If there is a single moment that captures the beginning of Kashmir’s collapse into the abyss of the 1990s, it is the assassination of Neelkanth Ganjoo on November 4, 1989. When Ganjoo was killed on an early afternoon in the heart of the business district of Srinagar, a comatose Indian state — presiding over a dystopian state government — signalled its own flight from dignity and responsibility. In a flash, Ganjoo was a lens that let the stakeholders view themselves in the starkness of what Kashmir was becoming before the image was morphed into various black-and-white binaries by propaganda artists from all over. In essence, Ganjoo’s killing reduced the mirage of Kashmir’s innocence to what it was — an illusion — and gradually crippled its soul. Will the opening of the case, and providing justice to the Ganjoo family bring some form of closure to the 1990s?
Ganjoo fell on a day when the world was paying little attention to the Valley, and yet global events and their impact (like the butterfly effect) would suddenly become obvious in the Valley! On November 4, 1989, nearly a million East Germans were marching as part of the Alexanderplatz demonstration that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the eventual reunification of Germany. The maverick, Mikhail Gorbachev, had declared the end of the Soviet Union’s hegemony over Eastern Europe. Closer home, the Soviet Union had abandoned Afghanistan, as had empires of the past and of the future to come, to its own fate and the rag-tag coalition of the mujahideen, with a tenuous connection to the ISI and different western intelligence organisations. Pakistan was triumphalist; Kashmir was its next target. Anything seemed possible, everything seemed possible; we seemed to need a new vocabulary to understand the world as the writer-activist, Christa Wolf, declared at Alexanderplatz.
Ganjoo’s killing could easily have remained buried as another statistic in the records of the National Crime Bureau, and one other FIR lodged in the police station at Maisuma in the Lal Chowk area of Srinagar. But even 34 years after the event, Ganjoo’s killing haunts our collective conscience, like few others, for reasons that are not difficult to identify.
The murder of Neelkanth Ganjoo highlighted the pusillanimity of the Indian state, and heralded the political tsunami of violence and destruction that would overwhelm the Valley and beyond, for the next decades. While the targeted assassinations in Kashmir had begun in the autumn of 1989 with the killing of Tika Lal Taploo on September 14, 1989, and Yusuf Halwai on August 16, these were explained away as political killings. Taploo was a well-known RSS activist and Halwai a worker of the National Conference. Ganjoo fell for what he always stood for: A public servant, an Indian by birth and conviction, and a middle-class Kashmiri Pandit.
Even his worst detractors will concede that Neelkanth Ganjoo was a fearless, upright judge of scrupulous integrity and probity. As sessions judge, in 1968, he sentenced one of the founders of the National Liberation Front (a precursor to the JKLF), Maqbool Butt, to death for the killing of CID inspector Amar Chand. The sentence was confirmed by the High Court and the Supreme Court, and Butt was hanged to death in 1984 after his plea of clemency was rejected by the President. Ganjoo lived a quiet retired life in Karan Nagar (named after Karan Singh, when he was Yuvraj) a new locality in which a large section of middle-class Kashmir Pandits had made their home. For my father and our family, Ganjoo Sahib was the go-to person to seek high counsel on all issues legal. He was, in sum, an old-fashioned Batta gentleman who had probably gone to J&K Bank to withdraw his monthly pension, after buying newspapers from Abdullah New Agency across the Amira Kadal Bridge.
For the fiends of the JKLF, he was a soft target in their mission to lionise Maqbool Butt and position him as the Che Guevara of Kashmir. Indeed, Butt’s life story was used as an instrument of separatist mobilisation (especially after the killing of Ganjoo and the earlier killing by the JKLF of Ravindra Mhatre in Birmingham in 1984). The killing of Ganjoo revealed the brittleness of the state security and political apparatus. Unarguably the worst home minister in the history of India, Buta Singh, was in charge; Moosa Raza, whose prose has more style and substance than his administrative acumen, was chief secretary; the colourful maverick of the Intelligence Bureau, Amarjit Singh Dulat, was joint director; Jeelani Pandit was DGP, and, no surprises, Farooq Abdullah was Chief Minister.
Ganjoo was assassinated on Hari Singh High Street (named after the last Maharajah) which, even today, has a melange of wholesale traders and retail showrooms, including prominent jewellery shops (run across generations) by prominent Sikh businessmen, Mehtab Singh and Tara Singh. The street, on one end, is within a kilometre of the civil secretariat and on the other, the High Court. More than the chutzpah of the killers, it also demonstrated how much damage the rigging of the 1987 elections to the assembly had done to the body politic of the state. Many of those who joined the ranks of militants were workers, agents or candidates of the ill-fated Muslim United Front, but surely there must have been scores who were eyewitnesses. Where have they been all these years?
Tragically, Ganjoo’s killing enlarged the growing gulf between the Kashmiri Pandits and the majority of Kashmiri Muslims. It increased the former’s sense of collective insecurity and eventually led to their exodus. Can one imagine a return to the pre-1989 era in Kashmir in terms of the way things were if the perpetrators are prosecuted?
If justice is the fundamental basis for peace and reconciliation, this is one necessary step. But much more needs to be done to ensure that justice is done and seen to be done to all those who are innocent victims, from all sides, including Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus of the three decades of violence. Only then can we imagine a secure and sustainable Naya Kashmir.
The writer is professor of international relations at JNU and the University of Melbourne. He is also the author of a forthcoming personal-political memoir of Kashmir
