A Daniel Came to Judgement
By Badri Raina
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark;
O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.
(Hamlet)
In an act of historic courage (some might say ‘audacity’) the young, bright, and fiercely upright Omar Abdullah has breached the pall of silence in which the Valley has remained suffocated since the exodus of the Pandits in 1990.
In a statement recorded on his blog, (also 1717 hrs IST, PTI, 15 May, 2008), Omar has made the following candid aversions that interrogate Kashmiri Muslims as a whole:
“It is so easy to say that we will lay down our lives to bring Kashmiri
Pandits back to the Valley and I appreciate the sentiment as I am sure
the Kashmiri Pandits reading it will. Pity that the sentiment was missing
when our mosques were being used to drive these people out.. .
None of us was willing to stand up and be counted when it mattered.
None of us grabbed the mikes (microphones) in the mosques and said
‘this is wrong and the Kashmiri Pandits had every right to continue
living in the Valley. . .
Our educated, well-to-do relatives and neighbours were spewing venom
24 hours a day and we were mute spectators, either mute in agreement or
mute in abject fear but mute none the less. . .
And talking about mosques—what a great symbol of mass uprising they
proved to be. While I can’t claim to have lived through it, I have enough
friends who did and they tell me about the early 90’s where attendance
was taken in mosques to force people to pray.”
Questioning the spontaneity of processions taken out in 1990, Omar said people were forced out of their homes to participate in “mass upsurges” against “Indian occupation” and the same enforcement committees went from door to door.
Do recall that not long after, the rath-yatra to Ayodhya was to beat a similar drum of hate-filled, exclusionary cultural politics.
Indeed, this writer was to point out that the yatra was curiously a mirror image of what it sought to confront, as its thrust was to semitise Hinduism (see my “Tenth Avatar of Vishnu, TOI, 17th Feb., 1991) and be like its so-called “other.”
II
Subsequent years and events have shown that the transient attractions of such exclusionary projects notwithstanding (some more seats in the legislatures and in parliament?) Indians overwhelmingly reject such constructions of culture. Immediately after the rath-yatra, the party that led it lost elections in five states, one after the other. And, it is some further irony that in a recent country-wide poll conducted by an electronic channel (ndtv, May 21st, ’08), the projected prime- ministerial candidate of that same party was the country’s fourth choice at a dismal 9.8%, about the same as that still-green Gandhi! Some snub that!
The pity is that a state that had stood rock-like as an example of loving, inter-community existence during the shameful killings of 1946/47, taking on aggression with collective resolve, was to be rendered self-alienated by the events of 1990, not only in social terms but as a spiritual/cultural space.
III
Over the last year or more, increasing numbers of Pandits have been revisiting the Valley chiefly to perform puja and pilgrimage. Media reports on these visits, as well as coverage undertaken daily for a half hour each evening by ETV Urdu Channel have repeatedly shown proof of how heart-rending these renewed contacts between Pandits and Muslims have been.
Pandits have been profoundly moved to discover for themselves how many Hindu shrines are tended by local Muslims, and how close the inter-community inter-face still is among Pandits who have stayed in the Valley and Muslims, the latter most of the time arranging, assisting and conducting Pandit weddings and cremations.
Just the other day, as nine Pandit families returned to their old homes in Verinag to save their houses from being demolished to make way for parking space, these families were astonished at not just the warmth with which their erstwhile Muslim neighbours greeted them, but the bold stand taken by the latter in defence of the right of the Pandits to retain their houses, and the desire expressed by the Muslims to live again next door to them as of old. (What a contrast to Gujarat, you might say.)
The quality and substance of these syncretic cultural reassertions are precisely the sort that this writer has consistently experienced in my visits to the valley (see my “Valley of Love,” Frontline, Aug.1, 2003).
IV
Yet, something has been missing—a major expression of culpability and complicity, coerced or not, in the events of 1990. Kashmir has been waiting for its Hamlet, a whistle-blower who would speak the word of cathartic shame, letting the genie out that would begin to scatter the dark cobwebs of guilt and suppression. Omar Abdullah has come forward as that angel that blows the conch of confession and return.
In saying what he has said, Omar recalls the imperishable truth that cruelties and inhumane distortions notwithstanding, the demons of the culture of hate-filled exclusion remain alien to the heart of Kashmiris. And he also recalls a legacy that in modern times was enunciated by that towering human being, his grand father, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah.
Recall that in late 1947 when Sardar Patel invoked the Nawabs of Junagarh and Hyderabad to follow the will of the people in the matter of accession, the Sheikh, agreeing with that view, posed himself the question: what should Kashmir do?
And, weeks before the aggression from across the line, or the accession and the coming of the Indian army, answered that question in a public speech on October 4, 1947; and this is what he said:
“We shall not believe . . .the two-nation theory which has spread so much
Poison. Kashmir showed the light at that juncture. When brother kills
brother in the whole of Hindustan, Kashmir raised its voice of Hindu-
Muslim unity. I can assure the Hindu and Sikh minorities that as long as
I am alive their life and honour will be quite safe.”(see M.J. Akbar,
Kashmir: Behind the Vale, p.xiv)
And, speaking to the U.N. General Assembly on Feb. 5, 1948, this is what the Sheikh said:
“I and my organization never believed in the formula that Muslims and
Hindus form separate nations. We do not believe in the two-nation
theory, nor in communal hatred or communalism itself. We believed that
religion has no place in politics. Therefore when we launched our ‘Quit
Kashmir’ movement it was not only Muslims who suffered but our Hindu
and Sikh comrades as well.”(Association of Communal Harmony in
Asia—ACHA, Archive of Kashmir Resources).
