This is in response to “Pandits as pariah, legally” by Haseeb Drabu, in Greater Kashmir, April 30, 2020.
Drabu’s piece rests on careful omission of facts and deliberate inclusion of usual bile. The only legible thing in the write-up is the use of word “pariah” in the title, a “persona non grata”…an outcaste…a person who the society eats up and then vomits outside the boundaries…then walls are built to keep them out. Often these walls are perfectly sounding arguments built on solid gleaming bricks of history. And to keep the people inside the wall happy, unquestioning, the tale of “Pandit” monster who has been hounding poor mazloom Kashmiri Muslims from five hundred years ago, is graphically remembered.
Drabu’s excuse for writing all this: a patronizing “concern” for the wily Kashmiri Pandits, that he now assumes is somehow is not smart enough. That the “smart” community was celebrating a law that was unfair to them. He is not bewildered by it. Because, the reader gets it, if it is bad for them and they are still celebrating, either they are dumb or pure evil. Gist of what already the masses in Kashmir have been sold in the valley till now. Drabu, is making it all the more clear for them.
But, is it true?
All these years, in all discussions on KP exodus matters, the population of KPs impacted by the secessionist movement, “the migrants” has been measured only by numbers of registered migrant families (there was no individual count). The rule change means nothing to them. They are all accounted. They are the bulk. As for those not registered as migrants…something as election cards, rev. records etc. can be considered. Already something like this is done by Relief Commissioner for former government employees who never registered. As for others, KPs who left in 40s/50s/60s….they didn’t even have a chance in previous Kashmir fiefdom setup …now if they wish they can take the normal root in new law. And they don’t need to worry who is married where and to whom. All they need is peace, which of course is another matter and subject to guns of Pakistan.
The concern for KPs shown by Drabu is just a ruse to show to show how KPs are somehow in intellectual pits now.
He should remember that Kashmiri Pandits raised the slogan of “Kashmir for Kashmiris”…not “Kashmir for Kashmiri Pandits”…the present violent mess in the state if because of “Kashmir Banega Pakistan”, but you can’t talk about it, you be deemed “occupier”/”collaborator” and once you are deemed that, all you can do to redeem yourself is remind the people of Pandit monster. You can compare the present generation to Pandit Shankar Lal Kaul, Jia lal Kilam and J.L. Jalali, but it should be remembered that these leaders also walked away from Shiekh Abdullah’s brand of Kashmiriyat Kashmiri Nationalism as formulated by Sheikh is based on what Orwell called “Negative Nationalism”…it didn’t know what it was…until it starts defining what it was against. It is nothing without the “Other”. Thus we see it defining itself in beginning as “against landlords”…and eventually morphing into “against pandits” or rather they now proudly say in Kashmir against “certain kind of” pandits, “rest are welcome”. Of course, overtime and scenarios the “kind” they are against keeps changing and “they” get to define who they are against whenever they take shelter under nationalism. Not surprisingly no Kashmiri Muslim public intellectual is ready to be “anti-national” to The Cause, great Cause, which is like a shifting goal post based on the political position, physically, the intellectual takes in the power.
When an Kashmiri intellectual is shifting post, one of the clear sign of it is that he will start talking about the history of Dhars, Kouls etc in the valley. It is a tradition coming down from Shiekh himself. It was under him that KPs were shaped as the perfect enemy. It is under his that narratives were created.
73.21 % of KPs were illiterate. That should puncture the myth (that even KPs like to boast): KPs were highly educated class. The edge of education was only with the 9.36% English literate KPs among a total KP population of 55055. That’s just 5,154 individuals. To compare: There were 5231 educated KMs in the state with their population of 796392. Of them about 340 knew English.
Drabu causally tells us the shawl-trader princely class, the “cerebral pioneer of the freedom struggle of Kashmir”, opposed the state subject law.
What Drabu does not mention (but does mention without saying) here is that religio/political leadership of Kashmiri Muslims asked (and were granted also in part) that rather the non-Kashmiri Muslims (of Punjab) should be given jobs in the state as the state was Muslim majority. They had no interest in “Kashmir for Kashmiris”, yet (as KPs, Sikhs, etc were still a sizeable part of what was called “Kashmiri” back then. Today, “Kashmiri” the word is used just to imply Muslims by the progenies of these pioneers of Tahreek. And who do they “other” among them? The Muslims from plains that they asked for.
What is the charge on Pandit monster? That in 1917, ever selfish Kashmiri Pandits raised the slogan when it suited them. If so, didn’t the KM leadership also make their choice based on what was convenient to them at the time? If Ashai’s word of “non-mulki” Muslims might be more sympathetic to their plight seems fair, then by same logic if Pandits today claim “non-mulkis” from the plains might be more sympathetic to their plight than the “mulki” KM bureaucracy, why the hue and cry?
