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K
Ps, groping in a lightless tunnel
Sreeram
Chaulia
“India
lacks a national policy or institutional legal
framework concerning internally displaced persons. Moreover,
the government systematically refers to internally displaced
persons as 'migrants'. At the same time, India shuns
international scrutiny and thereby denies international
humanitarian access to internally displaced.” This is the
judgement of the Global IDP Project, the research database of
the Norwegian Refugee Council that advocates for the 25-30
million civilians worldwide who have been forced to flee
generalised violence, civil war and serious human rights
victimisation, but could not manage to cross over into another
country to claim refugee status.
Even
as some of the poorest and most backward parts of Asia, Africa
and South America are realising the devastating impact of war
on unarmed innocents sandwiched inside borders, implementing
legislation and inviting international aid to succour the
internally displaced, India, host to more than 350,000
Kashmiri Hindu IDPs, has callously avoided a policy that can
lead to durable solution of the violent tragedy afflicting a
religious minority hailing from Muslim-majority Kashmir.
Languishing in makeshift camps of Jammu and Delhi with minimum
nutritional and medical benefits, Kashmiri Hindu IDPs (also
known as the ‘Pandits’) are unenviable holders of the
‘homeless and persecuted’ identity card for 12 long years.
Thanks to the total negligence and insensitivity of the
government of India, they are grovelling in a lightless
tunnel, in a baleful dark night that never turns into dawn.
What
are the roots of apathy towards this hapless population which
was religiously cleansed by militant Islamists from its
original home in the Kashmir valley in 1990-91?
Firstly,
and this is the consensus of the IDPs themselves, the queer
logic of the ‘number game’ in Indian democracy makes
350,000 demoralised and disorganised citizens a zilch as far
as a vote bank is concerned. No major political party, be it
in Jammu & Kashmir state or at the national level, finds
the right to return of the IDPs worthy of patronage or
highlighting because they are too few in number to matter in
winning elections. Indian democracy has been reduced to the
farce called ‘electoral democracy’, where polarisation of
votes is achieved by latching on to divisive issues like caste
and religion. ‘What election has ever been won on the
idealistic plank of restoring IDP human rights?’, ask the
power-hungry politicos. Even if all the Kashmiri Hindu IDPs
were to vote en masse for one party, their impact on
the result would be minimal. Small and unassertive fish, like
the millions of Indians who live below poverty level, are
therefore abandoned by Indian democracy to their listless
destiny.
Secondly,
the government of India uses Kashmiri Hindu IDPs as a
psychological talking point to prove how rapacious
Pakistan-sponsored terrorism is in Kashmir. The fact that the
IDPs were victims of a Kashmir valley-wide fundamentalist
upsurge that instilled fear through dreadful kidnappings,
murders and warning chants of Kashmir Mein Rehna Hain To
Allahu Akbar Kehna Hain (If you want to live in Kashmir,
convert to Islam), is indeed proof of the devastating impact
of the rise of Islamist terrorism in a once peaceful region.
However, for the Indian government, which is accused of
disallowing self-determination of the majority Muslims in
Kashmir, the existence of Kashmiri Hindu IDPs is desirable as
it allows for a balancing of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’
According to Delhi’s convoluted rationale, if Kashmiri
Muslims do not wish to remain part of India and India is
morally wrong in denying them their own choice, then Pakistan
is morally worse by sending in armed jihadis who drove the
Pandits out of their homes.
As
long as the IDPs remain outside their homes, Indian officials
can indulge in slanging matches with the Pakistani government
about who is wrong and who is right. In case the IDPs returned
in safety and dignity, two essential conditions
of IDP return as per the UN Guiding Principles on Internal
Displacement, the Indian government will feel that it is on a
weaker moral wicket vis-à-vis Pakistan. No political analyst
has viewed Kashmiri Hindu IDPs as caught between the crossfire
of India and Pakistan, but this is very much the case. Pandits
still have hopes of returning home to their pre-conflict
property, professions and free life in the valley, but with
every passing year, solutions appear more and more like
chimeras.
