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Kashmiri
Pandits: Groping in a Lightless Tunnel
Sreeram Chaulia
“India lacks a
national policy or institutional legal framework concerning internally displaced
persons. Moreover, the government systematically refers to internally displaced
persons as 'migrants'. At the same time, India shuns international scrutiny and
thereby denies international humanitarian access to internally displaced.” This
is the judgement of the Global IDP Project, the research database of the
Norwegian Refugee Council that advocates for the 25-30 million civilians
worldwide who have been forced to flee generalised violence, civil war and
serious human rights victimisation, but could not manage to cross over into
another country to claim refugee status.
Even as some
of the poorest and most backward parts of Asia, Africa and South America are
realising the devastating impact of war on unarmed innocents sandwiched inside
borders, implementing legislation and inviting international aid to succour the
internally displaced, India, host to more than 350,000 Kashmiri Hindu IDPs, has
callously avoided a policy that can lead to durable solution of the violent
tragedy afflicting a religious minority hailing from Muslim-majority Kashmir.
Languishing in makeshift camps of Jammu and Delhi with minimum nutritional and
medical benefits, Kashmiri Hindu IDPs (also known as the ‘Pandits’) are
unenviable holders of the ‘homeless and persecuted’ identity card for 12 long
years. Thanks to the total negligence and insensitivity of the government of
India, they are grovelling in a lightless tunnel, in a baleful dark night that
never turns into dawn.
What are the
roots of apathy towards this hapless population which was religiously cleansed
by militant Islamists from its original home in the Kashmir valley in 1990-91?
Firstly, and
this is the consensus of the IDPs themselves, the queer logic of the ‘number
game’ in Indian democracy makes 350,000 demoralised and disorganised citizens a
zilch as far as a vote bank is concerned. No major political party, be it in
Jammu & Kashmir state or at the national level, finds the right to return of the
IDPs worthy of patronage or highlighting because they are too few in number to
matter in winning elections. Indian democracy has been reduced to the farce
called ‘electoral democracy’, where polarisation of votes is achieved by
latching on to divisive issues like caste and religion. ‘What election has ever
been won on the idealistic plank of restoring IDP human rights?’, ask the
power-hungry politicos. Even if all the Kashmiri Hindu IDPs were to vote en
masse for one party, their impact on the result would be minimal. Small and
unassertive fish, like the millions of Indians who live below poverty level, are
therefore abandoned by Indian democracy to their listless destiny.
Secondly, the
government of India uses Kashmiri Hindu IDPs as a psychological talking point to
prove how rapacious Pakistan-sponsored terrorism is in Kashmir. The fact that
the IDPs were victims of a Kashmir valley-wide fundamentalist upsurge that
instilled fear through dreadful kidnappings, murders and warning chants of
Kashmir Mein Rehna Hain To Allahu Akbar Kehna Hain (If you want to live in
Kashmir, convert to Islam), is indeed proof of the devastating impact of the
rise of Islamist terrorism in a once peaceful region. However, for the Indian
government, which is accused of disallowing self-determination of the majority
Muslims in Kashmir, the existence of Kashmiri Hindu IDPs is desirable as it
allows for a balancing of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ According to Delhi’s convoluted
rationale, if Kashmiri Muslims do not wish to remain part of India and India is
morally wrong in denying them their own choice, then Pakistan is morally worse
by sending in armed jihadis who drove the Pandits out of their homes.
As long as the
IDPs remain outside their homes, Indian officials can indulge in slanging
matches with the Pakistani government about who is wrong and who is right. In
case the IDPs returned in safety and dignity, two essential
conditions of IDP return as per the UN Guiding Principles on Internal
Displacement, the Indian government will feel that it is on a weaker moral
wicket vis-à-vis Pakistan. No political analyst has viewed Kashmiri Hindu IDPs
as caught between the crossfire of India and Pakistan, but this is very much the
case. Pandits still have hopes of returning home to their pre-conflict property,
professions and free life in the valley, but with every passing year, solutions
appear more and more like chimeras.
