Author: Sankarshan Thakur
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: August 25, 2008
URL: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080825/jsp/nation/story_9739798.jsp
They live eight, often ten or twelve, to a
room. To call them rooms is a stretch; hovels is more appropriate - barely
six by eight, the asbestos ceilings knocked low over them, a vast and suffocating
narrow-laned warren. They do with temporary power pulled on illicit lines,
they have little access to water, they share unsanitary community bathrooms.
They live marooned in the putrid discharge oozing from them, amid foraging
pigs and pie-dogs.
These are Kashmiri Pandits uprooted from their
Valley moorings two decades ago, and Muthi, on the forsaken outskirts of Jammu,
is their home - a blistered tinderbox of frustration and rage, spewing communal
pus. In Muthi, and other similar "migrant camps" littered around
Jammu, could lie some of the clues to why this crisis has caught fires that
refuse to die.
It's so angry, it doesn't even want to talk.
"Go away, just go away," protests P.N. Dhar, a former government
employee and community leader. "What have you come here now for? To use
us to douse the fires those (expletive deleted) Kashmiri Muslims are lighting
up? Too late, now it's our turn to light the fires, to get some notice from
this country."
Men from the ghetto have gathered around Dhar
and it is instantly evident they have unspent payloads of fury and hatred
accumulated over the years; they are now letting it off.
"This country has only been bothered
about (expletive deleted) who carry Pakistani flags and spit on patriots,"
says Sahabji Chrungoo, originally from Baramulla. "Nobody came when we
were thrown out, nobody bothered when we were killed, nobody listened when
we warned secession had gripped Kashmir. But how long could you have ignored
it? This had to happen. If we have to light fires now to get attention, so
be it. But this time, we will have it our way."
As an unprecedented regional-communal conflict
consumes the state, the Valley's ousted Kashmiri Pandits have become Jammu's
sword-arm in battle. It's a sword smelted in decades of unassuaged grievance
and of rancour and prejudice. It's a sword that has verily stabbed the celebrated
and inclusive notion of "Kashmiriyat" to death and invoked in its
place a ghoulish spectre of intolerance that threatens to extend the current
rift.
Agnishekhar, convener of Panun Kashmir, the
umbrella body of ousted Pandits, isn't even remorseful or apologetic about
pronouncing "Kashmiriyat" dead.
"What about it?" he asks combatively.
"Where is composite culture when all Hindus have been driven out of the
Valley, out of their homes and farmlands? They killed Kashmiriyat, not us.
Don't expect secularism of us when you are pandering to all shades of Islam
and anti-nationalism in the Valley. Who is secular in the Valley that Jammu
is being called communal in contrast? Those who are unleashing cries of Nizam-e-Mustafa
(Islamic rule)?"
The Panun Kashmir leader won't openly admit
it, but the strident "Bam-Bam Bole" movement across Jammu is an
hour of vindication that he is loath to let go of.
"We have been waiting for this for long,"
he says. "Jammu didn't exactly welcome us when we were driven out of
the Valley in 1989-90, we haven't had it easy here. But now Jammu seems to
have understood what the problem with Kashmiri Muslims is, it has risen and
we are with Jammu. This is not about land in Amarnath, this is about a deeper
malaise of which Amarnath is only a symptom. Kashmir has held India to ransom
for too long, now it is our turn. Half the Kashmiri leadership deserves to
be put behind bars for sedition, we deserve to be reinstated to our homes."
Does he realistically believe, though, that
he and his fellow Pandits can make their way back to the Valley laden with
such loathing? That they can even, in this surcharge, visualise the "yatra"
to Amarnath proceeding next year?
"That is for the government to ensure,"
Agnishekhar says. "Why does the law of the land not run in Kashmir, can
Indians not go there? The government and secularists of this country have
nothing to say of the anti-national Islamists of Kashmir, all they can do
is blame us. What for? For agitating with the national flag?"
As his Muthi compatriots gather, a little
clutch that has mushroomed in minutes, Agnishekhar, also a Hindi writer of
fair renown, crossly throws off the burden of bigotry from his doorstep.
"I was once known as a progressive writer,
until they threw me out for protesting the ouster of Pandits and began calling
me a religious zealot. But should I not even protest my circumstances? Won't
you if you were thrown out of home? Hum aah bhi karen to ho jaate hain badnaam,
woh katl bhi karen to charcha nahin hota (I get defamed if I so much as complain,
they commit murder and yet get no blame)."
Agnishekhar claims no allegiance to the BJP
or the Hindu rightwing, he's been a Congressman all his life, paid obeisance
to Nehru. He does concede, though, that today his worldview is closer to the
Hindu rightwing.
"Where are Nehru's children, where is
the Congress, feeding the Muslim communalists of the Valley?" he asks.
"It's the BJP that helped us in crisis, if anybody did, we have to be
grateful. And now we have to fight its battle to the very end."
The assemblage behind him, virulently anti-Muslim
and sporting saffron bandannas, is ominously nodding approval.