjay Kak So it is a very complex issue. My real regret is that there hasn’t been a substantial historical investigation or account of what happened to Kashmiri Pandits from 1989 onwards. There isn’t a single piece of authentic sort of research. If something terrible happened on 19th January 1990 and all the Kashmiri Pandits fled, where are the statistics? How did they all go? Where are the details? Were there news reports the next day in Jammu that hundreds of trucks have arrived? Or is it something that nobody noticed? You can argue that they left Kashmir in the night. But they didn’t arrive in Jammu in the night. So obviously it didn’t happen on a day. It happened over months. People left. Some may have left in January 1990. Some may have left in 1994. So the fact of the migration is undeniable. The fact that people left in fear is undeniable. Everything else remains shrouded in hysteria, in confusion. It would be wrong to deny that the Pandits were not threatened people. They were under tremendous threat. Nobody in Kashmir will deny that. But it is the spin that has been given to it, and there is guilt and confusion on both sides.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 02:34:26 +0000
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