Srinagar, January 4, 1990. Aftab,
a local Urdu newspaper, publishes a press release issued by Hizb-ul
Mujahideen, set up by the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1989 to wage jihad for
Jammu and Kashmir’s secession from India and accession to Pakistan,
asking all Hindus to pack up and leave. Another local paper, Al Safa, repeats this expulsion order.

In the
following days, there is near chaos in the Kashmir valley with Chief
Minister Farooq Abdullah and his National Conference government
abdicating all responsibilities of the State. Masked men run amok,
waving Kalashnikovs, shooting to kill and shouting anti-India slogans.

Reports of
killing of Hindus, invariably Kashmiri Pandits, begin to trickle in;
there are explosions; inflammatory speeches are made from the pulpits
of mosques, using public address systems meant for calling the faithful
to prayers. A terrifying fear psychosis begins to take grip of Kashmiri
Pandits.

Walls are plastered with posters and handbills, summarily ordering
all Kashmiris to strictly follow the Islamic dress code, prohibiting
the sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks and imposing a ban on
video parlours and cinemas. The masked men with Kalashnikovs force
people to re-set their watches and clocks to Pakistan Standard Time.

Shops, business establishments and homes of Kashmiri Pandits, the
original inhabitants of the Kashmir valley with a recorded cultural and
civilisational history dating back 5,000 years, are marked out. Notices
are pasted on doors of Pandit houses, peremptorily asking the occupants
to leave Kashmir within 24 hours or face death and worse. Some are more
lucid: “Be one with us, run, or die!“

* * *

Srinagar, January 19, 1990.
Jagmohan arrives to take charge as governor of Jammu and Kashmir.
Farooq Abdullah, whose pathetic, whimpering, snivelling government has
all but ceased to exist and has gone into hiding, resigns and goes into
a sulk. Curfew is imposed as a first measure to restore some semblance
of law and order. But it fails to have a deterrent effect.

Throughout the day, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front and Hizbul
Mujahideen terrorists use public address systems at mosques to exhort
people to defy curfew and take to the streets. Masked men, firing from
their Kalashnikovs, march up and down, terrorising cowering Pandits
who, by then, have locked themselves in their homes.

As evening falls, the exhortations become louder and shriller. Three
taped slogans are repeatedly played the whole night from mosques: ‘Kashmir mei agar rehna hai, Allah-O-Akbar kehna hai‘ (If you want to stay in Kashmir, you have to say Allah-O-Akbar); ‘Yahan kya chalega, Nizam-e-Mustafa‘ (What do we want here? Rule of Shariah); ‘Asi gachchi Pakistan, Batao roas te Batanev san‘ (We want Pakistan along with Hindu women but without their men).

In the preceding months, 300 Hindu men and women, nearly all of them
Kashmiri Pandits, had been slaughtered ever since the brutal murder of
Pandit Tika Lal Taploo, noted lawyer and BJP national executive member,
by the JKLF in Srinagar on September 14, 1989. Soon after that, Justice
N K Ganju of the Srinagar high court was shot dead. Pandit Sarwanand
Premi, 80-year-old poet, and his son were kidnapped, tortured, their
eyes gouged out, and hanged to death. A Kashmiri Pandit nurse working
at the Soura Medical College Hospital in Srinagar was gang-raped and
then beaten to death. Another woman was abducted, raped and sliced into
bits and pieces at a sawmill.

In villages and towns across the Kashmir valley, terrorist hit lists
have been floating about. All the names are of Kashmiri Pandits. With
no government worth its name, the administration having collapsed and
disappeared, the police nowhere to be seen, despondency sets in. As the
night of January 19, 1990, wears itself out, despondency gives way to
desperation.

And tens of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits across the valley take a
painful decision: to flee their homeland to save their lives from rabid
jihadis. Thus takes place a 20^th century Exodus.

* * *

Srinagar, January 19, 2005. There
are no Kashmiri Pandits in Srinagar, or, for that matter, anywhere else
in the Kashmir valley; they don’t live here anymore. You can find them
in squalid refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi. As many as 300,000
Kashmiri Pandits have fled their home and hearth and been reduced to
living the lives of refugees in their own country.

Two-thirds of them are camping in Jammu. The rest are in Delhi and
in other Indian cities. Many of them, once prosperous and proud of
their rich heritage, now live in grovelling poverty, dependent on
government dole and charity. In these 15 years, an entire generation of
exiled Kashmiri Pandits has grown up, without seeing the land from
where their parents fled to escape the brutalities of Islamic
terrorism, a land they dare not return to, although that land still
remains a part of their country.

A large number of them are suffering from a variety of stress and
depression related diseases. A group of doctors who surveyed the mental
and physical health of the Kashmiri Pandits living in refugee camps,
found high incidence of ‘economic distress, stress induced diabetes,
partial lunacy, hypertension and mental retardation.’ Statistics
reflect high death rate and low birth rate among the Kashmiri Pandit
refugees.

And thereby hangs a tragic tale that has been all but wiped out from public memory.

An entire people have been uprooted from the land of their ancestors
and left to fend for themselves as a weak-kneed Indian state
shamelessly panders to Islamic terrorists and separatists who claim
they are the final arbiters of Jammu and Kashmir’s destiny. A part of
India’s cultural heritage has been destroyed; a chapter of India’s
civilisational history has been erased.

Had this tragedy occurred elsewhere in Hindu majority India, and had
the victims been Muslims, we would have described it as ‘ethnic
cleansing’ and ‘genocide.’ We would have made films with
horror-inducing titles. We would have filed cases in the Supreme Court
of India. Our media would have marshalled remarkable rage in reporting
the smallest detail.

But, this
tragedy has occurred in Muslim majority Kashmir valley, and the victims
are all Hindus, that too Pandits. What has been lost is part of India’s
Hindu culture, what has been erased is integral to India’s Hindu
civilisation.

Therefore, the government makes bold to record that the Kashmiri Pandits have “migrated on their own” and their ‘displacement (is)
self-imposed;’ the National Human Rights Commission, after a
perfunctory inquiry, refuses to concede that what has happened is
‘genocide’ or ‘ethnic cleansing,’ though facts add up to no less than
that, never mind that 300,000 lives have been destroyed.

And, our jhola-wallah
brigade of secular activists rudely turn up their noses to the plight
of Kashmiri Pandits: Hindu sorrow, inflicted by Islamic terror, stinks.

Today, on January 19, the 15^th anniversary of the forced
flight of Kashmiri Pandits, look back at India’s wretched history of
secular politics and consider the terrible price the nation has paid at
the altar of appeasement because the Indian State has, and continues
to, toe the line of least resistance.

Reflect. Resolve. React.

http://islamicterrorism.wordpress.com/2008/06/21/190190-the-day-when-kashmiri-pandits-fled-islamic-terror/