A
third reason for India’s inaction on IDP rehabilitation is
its inability to improve conditions of return inside
insurgency-ridden Kashmir valley. UN Guiding Principle 28
states, “Competent authorities have the primary duty and
responsibility to establish conditions, as well as provide the
means, which allow internally displaced persons to return
voluntarily to their homes or places of habitual residence.”
The onus is on the state to establish law and order, curb
threats to minorities and create space for the reintegration
of returnees. India’s failure to defeat Pakistan-sponsored
Islamist terrorism in Kashmir for the last twelve years,
despite maintaining a huge army presence and issuing several
spiels that its “patience is running out”, renders talk of
returning IDPs impractical.
The
new Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir, Mufti Mohammad
Sayeed, rhetorically claims that his government will organise
voluntary repatriation of IDPs and welcome the Hindus back
with open arms. One glance at the violence graph in the valley
and the unending attacks on Hindus and Sikhs and their
religious shrines by Islamist gunmen will demonstrate that
Mufti is merely paying lip service to a now- forgotten idyll
of Kashmiri Sufi Muslim tolerance toward all faiths. The
younger generation of majority Kashmiris that is coming to age
has been brought up on Jamaat-I-Islami propaganda that
Hindus are “Indian agents” (mukhbir). Animosity in
the valley’s mosques for a trickle-back return of Hindu IDPs
is comparable to the impossible hostility encountered by
Serbian IDPs who wish to return to Kosovo.
The
fourth reason for Indian ineptness at assisting its own
citizens who are now IDPs is a long-held Ostrich mentality in
Delhi about ‘internationalising the Kashmir dispute.’
While India understandably feels it is conventionally superior
to Pakistan and does not need third party mediation or
intervention, the unfortunate fall-out of this protective and
defensive strategy has been the shielding of Hindu IDPs from
much-needed international humanitarian aid. In January 2003,
the government of Pakistan allowed the International Rescue
Committee, a leading American non-sectarian refugee relief
NGO, to distribute food and blankets to temporary IDPs in
Pakistani Kashmir who were forced to escape their border
villages due to cross-border shelling. But the Indian
government, which has an instinctive mistrust of ‘internationalisation’,
has never allowed relief aid from UN or other impartial
agencies to reach the protracted, near-permanent Kashmiri IDPs
in Jammu and other parts of India.
One
striking parallel to the case of the Pandits is the relatively
better situation of some 280,000 Georgian IDPs who were
defenestrated from the Abkhazia region by Islamist fanatics
after the USSR’s collapse. The Georgian government, in
contrast to the lackadaisical Indian government, invited
international attention as soon as the expulsions of the
Christian IDPs from Abkhazia began. World involvement
prevented mortality rates to shoot up in the immediate
aftermath of the exodus and gradually stabilised IDPs in
settlements in interior parts of Georgia. Today, humanitarian
NGOs run psychosocial counselling centres and employment
bureaus to enable IDPs to find employment while in exile. The
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees acts as a
lifeline for the IDPs, concentrating on housing and property
restitution for potential returnees and supporting a network
of jurists who provide advice to the IDPs on their legal
rights. Kashmiri Pandits, on the other hand, are resigned to
cruel fate, unaware of their rights and struggling to make
ends meet. Summing up the sorry state of the IDPs is the
community’s lugubrious label for itself- Sharanarthi Apne
Hi Desh Mein (“refugees in our own country.”)
In
conclusion, I submit that the plight of Kashmiri Hindu IDPs is
not just an integral part of the ‘Tragedy of Kashmir’, but
also of the much-talked-about ‘Kashmir Problem.’ If
Kashmir is a tale of justice denied and of rights trampled,
the Pandits have been its most visible demonstration. As the
international community increasingly recognises the rights of
civilians against arbitrary displacement and in favour of
rightful return, the government of India’s haphazard and ad
hoc response to IDPs in general and Kashmiri Hindu IDPs in
particular, is anachronistic and anti-democratic.
Are
Vajpayee and his mandarins listening? Even if they are, do
they care?
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