A third reason
for India’s inaction on IDP rehabilitation is its inability to improve
conditions of return inside insurgency-ridden Kashmir valley. UN Guiding
Principle 28 states, “Competent authorities have the primary duty and
responsibility to establish conditions, as well as provide the means, which
allow internally displaced persons to return voluntarily to their homes or
places of habitual residence.” The onus is on the state to establish law and
order, curb threats to minorities and create space for the reintegration of
returnees. India’s failure to defeat Pakistan-sponsored Islamist terrorism in
Kashmir for the last twelve years, despite maintaining a huge army presence and
issuing several spiels that its “patience is running out”, renders talk of
returning IDPs impractical.
The new Chief
Minister of Jammu & Kashmir, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, rhetorically claims that his
government will organise voluntary repatriation of IDPs and welcome the Hindus
back with open arms. One glance at the violence graph in the valley and the
unending attacks on Hindus and Sikhs and their religious shrines by Islamist
gunmen will demonstrate that Mufti is merely paying lip service to a now-
forgotten idyll of Kashmiri Sufi Muslim tolerance toward all faiths. The younger
generation of majority Kashmiris that is coming to age has been brought up on
Jamaat-I-Islami propaganda that Hindus are “Indian agents” (mukhbir).
Animosity in the valley’s mosques for a trickle-back return of Hindu IDPs is
comparable to the impossible hostility encountered by Serbian IDPs who wish to
return to Kosovo.
The fourth
reason for Indian ineptness at assisting its own citizens who are now IDPs is a
long-held Ostrich mentality in Delhi about ‘internationalising the Kashmir
dispute.’ While India understandably feels it is conventionally superior to
Pakistan and does not need third party mediation or intervention, the
unfortunate fall-out of this protective and defensive strategy has been the
shielding of Hindu IDPs from much-needed international humanitarian aid. In
January 2003, the government of Pakistan allowed the International Rescue
Committee, a leading American non-sectarian refugee relief NGO, to distribute
food and blankets to temporary IDPs in Pakistani Kashmir who were forced to
escape their border villages due to cross-border shelling. But the Indian
government, which has an instinctive mistrust of ‘internationalisation’, has
never allowed relief aid from UN or other impartial agencies to reach the
protracted, near-permanent Kashmiri IDPs in Jammu and other parts of India.
One striking
parallel to the case of the Pandits is the relatively better situation of some
280,000 Georgian IDPs who were defenestrated from the Abkhazia region by
Islamist fanatics after the USSR’s collapse. The Georgian government, in
contrast to the lackadaisical Indian government, invited international attention
as soon as the expulsions of the Christian IDPs from Abkhazia began. World
involvement prevented mortality rates to shoot up in the immediate aftermath of
the exodus and gradually stabilised IDPs in settlements in interior parts of
Georgia. Today, humanitarian NGOs run psychosocial counselling centres and
employment bureaus to enable IDPs to find employment while in exile. The United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees acts as a lifeline for the IDPs,
concentrating on housing and property restitution for potential returnees and
supporting a network of jurists who provide advice to the IDPs on their legal
rights. Kashmiri Pandits, on the other hand, are resigned to cruel fate, unaware
of their rights and struggling to make ends meet. Summing up the sorry state of
the IDPs is the community’s lugubrious label for itself- Sharanarthi Apne Hi
Desh Mein (“refugees in our own country.”)
In conclusion,
I submit that the plight of Kashmiri Hindu IDPs is not just an integral part of
the ‘Tragedy of Kashmir’, but also of the much-talked-about ‘Kashmir Problem.’
If Kashmir is a tale of justice denied and of rights trampled, the Pandits have
been its most visible demonstration. As the international community increasingly
recognises the rights of civilians against arbitrary displacement and in favour
of rightful return, the government of India’s haphazard and ad hoc
response to IDPs in general and Kashmiri Hindu IDPs in particular, is
anachronistic and anti-democratic.
Are Vajpayee
and his mandarins listening? Even if they are, do they care?
Sreeram Chaulia works for the International Rescue Committee, New York.
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