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Our man writes this while his
family has left the valley, and he is alone in his house in
Srinagar for reasons of emotion and indecisiveness. Lonely and
apprehensive, he oftentimes gets depressed, but the writing is
lucid, even if it goes back and forth in time following his
thoughts. "Do I have to make an announcement in public that
I am here because I belong here, that my roots are here…? I
feel I should hold to my place for myself and my children, even
if it involves risking my life." Tensions and suspense rise
and ebb in the heart of the reader along with the writer of the Diary.
What frustrates
this Pandit the most is that his community is being punished for
no fault of its own and, worse still, that whether Pandits live
or are killed is going to make no difference to the larger
political movement. So they are plain victims and no more.
Living in his
house, the Pandit comes across various stories of atrocities and
gross cruelties being inflicted upon Pandits by militants. After
hearing of one such beating of a young and beautiful
schoolteacher, he wonders: "Is there anybody to speak for
the likes of her? Any so-called human rights organisations? They
are interested only in knowing how many terrorists are in
prison, the kind of food they are provided…."
Pandits' being of
no consequence to either the militants or the government is what
pains him the most. "Our tragedy is that we are a minority
in a state where the [national] minority is in the majority, and
therefore, irredeemable!"
Tragedies detailed
in the entries can help a ringside viewer understand better the
emotional stress under which Kashmiris, particularly Pandits,
though Muslims too, have lived and are living. A tale of how a
Hindu-Muslim pair of girls, who were more sisters than friends,
is torn apart, ending in treachery, rape and murder, is truly
illustrative. So is that of a respectable old man who is beaten
to pulp along with his son just because he is prominent and
sticks out like a sore thumb as far as the jehadis are
concerned.
The protagonist,
if he may be so called, is also confused by the antipathy, or at
best apathy, of Muslims towards Pandits because all his life he
has known them to be caring and affectionate fellow beings. But
he is also able to see their helplessness in the face of the new
wave engulfing Islam.
One thing of note
is that in spite of being persecuted by Muslims, he does not
blame Muslims much for the misery, but politicians. Sheikh
Abdullah is blamed for vacillating between accession and
autonomy and not giving a clear direction to people. The freeing
of five prominent militants for the release of kidnapped Rubiya
Saeed, Home Minister's daughter, is criticised for giving a
fresh impetus to the movement. Gilani is blamed for rejecting
secularism as a falsity, communists for saying that Pandits are
themselves responsible for their fate. Abdullah's successor
Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad is charged with a full-fledged conspiracy
against Pandits to appease the Muslims.
Apart from
specific blames on leaders, our man propounds many other evolved
explanations to the problem as he sees them, and they are
interesting for they are well reasoned.
We may close with
a lament: "The voice of the common sufferers will be
submerged forever…. What the people will discover later will
be the untruth of the statements of the politicians…and their
written versions. These alone will form the basis of knowing
what happened. Unfortunate, but true."
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UNRESTRAINED
by matters of form and expectation, forthright from its being
relatively private, and accurate owing to immediacy of
reporting, a diary can be a fairly honest and unassuming piece
of work. Here we have one on the life of an unknown Kashmiri
Pandit during 1990 when the community was forced to undertake
a kind of exodus from the beautiful valley.
