I have been reading and noting with interest, the intensity of discussion around Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri’s film ‘The Kashmir Files’ on Social Media. I am not commenting here on the film per-se, but about a strand that is picking up steam in the audience reactions, commentary and discussion around the film. And that relates to the events of January 19, 1990 in Srinagar, Kashmir, and the extent to which they contributed to, or triggered, the ‘exodus’ of Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir. One of the most significant motifs in this discussion is the question of the extent to which Kashmiri Pandits left of their own volition, based on their understanding of the threat they perceived around that time due to the rising discontent in the part of the Kashmir valley administered by India on the one hand, and the role played by the then newly appointed governor of Jammu & Kashmir, Jagmohan Malhotra, in enabling, and to some extent, engineering that ‘exodus’. This post will try to unravel some of the context in which this ‘exodus’ took place, by examining some of the publicly available (albeit not easy to locate) contemporary sources. I hope this post, despite its length, can contribute to clearing some of the fog that has collected around the question.
I am not concerned ultimately with whether Jagmohan himself can be held responsible for the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1990/91. I think the question to be asked is whether or not the Indian state, and its apparatus of occupation in Kashmir can be held responsible. Jagmohan, being for a time an important instrument of the apparatus of the occupation, cannot evade responsibility, just as he cannot become the sole scapegoat for the exodus. The confusion about whether or not Jagmohan played a part in the exodus of KPs has partly to do with the fact that the date of January 19, 1990 has become somewhat fetishized. This is the day that Jagmohan took office (for the second time) as governor of Jammu and Kashmir, in Jammu. As he records in his book ‘My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir’, ‘turbulence’ over the Banihal pass meant that the helicopter he was using to travel from Jammu to Kashmir had to turn back to Jammu that day. So, crucially, he was not in Srinagar on the 19th of January, 1990. A lot happened that night. The season’s worst and most severe ‘cordon & search’ operation was undertaken in the Chotta Bazar-Guru Bazar area in Srinagar city. 300 young people were detained. A journalist, Masood Hussain, remembers that during the operation saw an escalation of arbitrary violence, CRPF men systematically entered homes and kitchens, attacked the stores and provisions that families has mustard, and “mixed their rice reserves for winter with sand and left sugar pots filled with chilli powder.” see - https://kashmirlife.net/jagmohan-days-95656/ Kashmir had been in turmoil for a while. Jagmohan himself, in his book, says - “Even prior to the day (December 8, 1989) of Dr. Rubaiya Sayeed’s kidnapping, when the eagle of terrorism swooped on the State with full fury, 1,600 violent incident, including 352 bomb blasts, had taken place in eleven months. Then, between January 1 and January 19, 1990, there were as many as 319 violent acts—21 armed attacks, 114 bomb blasts, 112 arsons, and 72 incidents of mob violence.” The sheer numerical majority of the victims of these incidents were Kashmiri Muslims, (local politicians, minor administrators, government officials, NC and Congress activists, some public figures, and people in the police), not, Kashmiri Pandits. The only prominent Kashmiri Pandit victims at this period were, to my knowledge, four individuals - T.N. Tiploo, BJP and RSS Leader, Srinagar Doordarshan Director Lassa Koul, Sheela Tickoo and Justice Neelkanth Ganjoo (who had pronounced the death sentence on Maqbool Butt). They were attacked for their political positions, and for their actions, not because they were Kashmiri Pandits. The killing of three individuals, hardly seems to be the catalyst for a mass exodus. A horrible pattern of violence against Kashmiri Pandits did begin to occur, especially in rural areas, against poor and defenseless victims, spearheaded by ‘militants’ intoxicated with a fundamentalist or nationalist agenda, but this happened after, not before January 19, 1990, and actually picked up momentum after the major part of the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits had left those who remained especially vulnerable. In this way, the responsibility of the terrible violence that some Kashmiri Pandit families had to face has to be shared between a hateful Islamist ideology and a deliberate policy of leaving Pandits in the valley defenseless and isolated in the wake of the exodus. But let us come back for now to the night of January 