Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (11 page)

B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L
T-O-R-T-O-I-S-E
F-E-B-R-U-A-R-Y
C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S
P-O-R-C-U-P-I-N-E

I remembered the red ribbon she wore; I remembered how she waited behind the closed gates of her school to catch a glimpse of father’s shoes from beneath; I remembered how she threw a duster at one of her friends who tried to bully me; I remembered how I left her alone in the middle of a game of hopscotch because I saw Ravi’s mother entering the house with a parrot in a cage.
Would Mother stab her? And herself? What would we do?

‘The BSF will do something,’ Uncle said. But nobody does anything. The slogan-mongering continued all night. We could see searchlights from somewhere making an arc over and over again. Was the BSF keeping a watch? Why were they not stopping this madness?

The slogans did not stop till the early hours of the morning. We remained awake the whole night. As the first rays of the sun broke, I dozed off for a while and when I woke up everyone was still there. Ma was still holding on to the knife.

The crowd took a break in the morning. I don’t think we had ever been as happy as we were when dawn broke that day. It gave us an elemental sense of hope, of security.

It was later that we realized that it was not only in our locality that this had happened. These incidents had occured all over the Kashmir Valley at around the same time. It was well orchestrated. It was meant to frighten us into exile.

Three hundred kilometres away, in a former palace, a man spent that night feeling absolutely helpless. Jagmohan had been sent by New Delhi to take charge as the governor of Jammu and Kashmir. On the afternoon of January 19, he had boarded a BSF plane that had brought him to Jammu. While being driven to the Raj Bhavan, he saw people lining up on both sides of the road to greet him. Jagmohan was a very popular administrator and, during a previous stint in 1986 as the governor of the state, he had won the hearts of the people by undertaking large-scale reforms. That night in Jammu’s Raj Bhavan, the phone began to ring from 10 p.m. onwards. ‘They are coming to kill us,’ a scared Pandit from somewhere in the Valley whispered to him. ‘Please ask the army to help us,’ begged another. But that night, Jagmohan was not in a position to help them at all. The administration, he knew, had collapsed completely. Some sections of the police were sympathetic to militant groups. No one was in charge. And as usual, in New Delhi, the babus in the government had no idea what was happening. On Doordarshan, as Jagmohan would recount in his memoirs later, a special programme on the ‘ethnic revolt’ in Azerbaijan was being telecast. Only a week earlier, in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, a massive crowd demanding independence from Soviet Russia had attacked the Christian Armenian community, killing hundreds in a bloodied frenzy, and looting their homes and business establishments. And oblivious to New Delhi, a similar episode was about to occur in Kashmir.

Only the gods could save the Pandits now.

The next morning, the exodus began. Families stuffed whatever little they could into a few suitcases and slipped away to Jammu. In some places, we later learnt, people had suffered worse than us the previous night.

At Draebyaar, Habba Kadal, for hours stones had been showered over Pandit houses. In several places, families were threatened. ‘Bring petrol, let’s burn them down!’ someone had shouted outside the house of father’s colleague in Jawahar Nagar. The next morning the family left, leaving the house keys with their Muslim neighbours.

Sometimes I think back to the events of the night of January 19. How does one depict the fear we felt that night? I found my answer much later in Art Spiegelman’s
Maus
, a graphic novel in which the author interviews his father, a holocaust survivor. Depicting the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, Spiegelman asks his father how it felt to be in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His father startles him by producing a loud ‘Boo!’ and says ‘it felt a little like that. But always!’ That is how we felt on the night of January 19.

Two days later, a massive procession began from our locality to Jama Masjid in downtown Srinagar. The crowd was demanding azadi. One of our Muslim neighbour’s sons was very young, not a day older than three, and he had curly brown hair. That day he went missing. A frantic search was launched for him but he was nowhere to be found. Later in the day, one of the family’s acquaintances reported that the boy had followed a few older boys to downtown Srinagar to take part in the procession. Four days later, on January 25, four unarmed personnel of the Indian Air Force were gunned down near our house. It was about 8 a.m. and the men were waiting for their bus when gunmen riding on motorcycles sprayed them with bullets. One of the dead was a squadron leader.

The slogans and the war cries from the mosque did not stop. So, in a way, every day in Kashmir after January 19 was January 19. The cries just became a little more systematic. They would begin during the night and continue till the wee hours of the morning. After a break, they would resume until late morning. Then another break and so it would go on.

Processions would stream into Srinagar from all over. There were several instances of Pandits being forced out of their homes to lead such processions. This was done to ensure that in case the paramilitary charged at the crowd or fired at it, the Pandits would become the first targets.

Initially, the first few killings of Pandits were carried out quite surgically. But as the euphoria reached its zenith, the killings turned more macabre. On February 2, a young Pandit businessman named Satish Tickoo was called out of his home by a few men and shot at point-blank range. Tickoo knew them. One of them lived nearby and often took lifts from Tickoo on his scooter. When the man whipped out a pistol, Tickoo tried to save himself by hurling his kangri at the assailants. But it missed them. The first bullet hit him in his jaw. As he fell down, the men pumped several more into his body.

Tickoo’s main assailant, the same man who often rode with him on his scooter, was identified as Farooq Ahmad Dar alias Bitta Karate. He was arrested in June that year. In a TV interview shortly afterwards, he confessed that he had killed twenty people, most of them Kashmiri Pandits and that his first kill was Tickoo. Here’s an excerpt from that interview:

Journalist: How many people did you kill?

Karate: I don’t remember.

