A Moon of Many Shades

Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal

eorge Bernard Shaw wrote, All autobiographies are lies. There is no denying the truth of this though there may be no reason to doubt the integrity of a person who pens his or her own story. Memories are tricky things to write down because they are not all the same they are good, bad, or insignicant and depend on ones perception. Nor do they uniformly dwell in the mind. The worst memories stick with us, while the nice ones always seem to slip through our ngers, writes Rachel Vincent in My Soul to Save. In striking contrast, Gabriel Garca Mrquez says in Love in the Time of Cholera, He was still too young to know that the hearts memory eliminates the bad and magnies the good, and that thanks to this artice we manage to endure the burden of the past. Whatever the case, memory compartments in every mind lter out some part and preserve the rest for posterity, often making autobiographies and memoirs repositories of half truths. How much of an authors memory is part of a manuscript or how much of it is a part of the author himself? No wonder then that Our Moon has Blood Clots, a memoir of Kashmir of the 1990s by journalist-turned-author Rahul Pandita, has become a subject of controversy. Kashmir is one of the most complex regions in the world, not just because of armed conict and being a nuclear ashpoint. It is also a region that has multiple claimants and multiple historical narratives the ofcial narratives of India and Pakistan, the varying and competing narratives of communities and ethnic groups from areas other than the Kashmir Valley, and the contradictory narratives of Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits, especially in the last two decades. The majority of Pandits ed the Valley in the 1990s and ever since everything about their ight has been a bone of
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book review
Our Moon has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits by Rahul Pandita (Noida: Random House India), 2013; pp 258, Rs 499.

academic contention from their numbers to the reasons they ed. It is not uncommon to hear Kashmiri Muslims concluding that the Pandits suddenly ed one day when militancy began, often holding former Jammu and Kashmir Governor Jagmohan responsible for the exodus. The Pandits vehemently challenge this and instead cite an atmosphere of xenophobia open threats, selective killings, and fear that triggered the ight in batches, the rst one on 19 January 1990. The popular narratives located within these black and white extremes do not match nor sound very reasonable. They, however, are historically situated against the background of harmonious relations between the two communities before the 1980s and to some extent through the 1980s as well. At One Extreme Rahul Panditas book more or less adopts one of the simplied extremes, offering hand-picked memories that are bitter but undeniable. The other problem with the book is that it tends to locate the incidents of 1989-90 within a history that is sifted out to contextualise his sense of collective victimhood. The history is told without references and forms a continuum of incidents of victimisation as if there were no intervening period between 1947 and 19 January 1990, the day of the rst mass exodus, and March 1990, when he left the Valley with his family. Historical events, particularly the events of 1947 in Baramulla, are crucial to understanding the fear psychosis of the Pandits, though the Pandits were not the only ones killed by the armed Pathan tribals nuns in Baramulla
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church, and Sikhs and Muslims were also victims. The manner in which this victimisation is magnied, especially by citing incidents in Muzaffarabad, where there were only a minuscule number of Pandits who were targeted along with many more other Hindus and Sikhs, seems to suggest the author is desperately looking for every bit of evidence to show Kashmiri Pandits have been hard done by. Though this makes for an emotive narrative, it does not lend much authenticity to the claims of persecution of Kashmiri Pandits. Pandita makes a similar mistake while writing about the painful death of his cousin Ravi at the hands of militants in Gool, an area in the Jammu region, without adding the sub-context of the selective nature of killings in the hilly areas of Jammu in the 1990s. Ravi and another person were taken out of a bus because they were Hindus and not because of their ethnicity and brutally done to death. Though this gory death forms an important part of the narrative, the lack of the sub-context leaves the memoir open to challenge. The most powerful part of the narrative concerns the days of fear Pandita spends as a 14-year old in the winter of 1990, along with some incidents preceding it, which contextualise his sense of fear, shock, and horror. But why does this sense of fear and the exodus that it triggered remain at odds with the popular narrative of Kashmiri Muslims? The writer cannot be faulted for the isolated memories of the two communities of those very chaotic times when access to real information was limited because of the sudden turn of events and the imposition of a curfew, which leaves only sketchy details in newspaper archives to grapple with. The Jagmohan Factor To understand the exodus, the days preceding and following 19 January 1990 are crucial markers. A right-wing Kashmiri Pandit organisation, Panun Kashmir, observes the day as Holocaust Day. For Kashmiri Muslims too 19 January was a turning point, not particularly
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because of the ight of the Pandits and other minorities that eventually robbed the Valley of its secular character, but more for the curfews and shocking massacres by the security forces that followed. Thus, for both the day is an important part of collective memory for entirely different reasons. The day also marked Jagmohan taking over as governor of the state, which had suddenly been placed under presidents rule. The move had probably been in the making as heightened militancy between September and December 1989 saw New Delhi sending in reinforcements of armed troops. The state government collapsed by the end of December and the Valley had been under a strict and unprecedented curfew for days when Jagmohan arrived. A large chunk of Pandits left the Valley on the night of 19 January amid strict curfew many of them on buses of the government-controlled state road transport corporation. On 20 January, house-to-house searches, raids, cordons, and random arrests began in many areas of Srinagar, particularly in Muslimmajority ones, with allegations of harassment and other atrocities. Caught between the devil and the deep sea, people began pouring into the streets in protest, violating prohibitory orders. Street protests with slogans of azadi and religious symbols became a regular feature. And so did massacres on the streets, beginning with Gaw Kadal on the morning of 21 January, which left at least 35 dead and hundreds injured, many of whom succumbed to their injuries later.1 The Alamgari Bazaar massacre followed on 22 January and Handwara on 25 January. Did Jagmohan engineer the ight of the Pandits? Whether he did or not, Jagmohan did see the Kashmir problem as a Muslim versus Hindu one, where Muslims were the perpetrators and Hindus the victims. In an interview to Current in May 1990, Jagmohan stated,
Every Muslim in Kashmir is a militant today. All of them are for secession from India. I am scuttling Srinagar Doordarshans programmes because everyone there is a militant ... The bullet is the only solution for Kashmir. Unless the militants are fully wiped out, normalcy cant return to the Valley.