Saligram was brother of Hargogal Kaul, the man who started Sanatan Dharam Sabha. Hargogal Kaul was a man born and brought up in Punjab in a KP family that had settled there in earlier times of persecution. A “non-mulki” as much as a Nehru. Hargogal arrived in state around 1876. He was quickly branded a British agent and rumor started that he had drowned some KMs in a boat. He was a fierce critic of the Maharaja and was even banished from the state for some years. He was charged by Wahabi leader Yahya Shah of hurting religious sentiments of muslims in around 1898. Bazaz’s clearly mentions “Kashmir for Kashmiris” started in 1920s. Slogan was coined by Shankerlal Koul. If Drabu has based him opinion based on “Emergence of political awakening in Kashmir” (1986) by Upendra Kishen Zutshi (incidentally a KP ), he already knows all this.
In 1907, KM representatives while asking for education funds for Islamia school were writing to Maharaja thanking him for protecting them from Arya Samajis , the evil brains behind Congress whose main agenda is Hindustan for Hindus. Sounds familiar?
It must be remembered here that in Glancy Commission, KPs were represented by rationalist, Premnath Bazaz…while the KMs were represented by religious heads and businessmen. Bazaz sided with the KMs. For that Pandits never forgave him. That much is much recounted in Kashmir, but is not remembers that in late 1960s, while in exile in Delhi, Bazaz accepted he was wring, that he gave-in into the obvious communal demands of KM leaders in the commission just because he thought it will create “goodwill” for pandits in the valley. That is all there is to it. Pandits have been trying to gather the currency of “goodwill” for a century now, all while actually losing ground, physically in Kashmir. It was this “goodwill” currency system in which a KP is seen as a good harmless government teacher but an evil bureaucrat ever ready to backstab “Mother Kashmir”.
Drabu claims till KMs were no competition to KPs, the KPs took then along. When muslims became competition for jobs KPs went against them. This claim flies in the face of well known facts.
Fact that KP-KM political unity only came about in late 30s after KMs started having their demands met. After there were communal riots, after “Roti-agitation” (1932). A riot for which Kilam was conveniently blamed, triggering it by a speech. Yet, Kilam (along with Kashyap Bandhu and Prem Nath Bazaz) became one of the building block of what later NC sold as “Kashmiriyat”. That’s how Muslim Conference became National Conference. Bazaz calls it golden era of unity.
But it was Sheikhs’ recourse to communalism post 47 that put an end to it. One can rather claim that KPs were taken for a ride. Their support sought when it was needed, when it was needed to be in good books of Congress and progressives. In the “Naya Kashmir” manifesto a seat was reserved for a KP representative in the assembly. What happened of it? Post independence, KPs, a dispersed minority were actually disenfranchised. Even in areas where they were in majority, delimitation was carefully done to keep them out. Drabu is taking names of KPs, long dead KPs, without knowing much about them. In 1950, J. L. K. Jalali (a man who in 1920s waged lone campaign against grain hoarder and black marketers ) wrote about the brutal realities of “Naya Kashmir” and the dangerous form of Nationalism sold by NC to masses, at the core of which was the theory of “evil KP”:
“I am a Kashmiri to whom Kashmir has always been the dearest of treasures, and suffered for it. To me the nationalism of today is nothing a garbled version of majority communalism directed towards a definite end.”
Telling tales of evil pandits used to a hobby in Kashmir, now it seems to be a profession, particularly of former bureaucrats, courted by center from time to time. There is no other reason why someone, who lives in a community where crackers are burst after terror attacks, would rather than writing about it, would tell those crackers how fanatic Pandits were distributing sweets on abrogation of a law. All these are nothing but attempts to save their own skin but blaming the eternal pandit for all the invisible webs they themselves have woven.
For this class Bazaaz was to write:
Therefore, to keep people in darkness and not to make them politically conscious and socially awakened became a vested interest of Kashmir politicians. A policy was evolved to make Kashmir Muslims feel perpetually in terror of the hostile Hindu majority and depend upon the local coreligionist leaders for protection against it. Article 370 was frequently maligned and abused, and conditions were created not to allow it to outgrow its utility as originally intended but to make it a permanent feature of the Indian Constitution. In this atmosphere while the leaders thrived, the position of average Kashmiri worsened. The Central leadership of the Congress was caught in a web woven by the National Conference leaders before they could realize what was happening.”
It was again Bazaaz who wrote what the actual cost of KM secessionism would be, or rather the cost of communal majoritarian KM politics, which community will first bear the actual cost of it and how KPs will and must respond.
A reminder: 98% of Pandits today live in places (all over the world) where there are “immigrant” yet equal citizens. It comes from present. The world as it is. Not as it was. The progenies of Kaul, Kilam, Jalali, Bazaz are all outside Kashmir. Probably as divergent in their individual political stands at their ancestors were. But, they are all outside. There was there becomes of decades and decades of “othering”.
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