19, 1990 It was also the night when TV was broadcasting the events of the Romanian Revolution. The Berlin Wall had opened, just over a month ago, and the continuing turbulence in the about to collapse USSR, particularly in Azerbaijan - was directly visible on TV news. (Jagmohan thinks it was very unwise of the otherwise staid Doordarshan to have broadcast this news - which apparently inspired people in Srinagar to think that the world was changing, their world could change too.) There are several people who recall that through that evening and night, mosques blared slogans, people walked around chanting, and amongst the slogans was - “Jago Jago Subah Huyee; Rus ne Baazi Haari Hain, Hind par larzaan tare hain, Ab Kashmir ki baaree hain” Apparently, a particularly vicious slogan asking Pandits to leave, but to leave their women behind was also heard in places. There is an interesting discussion of this slogan in Sanjay Kak’s review (‘What About the Kashmiri Pandits’, published in Raiot, on June 21, 2018) of Ankur Datta’s ethnography of the migrant/refugee Kashmiri Pandit experience and memory in Jammu (On Uncertain Ground: A Study of Displaced Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir, Oxford University Press-India, 2016).It is worth quoting in full. “ One particularly sexualized threat reappears with unerring consistency in almost all contemporary Pandit narratives, Datta notes, and we know this to be accorded an almost sacred centrality in memories of the early months of 1990. “Batav bagair, batnev saan” – for a beleaguered minority this most hurtful of slogans suggested that the crowd wanted Azadi for Kashmir, ‘without Pandit men, [but] with their women’. Looking into the newspaper archive Datta sees that the earliest reports of this hateful slogan emerge only years later: “The slogans the Pandits remember have never been reported officially at the time and suggest a gap between what was recorded and what Pandits describe”. The newspapers of the period do of course focus on ‘mob violence’, casualties due to police action, as well as large-scale arrests. The attention I have paid here to what might appear to be a minor detail in Datta’s book does not imply that the particular slogan was never raised. But that it may have not have been as widespread as it was later claimed to be. And that this damaging slogan developed a corporeality across decades of recounting by the migrants, as part of the shared description of the conditions that led to departure, and that it played a crucial role in the production of what Datta elsewhere references as a “single ritualized account” of Pandit victimhood.” https://raiot.in/what-about-the-kashmiri-pandits/ So, regardless of the now almost totally myth-making about this slogan about Kashmiri Pandit women being told to ‘stay behind’, it is not at all unreasonable to say that Kashmiri Pandits were anxious and scared by the viciousness of the communal sloganeering at places. They had reason to be. But no one was killed, or injured. Given the kind of slogans that are regularly voiced these days in India, it would appear that the kind of day that some Kashmiri Pandit organizations observe as ‘Kashmiri Pandit Holocaust Day’, a very large number of people would be observing their ‘Holocaust Days’ on a daily bases in mainland India. But let us leave that aside for the moment. People did die the next day. 52 Kashmiri Muslims died at Gawkadal when the paramilitary forces opened fire. Jagmohan was in the city by then, and cannot evade responsibility for the actions of forces under his command. More were killed the following day, and then a pattern of shoot-to-kill orders at crowds was in place, that was to define the destiny of Kashmir. No buses or trucks with fleeing Kashmiri pandits left Kashmir on the night of January 19th. Some individuals may have left, but the ‘organized’ exodus, did not happen on January 19, 1990. But it did begin happening, a little later. There are reports of it happening between the 20th and 24th of January, and in Mid March, and also at further, later days. By the end of 1991, close to 300,000 pandits had left the valley. Someday, diligent archival investigation may be able to unearth some details of the orders (formal and informal) that may have moved between desks in Delhi and Srinagar that made this possible. But for now, we have to rely on the testimonies of those who were made to move. And so, I am relying entirely on the direct or indirect testimony of Kashmiri Pandit individuals who lay the blame on Jagmohan. Yes, I do rely on the memoir of a ‘mainstream Kashmiri Muslim politician - Saifuddin Soz, now with the Congress, but the sources he quotes are Kashmiri Pandits - and those are the voices that i am interested in listening to here. I am NOT relying on the testimony of Kashmiri Muslims, or of ‘Human Rights’-walas in India.