On Tuesday, 19 January 2010, Kashmiri Pundits staged a demonstration in front of Raj Bhavan in Jammu to observe the day as ‘Holocaust Day’. This day the community has been observing to mark their two decades of exile from Kashmir valley. As usual some Pundit leaders in company of some Hindu communalist groups spewed venom against Muslim majority Kashmir. The Pundits alleged that they were ‘victims of Muslim majoritarianism, genocide and ethnic cleansing in Kashmir that resulted in their forced exodus’.
      Holocaust, genocide, ethnic cleansing. This outrageous expression reveals it must have been the all-burning infernos setup in Kashmir, second only to the dreaded gas chambers Jewish were thrown in the Europe to wipe them out from the surface of earth. Or, it must have been Plan Dalet in operation in use and Kashmiris would have cast themselves into the role of rabid communalist Zionist who at the time of forming their ‘nation state’, wiped some 400 villages off the map and expelled some 8 lakh Palestinians at the gun point. ‘Muslim majoritarianism’ has in it all the inputs and ingredients to show Kashmiris doing Srebrenica and Sarajevo on minority community of Pundits.
      The way these adjectives were slung on Muslims of Kashmir by Pundits and Indian media reveals the stink mentality. The age-old acknowledged meaning and definitions of words and idioms get corrupted when hate and bias overwhelms the truth. With mind and soul polluted language can not hold its chastity. The expression and the discourse will be all filthy.
      Holocaust. See the dictionary meaning of the word: it is ‘killing of millions of Jews by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s’. When you use it in context of your fleeing from the valley it implies, and you do want to convey that, that millions of Hindus in Kashmir have been massacred and those who fled were forced to flee for survival. And it was the monster of ‘Muslim majoritarianism’ which forced your exodus. Painting all of us black, sweeping all of us fanatic. This horrible picture of Muslims gives the impression that only killing fields had been left for the Pundits in which they were driven in. We ask how many were slaughtered. A million? Half a million? Fifty thousands?  Ten thousands?  Or five thousands? Or a one thousand?
      Truth behind the holocaust of Pundits have, at long last, wriggled out of the womb of deceit and false propaganda. The Bureau chief of NDTV, stationed at Srinagar, cracked the veneer that was used to fudge the reality. Documented with hard evidences from police records Nazir Masoodi in his first May 2008 report stated that from the onset of armed uprising in 1989 up to now (1 May 2008) 209 Kashmiri Pundits have been killed in Kashmir. We repeat 209. Police have registered all these cases. Even the district wise break-up of the number of Pundits killed and FIR lodged were given: Srinagar 82 killed, FIR lodged 72; Budgam (16, 10); Ganderbal (28, 5); Varmul (11, 11); Kupwara (4, 4); Handwara (4, 3); Islamabad (16, 13); Pulwama (28, 4); Kulgam (17, 15); Awantipora (13, 3).
      This is for the first time when such an authentic and credible report about the killing of Pundits has come to surface. Before such a revelation even Kashmiris had found themselves numbed against the malicious propaganda carried against them. Even though murder of one innocent, not to speak of murder of 209 people, is by no means less heart rending and tragic and cannot be justified, but the manner the plight of Pundits was showcased and Muslims demonized looked as if Nazis have revisited in Kashmir in the form of Muslims. Hundreds of websites were opened, books and articles written to vilify Kashmiris and leave them assassinated in character. Many of the Pundits led themselves to be used as tools to further the communalist agenda of various political groups of India. The propaganda blitzkrieg launched masked the reality from the eyes of the world that all Pundits did leave the valley. More than seven thousand are still living in the neighborhood of their Muslim brethren in Kashmir.
      Does it mean Pundits left of their own from the valley and they did not feel threatened? No, we don’t mean that. At the time of eruption of militancy the pro-Indian political leadership and their political activists got scared. The leadership fled for safety in Jammu or Delhi. The political workers declared their Izhar-e-la tauluqee (non affiliation declaration) through paid advertisement in the local papers. Nonetheless, some legislators, block and district presidents and key activists of the pro-Indian political parties were killed by the militants. In the same way some members from the Pundit community were targeted. We have no hesitation to admit that Kalashinkoeff arm of the struggle was smeared by some of the lumpens that had sneaked in it.  But indulgence of some militants in inflicting atrocities on Pundit community was not sanctioned by Muslim majority. They themselves were vulnerable, some of them to militants, majority of them to Indian forces. Being in minority Pundits were scared. But their trepidation could not have reached the tipping point had their mass exodus not been planned and executed by Delhi’s representative, the then Governor Jagmohan to ‘teach Muslims a lesson’ for their rising up against Delhi’s rule. ‘He (Governor Jagmohan) made deep furrows in the muddy road to parochialism and encouraged the Kashmiri Pundits to migrate to Jammu, Delhi or some other places’,  says Kuldeep Nayar, an Indian journalist, in his article Not another partition  (GK November 30, 2003). Professor Bheem Singh is the chief patron of National Panthers Party. His party too was a coalition partner of Mufti Sayed-Azad led state government (2002-2008). He squarely blamed Indian Home Ministry and Raj Bhavan for masterminded and executing the migration of pundits. He told reporters in Jammu on December 14 2005 that migration of more than 200 thousand pundits ‘was not possible without the help of state apparatus’. ‘I can prove that Jagmohan and then Home Minister Mufti Sayed were behind the mass migration of pundits’. (GK: 15 December 2005). Rejecting the allegation of ‘ethnic cleansing’ heaped on Kashmiris by some vested interests Bheem Singh said: ‘Muslims and pundits are ethnically same. Kashmiri Muslims have always been secular. They were not responsible for the exodus of Pundits……In any setup (society) criminal elements are always present. A single criminal does not represent the whole community’. (Gk: 15 December 2005)
(The second part of this article will be published next Friday)

Lastupdate on : Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 IST