Agony of past
Tawqeer Hussain
Time is the best healer, these words always echo my ears and heart and I Always feel that this is true, although practically I never applied this theory and don’t know what others have to say about this. But surely during the practice of journalism, I met hundreds of people whose emotions and memories of their past fail out this sentence, and Kashmir is the practical example of such antagonistic clichés.
From past 65 years of conflict in Kashmir, I have witnessed and heard several stories who still haunt me and for those who are directly related to such incidents, life has came to a standstill for them.
In these thousands of stories of killings, disappearances, wailings, Kashmir have witnessed a mass migration in the early nineties where in thousands of members of Pandit community left their belongings and migrated to the other part of the state in a hurry with all their belongings left at their ancestral places hoping that soon they will back to the respective homes, which never happened. These people still have a desire to be back to their mother land. Although decades have passed this black episode in the conflict history of Kashmir still haunts them. They have the memories of their charmful past in this paradise, which they believe has now turned into the hell.
As many as 300,000 people fled their home and hearth, reduced to living the lives of refugees outside Kashmir. In what appears to be a flicker of a moment, they lost almost everything that their lives were based on: their roots, identity, homes, possessions and, most painful, their sense of belonging. Even their memories were full of the trauma and tragedy of being uprooted.
Meenakshi, a Pandit girl who was just few months old although have no personal memories but the tales she have heard from her parents are enough to bring tears in her eyes with the hope that one day they will be back to their motherland –Kashmir.
While narrating the event which made them to left the Kashmir and migrate to the other part of the State, Meenakshi said “ We were forced to leave, to leave our mother land, to leave a place where my grand parents desire to die, where memories of past still have the attraction of hope, a place which always remain in our minds and hearts and whenever we talk or think of that, a ray of charm and sadness fill our hearts, to leave such places which we called home, where my ancestors were born and died”
The migration have not only affected their minds and souls but have left them in the state of quandary where in they have many unanswered questions like Why Muslims didn’t help them to stay their? What happened to the Kashmir identity which they were proud of? How long they have to suffer? How long they will face the identity crisis?
The fallout of this has been highly detrimental to the collective psyche of people across Kashmir leading to wide-spread stress-related disorders. For the community of Kashmiri Pandits, however, this has been compounded by the fact that they have been rendered homeless and rootless. Now, living in Jammu , they still carry the scars.
As Meenakshi says, “we are neither Jammuites nor Kashmiries, Kashmir-we were forced to leave and Jammu-they never accepted us by heart, our condition is like the Muhajirs of Pakistan who are still in search of identity”
While sharing her opinion and discussing the place which they actually belong, the visibly disturbed and sag girl whose eyes were ready to shower tears but her mind were trying to control them have a good regard of her mother land in Kashmir,
“we were landloard and were having many domestic animals, the migration made us to loose everything in hurry” said Meenakshi adding that after migration the initial life was very hard in the camps at Jammu which still comes as night mare for many Pandits “Even after 21 years of migration, majority of the Kashmiri Pandits are living in squalid camps in Jammu, Udhampur and Delhi with families of five to six people often huddled into a small room. Living in abysmal conditions in camps, they face spiraling health and economic problems. Sometimes, a single room is shared by three generations. At other places, sometimes, six families lived in one hall separated by partitions of blankets or bedsheets. For those who lived in the idyllic environs of the Kashmir valley, this degeneration of life has been unbearable.”
After the exodus of 1990, most Kashmiri Pandits were hopeful that they would one day return to their homes in the Valley with same honour and dignity they once had. But, the months stretched into years, and, now the years have stretched into a decade-and-a-half of exile. The end is nowhere in sight. The yearning for their homeland is still confined to the dreams of Meenakshi and her family, they like to cherish once again seeing their precious Chinar trees and apple orchards in the Kashmir valley.