Thus, as Hamlet was moved by the noble example of his deceived father-king, Omar speaks today the noble legacy of the Sheikh yet again. And not a day too soon.
V
The question might be asked as to what are the resources from whence the unique Kashmiri Weltanschauung of love and humanism derives. This history is by now made familiar by many scholars. Let me only leave you with the following citations that bear on the theme from the ancient to the modern:
“Kashmir may be conquered by the force of spiritual merit but never
by the force of soldiers” (Kalhana)
“Shiv chuy thali thali rozan; Shiv lives everywhere; do not
Mo zan Hindu ta Musalman. divide Hindu from Muslim. . .
Truk ay chuk pan panun prazanav,
Soy chay sahibas zaniy zan.” (Lal Ded)
“Do not go to the Sheikh or priest or mullah; do not feed the cattle on
poisonous leaves. Do not shut yourselves up in mosques or forests.
Enter your own body, control your breath, and commune with
Gods” (Sheikh Noor-u-din, alias Nund rishi).
“The most respectable class in this country is that of the Rishis who,
notwithstanding their need of freedom from the bonds of tradition and
custom, are true worshippers of God. They do not loosen the tongue
of calumny against those not of their faith. . . (Abul Fazl, Ain-e-Akbari)
“Mohammed…radiates light all around;
Pujari lost his wits,
While offering flowers,
Iswara showered rain,
Come let us blow the sankh
Around Sankara. . . (Ahad Zargar)
(see Riyaz Punjabi, Kashmiriyat: Mystique of an Ethnicity” Miraas, Vol.1, No.1, ed., Pankaj Bhan at the Kasheer Foundation, Gulmohar Park, ND., for a more extensive discussion of the overlap between Hindu and Muslim mysticism in the Valley from the earliest times to the twentieth century.)
VI
Yet, the problem remains with us. Subsequent to the schism of 1990, many Pandits look for a cultural tradition exclusive to them, and in so doing, revisit the earliest Sharda literatures, beginning with the Nilamat Purana, etc., as they seek to reinvent an exclusively Hindu-aboriginal identity. Conversely, some Sunni Muslim groups propagate that syncretism was always a false construction, and that Muslims are enjoined, as in Arab countries, to follow the pristine Salafi/Wahabi path which forbids the notions of a personal discovery of godhead, the ethic of eros, music, idol-worship, ecstatic ritual, commingling with non-believers, and so on.
It is another matter that some eighty percent of Muslims actually live outside the Arab world—some seventy percent in Asia—and that in each national culture and history religions have always acquired features all their own.
Be that as it may, there is evidence that the people of Kashmir continue to internalize syncretism in ways that no theoretical formulations of an imposed nature are about to dislodge. Omar Abdullah’s call to confession and reconciliation indeed would have been either unthinkable or already severely castigated had that not been so.
A striking evidence of that truth is, for example, to be found in the pages of the book, Eighty Three Days: The Story of a Frozen River, by Dr. S.N.Dhar, a highly reputed Pandit physician.
Dr. Dhar was picked up by militants early in 1992, constantly moved from location to location but held captive for eighty three days. The book recounts what he suffered and what he learnt: among other things, he was to conclude: “in spite of the atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion, I found most of the young gunmen innocent and caring, some of whom held the Kashmiri Pandits in high esteem.”
And upon his release and return home: “within no time my neighbours, then more people and then even more people arrived, greeting me with showers of almonds and shireen. . .I was overwhelmed by this spontaneous expression of love and concern. . . . Something had happened, somehow an ordinary Kashmiri’s emotions of love hitherto suppressed, burst like a volcano, transforming into touching and dramatic scenes, for which a Kashmiri is known anyway. The more I saw of this, the more I resolved to be where I belonged---losing my freedom once again---this time to the chains of love” (pp.viii and 180).
An old college senior and cricketing friend, Dr. Dhar invited me to his home in Rajya Bagh in 2004 along with other Kashmiri friends of all denominations. There I had further proof that what we had lost was both recoverable and poignantly desirable of recovery.
Kashmiri Pandits who say they want to go back but to a sequestered “homeland” must introspect just as much as Omar Abdullah and Dr. Dhar do in what I have cited. Apart from taking in with open minds the experiences of those others, besides Dr. Dhar, who never left the valley and whose lives remain watched over by their fellow Muslim Kashmiris.
What, then, must now be discussed among all groups is how are ways to be found to extend the Omar initiative into a more embracing collective endeavour directed at exorcising the ghosts of the unnatural events of 1990. Other states and nations have done so with inspiring successes, although without chasing the faultless perfections of utopia.
For it is that sort of effort which alone can guarantee the safe and willing return of Pandits to their homeland, the reinstallation of ways of living that have had to yield to unlovely distortions, and to once again set an example to the nation and the world of how desirable macro-identities can be constructed from unstable, violent and sectarian ones.
It is also the only sure way in which the demons of communalism in the heartland of India and Pakistan can be shamed and defeated.
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