EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

History has a habit of biting back when you least expect it. Thirty-two years ago, Kashmir was on the brink of a communal hell. Homegrown jihadists, trained in Pakistan, unleashed a reign of terror specifically targeting members of the minority Kashmiri Pandit community, including prominent figures. This led to their rapid exodus from the Valley: perhaps the biggest story of internal mass displacement for political reasons since the Partition, tragically affecting 75,000 families. Despite the blurred record, an estimated 700 Kashmiri Pandits were killed, many of them brutally, though the state government figures put the number at 219. About 90 per cent of the community were estranged from their homeland. Most fled to neighbouring Jammu and other states in India. The houses they left behind, some in ruins, others razed to the ground, are mute testimony to that dark era of barbarity.

Now, these monuments of bloody excesses have begun to speak again, and loudly. The immediate trigger for the return of the issue to public discourse is the recently released film, The Kashmir Files, which is filling up cinema halls and setting social media on fire. The film looks at this shameful, blood-soaked chapter in Kashmir’s history in all its raw brutality, bereft of any nuance. In its portrayal, people stood by as silent spectators and even collaborated with the killers as the community was violently targeted.

Those were chilling times. The air rang with slogans like ‘Raliv, galiv ya chaliv (Convert, face death or flee)’. Warning posters were pasted on buildings in downtown Srinagar and the muezzin’s call was replaced by the deathly voice of Kalashnikov-toting religious crusaders. Rape bespoiled Kashmiriyat, and corpses lay on the streets as a warning to others. No wonder The Kashmir Files has touched a raw nerve. In a political environment conducive to its propagation, it is well on its way to becoming the highest grosser of all time in Hindi cinema. Sadly, accompanying it all too frequently are calls of hatred, not very different from those that Kashmir heard in 1990.

A film can’t possibly put one event in perspective, especially when set in the convoluted history of Kashmir. Counting from before 1947: Dogra rule and the social realities of that time, the accession to India, Sheikh Abdullah’s troubled passage right up to the 1975 accord with Indira Gandhi, his death in 1982 and the rise of Farooq Abdullah as his political heir, the rigged elections of 1987, the eruption of militancy aided by a scheming Pakistan, a Union home minister’s daughter’s kidnapping making the Indian State look weak, the ill-timed return of Jagmohan as Governor, the fated interplay in a canvas where the actors included V.P. Singh as a coalition prime minister, L.K. Advani of the BJP as a backseat driver and a divided political and security establishment that failed in every respect to prevent the tragic and traumatic departure of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley.

After the Pandits fled in 1990, over 45,000 people were killed in the next two decades due to the strife. Of these, 22,500 were terrorists, over 6,000 security personnel and, sadly, over 17,000 civilians. The break-up of the dead is a grim reminder of the ongoing battle, but the plight of the Pandits remains a festering sore. They stayed in forgotten tented cities in Jammu and elsewhere for decades, swallowing their trauma in silence, many of them still trapped in enforced poverty. Initially, they were offered cash relief and free rations. But it was finally the Manmohan Singh government that built pucca houses for them—though 5,000-odd flats in the bald environs of Jammu can never hold the paradise of their memories. It also began the other process of reparation, starting with 3,000 jobs for Pandits in the Valley, along with quarters set out in two colonies, in Srinagar and Sheikhpora in Budgam. The Modi government promises to up that to 6,000-plus jobs and build more accommodation in the Valley.

But can ghettos heal the wounds of society? Can we answer displacement with portacabins or one-bedroom tenements? Can we create the idea of home amidst concertina wires, spaces where only fearful menfolk will go—that too temporarily? Closure will come only if the Pandits can return to their real homes, their old city neighbourhoods, village alleys and orchards, to a landscape restored to normalcy in all its fullness. And Kashmir has to heal for that. No one has ever been held accountable for the rapes and the corpses—whether the victim was a Pandit or not. And the guilty, ultimately, are often political. Justice is the precondition of a true democracy.

What must we do to retell the story? First, the tragedy must be accounted for. It must be quantified and analysed. The collective onus upon us is to help lead the victims to closure and allow the nation to reach for a saner future.

In its laser focus on the incidents of 1990, The Kashmir Files had to omit much of the story. In this week’s cover story, Group Editorial Director Raj Chengappa goes beyond the immediate and answers the key questions: What events led up to the Pandit exodus? What happened to them afterward? What are the feasible closures for the Pandit community in their efforts to regain their roots in the Valley? Chengappa, who travelled to Srinagar and Jammu, along with Group Photo Editor Bandeep Singh, found there are no easy solutions. “It will be a long haul,” he says. “But, as the saying goes, ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’. We should delay no further.”

The controversy, though, comes at an inopportune time. After abrogating Article 370 in August 2019, the Modi government has been attempting to create a Naya Kashmir. Demonising a community will not help this effort, it must go beyond narrow political considerations. Bringing Kashmiri Pandits back to their homes with dignity and safety will be the best testimonial of their noble intentions for Kashmir.