Rush mats, mortar and pestle, kangdis, utensils and the effortless Kashmiri chatter. There was nothing to tell apart the pheran clad Kashmiri Pandits from their Muslim neighbours as they hauled their belongings into their new homes in the first separate, fortified colony built for them by the state government. The frail Dulari Devi, who lost her husband and son in the 1997 massacre of seven Pandits in her village Sanghrampora, was indistinguishable in this din—lost in conversation with some Muslim men who were greeting her on her new home.“Praise be to God. I got a house where I can die with satisfaction,” she says. Her son was a post graduate student of Kashmir University when militants dragged him out of his home with his farmer father, lined them up with five other Pandit men and shot them dead. Dulari now lives with her daughter’s family and is relieved that her daughter and her grand children finally have a shelter of their own. Her rough brush with Kashmir’s violent days has taught her to value security. The massacre forced her to leave her village. Her family spent 10 years in a migrant Pandit colony in Budgam, which she shared with two other Pandit families. The state government lodged 31 other Pandit families—all of them had fled to Budgam following the Sanghrampora massacre—in a guarded cluster. Now behind a 16-feet-high wall topped by barbed wire fencing and a security post at the gate, Dulari feels safe. “I have no fear. But I think the walls are necessary,” she says.Dulari’s case typifies the Kashmiri Pandit predicament. They were battered by Kashmir’s secessionist violence, which forced them to flee the Valley in 1990, but security and rehabilitation have been at the centre of the displaced community’s demands. The Pandits face an even bigger challenge—the fear of ethnic extinction. Nothing exemplifies this better than websites like kplink.com and kashmiribhatta.in whose task is to document the names and profiles of Kashmiri Pandits in the country and their diaspora. “Knowledge about the community is fading,” say the promoters of kashmiribhatta.in. The community is also paranoid about its institutional and religious properties in the Valley, which, it alleges, are being sold off in the absence of effective government legislation to check it.“We are a small ethnic community of several lakh. Displacement from our motherland (could) deprive us of our ethnic, cultural and linguistic identity,” says Ashwini Chrungoo, leader of Panun Kashmir, a political forum for Pandits. “We stand banished from our history, our distinct line of ancestry”. That explains the longing for a return to Kashmir, which they fled in the first burst of secessionist violence in 1989.Over the past two decades, not only has the Pandit issue become tangled with the larger Kashmir crisis, but the return of the Pandits to their former homes is still viewed as a tricky proposition. Their return has become the most exacting yardstick of the measure of normalcy in Kashmir. Kashmir, it is said, can hardly be called truly peaceful until the Pandits are able to return and settle back freely. But last week, when Kashmiri Pandits moved to the Valley’s first exclusive colony in Sheikhpora, Budgam, it caused concern. Not that there was any opposition to the Pandits’ return at the popular level or even from hawkish separatists. The concern was the effect that these antiseptically alienated townships would leave on the society that has historically prided itself on its inclusive character. “Separate community zones can be a loaded issue in any society. But for Kashmir, with its long history of peaceful co-existence, the issue has deeper overtones,” says Kashmir University Professor Gul Muhammad. There is suspicion that the government is indirectly succumbing to demands from some Pandit organisations for a separate homeland within Kashmir. Besides Sheikhpora, similar safe houses are being built in the towns of Mattan, Islambad, Tulmulla and Ganderbal. The new rehabilitation mechanism, it is said, works on some troubling assumptions. One, the problem in Kashmir is permanent. Second, the communal divide in the valley is real and afflicts each individual of the two communities. “The purpose of the return and rehabilitation of Pandits in Kashmir should have been the restoration of harmony between the communities rather than further driving a wedge between them,” says veteran Hurriyat leader Shabir Shah, one of the few separatist leaders who is acceptable to Kashmiri Pandits. Shah says that there continue to be places in the Valley where Pandits live with their Muslim neighbours. “Creating safe zones is an exercise in evading rather than confronting the problem,” he says.Here Dulari Devi offers a ray of hope. Losing her only son and husband to the militancy, she didn’t leave Kashmir. What is more, clothed in the Kashmiri pheran and lost in blithe chatter with some visiting Muslims, her nostalgia overcomes the painful memories. “If only I had the good fortune of returning to my village”.
