What the murder of
Ajay Pandita teaches us - written as a tribute to his tragic death
A Kashmiri Hindu
and an old friend called me up a few days ago. We discussed the COVID19
scenario, the political situation created by Chinese incursion and then he
asked me about the murder of Ajay Pandita. “It has affected me so much that I
haven’t slept properly since then. It has affected my family too. For the first
time in months I am at a loss. Can you explain why am I feeling this way?” he asked.
We talked for some
time. As he shared his feelings, what came across to me was the utter sense of
shock and unbelievability in his words. “Did you believe that after the
abrogation of article 370 there could be still such brutal murders of Kashmiri Hindus?”
he was asking. After a moment’s silence, he said, “Maybe I was wrong. After the
abrogation and the way things happened, all my Kashmiri Hindu brothers had come
to believe that no one will target us again like they used to do in 1989. That shell
around us, that cocoon has busted with this killing. We remain as vulnerable as
we were then.” Thanking me for the discussion, he hung up. A few days later he called
me and said he had talked to several other friends. All had expressed a similar
sentiment. It is as if the sense of vulnerability has come back to them. The shell
of safety they had begun to build around them is broken. The question on their mind
is that how could it happen when the reality of Kashmir is changing?
Some murders are
more shocking, more disturbing than others. They shake our inner beliefs that
we take as inviolate and which tell us the world, we inhabit is safe for us. The
killing that is sudden and unprovoked tells us the world is no longer the safe
place we assumed it to be. The murder of George Floyd is disturbing not just because
of its brutality but because every Black man in USA fears being questioned and
killed like that by police no matter what his station in life.
In 1995, while waiting
at Amsterdam airport to board my flight, the television screen announced the
murder of the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. A couple next to me had begun
to cry hysterically saying something in Hebrew. As I learnt later, Jews cried
that night not because their Prime Minister was killed but because it shattered
their faith that after going through the holocaust, a Jew could ever kill their
own Prime Minister.
Has the abrogation
of article 370, the subsequent handling of the Kashmir issue, produced in the Hindus
of Kashmir a similar conviction that the painful blood filled chapters of killings
is over and met with a closure?
As a psychologist,
I learnt about Kashmiri Hindus while working in prisons during my conversations
with terrorists. The second was while working in refugee camps in Jammu. Kashmiri
Hindus are unique in India. No other group of Hindus, I believe, has faced so
much persecution and terror as they have over centuries. Perhaps that is why the
need to exterminate the civilization of Kashmir is so strong in a certain group
of people who would like Hinduism to become extinct. Kashmir remains a reminder
of what Hinduism was in the past. The awakening of Kashmir will directly awaken
the very soul of Hindus.
Research studies
show that one terrorist killing is enough to create a circle of influence
around a large number of people who stay permanently terrified and in a state
of ‘learned helplessness’ for decades.
As I understood in
my talks with terrorists, the goal today is not to kill more and more Kashmiri Hindus
as was done in the past by invaders, but recreate that terror in their hearts
that is as real and palpable as it was centuries ago. Called ‘trans-generational
trauma’, it is today the biggest impediment in Hindu revival to autonomy and collective
identity. Today, as many are coming to believe, a new Hindu identity can only
be built around the collective memory of persecution.
When I worked in
the camps for Kashmiri Hindus, the most predominant emotion that they shared was
religious terror. The terror of being beheaded, the terror of being sawed into
pieces after a rape, the terror of being killed and mutilated for solely
belonging to their religion, was something that they discussed in almost every
meeting. The terror often crossed generations, to centuries back when they were
drowned for refusing to convert and to leave their religion because they were ‘infidels’.
Sarpanch Ajay
Pandita had refused to give in to that terror that he believed was gone. He
believed that they wouldn’t touch him. That he could stay in the middle of that
terror, in the ecosystem that hated his religion, his beliefs and his status as
a Hindu leader. It didn’t help that he belonged to Congress, a party for whom
the Kashmiri Hindus do not even exist. He perhaps believed that the spirit that
drove out half a million people thirty years ago wouldn’t apply to him because
he was speaking their language, something that his party does without batting
an eyelid. He perhaps also believed that the people had changed and a new era
would emerge out of it. Maybe he even thought that if terrorists came looking
for him like they did for Kashmiri Hindus in 1990, this time his neighbors
would come to protect him. They would protest and stand by him. After all his
party has been speaking on their behalf only. But it didn’t help. His killing
shows the mindset hasn’t changed in Kashmiris in thirty years and will not in
near future. The hatred, the vilification will remain as strong as before for every
‘infidel’.
As Toni Morrison
says in her celebrated work, “…the very purpose of bigotry is to identify the
other as an outsider and to separate him so that one can define one’s own self...”
In Kashmir the Kashmiri Hindu has been ‘the other’ for far too long. The need to
see him as ‘the other’ made the Kashmiri Muslim what he is. He drove him, the Kashmiri
Hindu, out from his land, took away his home because that was the only way to define
himself. That was the only way he could lay claim to the entire land by
destroying the very civilization of Kashmir. In this there was no space or meaning
for co-existence as long as the religion was different.
The reason Kashmir
has been such a fertile ground for international terrorism has been due to its
history, values and culture. It is impossible to understand this unless one
understands the children who are made to grow indoctrinated in a culture of hate.
The children were told to celebrate when the Kashmiri Hindus were forced to run
away. The exodus of Kashmiri Hindus, the rape and the murder of Kashmiri Hindu
women exists as narratives of victory over the infidel. They will tell you that
it was their land and what their fathers and forefathers did was an act
justified for this reason. When they pick up stones and hit the Indian army,
they are told they are doing an act justified by their faith. With large scale
violence, beheading and torture as the main imagery they grew up with forming
their identity, how will we stop the death of persons like Ajay Pandita?
Today, more that
the Kashmiri Hindu, it is perhaps the Kashmiri Muslim who needs to go to his
roots and understand that it is he who is alienated from his land, his people
and trying to define himself by detaching from his brother, the Kashmiri Hindu.
It is time to
understand that abrogation of article 370 was no magic. The psychology of the
people, the hatred and rancor need a far deeper understanding. I hope the
tragic death of Ajay Pandita would once again to teach us that painful reality
of Kashmir.
The exodus and the
genocide of Kashmiri Hindus ranks as one of the greatest crimes of the
twentieth century. Like all great mass crimes of history involving mass rape,
violence and cultural annihilation, the perpetrators of Kashmir have evaded all
accountability and still stand clean in the eyes of the world. They blame the
survivors with half the world still believing them. History shows that unless the
survivors rise from a slumber and relentlessly confront the perpetrators, no mass
perpetrators come forward to take responsibility and this is true for the
perpetrators of 19th January 1990. The men and women who rejoiced at
seeing Kashmiri Hindus running away, watched them being sawed and killed should
tell the world why they felt so and the world must acknowledge it as a genocide
of a race who desired nothing more than to live in their homes and follow their
religion. Till then, all peace will be elusive in Kashmir.
Rajat Mitra
Psychologist,
Speaker and Author of The Infidel next Door
www.rajatmitra.co.in
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