Journalist: So you killed so many people that you don’t even remember?

Karate: Ten to twelve I must have killed.

Journalist: Ten to twelve or twenty?

Karate: You can say twenty.

Journalist: Were all of them Kashmiri Pandits? Or were there some Muslims as well?

Karate: Some Muslims as well.

Journalist: How many Muslims and how many Pandits?

[Silence …]

Journalist: So there were more Kashmiri Pandits?

Karate: Yes.

Journalist: But why so?

Karate: We had orders.

Journalist: Who was the first person you killed?

[Long silence …]

Journalist: When did you commit your first murder?

Karate: Let me think. First murder I committed was of Satish.

Journalist: Satish who?

Karate: Satish Kumar Tickoo.

Journalist: Satish Kumar Tickoo! Who was he?

Karate: I got the order from the higher up to hit him and I did that.

Journalist: Who was he?

Karate: A Pandit boy.

Though Karate spent sixteen years in jail, he was not convicted. While releasing him on bail the judge remarked:

The court is aware of the fact that the allegations levelled against the accused are of serious nature and carry a punishment of death sentence or life imprisonment but the fact is that the prosecution has shown total disinterest in arguing the case, which is in complete violation of Article 21 of the Constitution.

Karate’s case is not an outlier. In hundreds of cases of Pandit killings, not a single person was convicted. Karate has returned to normal life and has since married and become a father. In a sparse room in Jammu, on the other hand, Prithvi Nath Tickoo looks at a photograph of his son and tears well up in his eyes. ‘He (Satish) had an inkling that something would happen,’ he recalls. The father–son duo ran a medical agency. Just before he was killed, Satish had told his father that they should shift to Jammu. ‘But to avoid arousing suspicion that we were leaving, he said we shall shift our belongings gradually,’ Prithvi Nath Tickoo says. After they shifted to Jammu, the Tickoos finally sold their house for peanuts. ‘My house was three-storeyed and it had forty-seven windows,’ remembers the senior Tickoo inhaling the stale air of his windowless room.

On the morning of February 8, I was studying at home when I heard a loud noise, as if a building had collapsed. Then there was absolute silence. We came out onto the veranda, not sure whether we should venture out further. ‘I think there has been a heavy burst of firing somewhere nearby,’ father said. One of our neighbours came out on to the street and she was crying. Her son was out and she was worried about him. But, thankfully, he returned soon afterwards. He had been at the milkman’s shop buying curd, when all of a sudden there was firing followed by complete chaos. He dropped the steel pitcher he was carrying and ran away.

In a few moments, the entire locality was surrounded by BSF soldiers. A soldier positioned himself just outside our house. We climbed up to the roof to get a better view. The soldier saw us and asked us to go inside. We learnt that two BSF soldiers buying vegetables at a shop had been shot dead. The gunfire had come from the temple opposite the shop, and it had also killed the milkman from whose shop our neighbours’ son had bought curd. I knew that milkman very well. Sometimes, in the severe cold, when curd wouldn’t set, I, like my neighbour, would be sent to fetch some from him.

A day later I went to the scene of the incident with a friend to have a look. All the shops were closed. Outside the vegetable shop, bloodstains were clearly visible. A few onions lay strewn on the ground.

On the night of February 13, we learnt about yet another death, this time of Doordarshan Kashmir’s director, Lassa Kaul. The Kauls were known to my father—he knew that Kaul came from a humble background, and had, through sheer grit and determination, made it to the prestigious post. In the past few weeks, Kaul had been finding it difficult to continue working amidst threats. This had made him move, two days prior to his murder, to a guarded government accommodation. On the night of his murder, he had visited his house in Bemina to meet his handicapped father who lived there alone. An investigation conducted after his death indicated that information about his movements may have been leaked to the militants by one of his colleagues.

For days Father could not believe that Kaul was no more and that he had met such a brutal end.

I often think of those days, and I realize how Father kept deferring our departure even after the signs of what was to become of us were so clear. I think it was mainly because of the house he had built after so much struggle—the house that was our home, the house that had twenty-two rooms.

On February 22 of that year, we celebrated our last Shivratri at home. That year, we did not go to Habba Kadal to buy fish or earthenware. There was too much grief. And fear. Ma hastily cooked a meal and we performed pooja silently. We were so scared, Father did not blow our ancestral conch as he had always done, to welcome the arrival of Lord Shiva.

One of the Pandit leaders, H.N. Jattu, wrote an open letter to the JKLF, asking them to make their stand on the Kashmiri Pandits clear. The JKLF took it seriously and responded the next day.

The second day of Shivratri was one of the coldest that season. It had snowed heavily and the snow had frozen on the roads, making it quite difficult to commute. But in that weather, hundreds of buses carrying thousands of people were out in procession. The rooftops of the buses were crowded with men wearing shrouds to indicate that they were ready to die for the cause of freedom. They were on their way to the Charar-e-Sharif shrine, where the Sufi saint Nund Rishi (or
Nund Bab)
, revered by both Hindus and Muslims, was laid to rest after his death in 1438. En route, wherever they came across a Pandit, they would hurl abuses at him. Many winked and made obscene gestures at women. In Tankipora, one of Jattu’s close associates, Ashok Kumar Qazi, was accosted by three armed men. While two men held him, another shot him in his knees. As he collapsed on the road, they kicked him, making him fall into a drain. One man unzipped his trousers and sprayed piss over him. As he writhed in pain, the men fired a few more shots and killed him. His killing was the JKLF’s answer to H.N. Jattu’s letter.