for Srinagar on 19 January. In Jammu, he shared his idea of evacuating Kashmiri Pandits with a cross-section of intellectuals and senior journalists he met in closed-door meetings. The idea was that this would make it easier to deal with the militants, even though he was warned against the wisdom of such a move.2 That thousands of Pandits ed at the same time was odd, especially because there had been no known Pandit killing close to that date. However, this is not to say that the Pandits foolishly picked up a suitcase each and suddenly left to suit the designs of a short-sighted ruler. Fear, panic and distress among the Pandits had been on the rise since militancy began. Already a minority in the Valley, they had reasons to look at every call for azadi with suspicion. Much of their sense of security came from Indian army and their identity as Indian citizens. That was challenged by gun-toting Muslim youth, who returned after training from across the border and opposed anything Indian. Fear also arose because a number of Pandits had been killed and the azadi movement began to wear a religious cloak through the use of mosques and Islamic slogans. Slogans and Beyond It is difcult to assume that there was a uniformity to the slogans that rend the air across the Valley. Islamic slogans had been an undeniable part of Kashmirs history even before 1989. But when the armed insurgency began Ham kya chahte hain Azadi very conveniently blended with Azadi ka matlab kya La elaha el-allah as also with Naara-eTadbeer Allah o Akbar and Jeeve Jeeve Pakistan. Many Kashmiri Muslims have contested a slogan Pandita mentions (Assi gacchi panunuy Pakistan, batav rostuy, bataenein saan) deeming it a creation of the Pandit imagination.3 The controversy is not new to this book. What is the true picture? After years of grappling with this conundrum of slogans, in 2008 I began to understand the multilayered complexity of such slogans on the memory of people. I was in Srinagar when the Amarnath land row began and on 27 June 2008,

after the Friday prayers, people began to pour out of mosques raising azadi slogans and heading for Lal Chowk. There were hundreds and thousands of people, coming in big and small groups from all directions and converging on Lal Chowk where I was with a small contingent of local and visiting journalists. Most of them chanted azadi slogans, some peppered it with religion, and there was one group, comprising mainly boys aged nine to 16, who began dancing and clapping Jeeve Jeeve Pakistan and Naara e-tadbeer Allah o Akbar when they saw us. Many of my journalist colleagues sensed that the slogans had been provoked by my presence and advised me to leave. That day it dawned on me that even one slogan was enough to create panic and an unforgettably unpleasant memory. Some Kashmiri Muslims do admit the slogan that Pandita mentions was used, but maintain that it was not really a part of the popular discourse it may have been used by a few odd people in some places. Strange are the effects of some incidents and events and the different ways they play on the memory of people. A slogan that became deeply embedded in the hearts of one community because of the fear it evoked was not even noticed all that much by the other. As for the killings that lie at the core of the fear psychosis of the Pandits, there is no empirical evidence to suggest that there were selective killings on the basis of community.4 According to research by the Strategic Foresight Group, 29 Muslims were killed in 1988 in militancy-related violence across Jammu and Kashmir. There were no Hindu killings. In 1989 and 1990, six and 177 Hindus respectively were killed, against 73 and 679 Muslims and six Sikhs. The number of slain Hindus included nonKashmiri Pandits of the Valley and from parts of Jammu. Yet, given that the proportion of Pandits in the Valley was less than 5%, this may have been a

