Massacre in Kashmir: "Decoding the craze that works in the name of Jihad" writes Subhasish Choudhury

30 years of the Kashmiri Pandit massacre and we are still unable to recognise the craze that works in the name of Jihad.

Since I am writing here on a very sensitive issue today, so I will be providing written documents, letterheads and newspaper headlines from local agencies of Kashmir that were issued or published time to time, to back my points because the truth of Kashmir won’t go easy with many of the readers.

It all begins with the clarion call of Jihad during the 1990s to make Kashmir a separate nation and the only available reason to support this demand was stated that Kashmir was a Muslim majority province and hence, the infidels (kafirs) don’t deserve to rule, live or reside in that land. It was just an extension of the Direct Action Day (16 August 1946, Calcutta) of the Muslim League. Both had the same reasoning, the same target, and the same demand.

With a very little Pandit (Hindu) population in the Kashmir Valley, the infidels or Kafirs, as they recognised the idol worshippers, were left exposed to the hunting wolves of Hizbul Mujahidin, Laskar-e-Islam and many other Islamic groups of the valley (photos of the threats issued by different organisations are provided with the article).

The dark night of 19 January 1990 was just an outburst of the incidents that were getting plotted and executed in several parts of Kashmir, in lower intensities from a long time before. By this time now, the call for Jihad was out in papers and notices were stamped outside every Pandits house in the valley. For several months and years in a row, Kashmir saw the horrible bloodbath, rape and forced conversions that went unnoticed in the mainstream media to maintain the ‘Secular Fabric’ of the Nation.

The government data put the number of deaths to 250+. Whereas the Kashmiri Pandits and several other non-govt sources count the number of deaths to thousands. The official numbers of the Pandits who left back their homes and took shelter in the refugee camps to save their religion, lives, and women from getting gang-raped stands around at 4 Lakhs.

To date, the Kashmiri Pandits are not able to return to their home. They are refugees in their own ‘SECULAR’, Democratic Nation. The swords of Jihad have not yet been silenced, which is why the Pandits never returned and the temples never restored. Who knew that the religious population numbers would matter so much for survival. Who would assure that the same fate doesn’t wait for us?

It’s better we collect back our facts and learn from our history, as soon as possible because the demography of India is changing really fast and we can’t run away from our home and village every time.

The Kashmir context becomes more relatable to the lives of the Bengali Hindus of Barak if we look back to the Tipra riots of 1946, Partition and the War of 1971. The Hindus, many in Barak have also faced similar ethnic cleansing from the land of their forefathers and don’t even have the slightest of chances to regain back the lost land. What we could do at best is to secure the land we are sitting upon now. Let’s not turn a blind eye to the threats imposed over our lives just to sound ‘Politically correct’. Your political correctness would matter only when your existence remains. The demography change in Barak and the dark clouds of Clause 6 of Assam Accord possess similar threats of religious and linguistic isolation of a community, which has a history of thousands of years in this part of the land.

The author of this article is a member of the Hindu Chatra Sangha. The views expressed in the article are his personal.