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Jagmohan rst landed in Jammu to take over as the governor before he left
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disproportionately high number and a cause for worry. Besides, one cannot rule out that some Kashmiri Pandits were killed for purely communal or at least personal, reasons. Issues Overlooked The problem of Panditas book is that it is unable to offer a larger picture, and that it is contextualised in fragments of historical narratives he chooses to weave into an uninterrupted sequence of events, without interpolating anything that would mitigate the bitterness of being betrayed as a community. His own memory blends into collective memory and unreferenced historical events with so much ease that it is difcult for someone unfamiliar with Kashmir to sift through them. He recalls an India versus West Indies cricket match of 1983 and his anger at how the crowds reacted, not to mention a taunt of the Muslim milkman the next day. This was when he was only seven. It is surely rare to recall feelings of identity and anger one had at that age with any precision. How much of it is his own memory?

However, it would not do to trash the book. It is important because it offers a very interesting insight into how the Pandits found themselves cornered in January 1990, of the unease they lived with and endured, and of the insecurities, played up by frenzied slogans, that became a part of their psyche. One can understand the horror Pandita felt on overhearing a conversation about distributing the houses of Pandits that took place among Muslim teenagers he played with in his locality. But one would have liked to know more about his relationship with these boys. One would also have liked to know how he and his family coped between January and March 1990 and their interactions with Muslim friends and acquaintances. What sense did they make of the massacres in January 1990 in which their Muslim counterparts were killed, even if such incidents paled into insignicance before their own deep sense of fear and isolation? By skirting these, Pandita leads us to believe that he has located the story of Kashmiri Pandits in a simplied context of Pandit victim

and Muslim perpetrator. Even a bomb blast on a busy Srinagar road has a Pandit victim, but there is no mention of any Muslim killed by either the militants or the security forces. There is an interesting subtext of coping in Jammu after the exodus, where he briey hints at being innocently tempted to join a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) shakha (branch). One would have liked to know if people he knew did so. Again, one would have liked his story to go beyond the simple us and them to describe the role of Kashmiri Pandits in Jammus culture, which is very cosmopolitan and represents the assimilation of many streams. This could have offered us greater insights into why a sense of isolation and alienation pervaded. Had he talked about these multilayered complexities or even offered subtle glimpses of them, it would not in any way have diluted the narrative of the suffering of Kashmiri Pandits. It would only have lent much more credibility and authenticity to the memoir. Any memoir, at the end of the day, is a birds-eye view. But you get a feeling that

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Pandita chooses to see only one half of the sky and the life beneath it. He sees his moon has blood clots, painful and real, but does not catch a glimpse of the other shades of the same moon.
Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal (anusaba@gmail. com) is Executive Editor, Kashmir Times, and a human rights activist based in Jammu and Kashmir.

Notes
1 The ofcial and unofcial gures of the Gaw Kadal massacre are contested, but 50 to 80 people died when Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel sprayed bullets on an unarmed procession crossing a bridge. Balraj Puri in Kashmir: Towards Insurgency points out that Jagmohan encouraged the ight of many Pandit leaders and was not very interested in efforts to restore intercommunity understanding and condence. The controversial slogan loosely translates as 4

We are going to be with our own Pakistan, the Pandit men can go, well take their women along. Pankaj Mishra writes in Kashmir: The Unending War, The Kashmiri Pandits formed a kind of elite in the Valley; they had a large presence in the bureaucracy, both in the Valley and in Delhi, where government policy on Kashmir was often dictated by the fears and concerns of this tiny minority. Their connections with India and their relative afuence made them highly visible targets during the rst few months of the insurgency in 1990.

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