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| " Why India won't remember the day Kashmiri Pandits were left to die:- Kundan Kashmiri. | | | |  New Delhi Jan 19(chief Bureau)
The kashmiri pandit conference party leader Kundan kashmiri expressed grief and sorrow over the situations of minority community of state and said that Why India won't remember the day Kashmiri Pandits were left to die. He said more that January 19, 1990, a date etched in our collective memory, a date that is hard to forget no matter how hard one tries to erase the memories of that night but they come back to haunt us again and again.
The January 19, 1990 did not happen in a day. For years, Pakistan kept training and indoctrinating many young Kashmiri Muslims to wage a jihad against India in Kashmir. Training camps were being operated in PoK and many Kashmiri Muslim boys were being trained to fight the infidels. Armed with Kalashnikovs and the ideology of hate these terrorists came back to Kashmir to kill, maim and separate Kashmir from India. It wasn’t as if the state government or the central government did not know that all this was happening, but almost as if in a tacit understanding with the terrorists it did nothing to tackle the surge of terrorism. On the contrary, the NC government kept releasing dreaded terrorists. During all this time, the writ of the terrorists went unchallenged. The National Conference government had run away and abdicated all its responsibilities and there was no administration at all.
The Kashmiri Pandits were sitting ducks waiting to be murdered.
From all sides there was just one cry that was to drive away Kashmiri Pandits. There were so many horrifying slogans, but most horrifying was that they want Kashmir to become Pakistan without Pandit men but with their women. It was this last slogan that terrified Kashmiri Pandits more than the fear of imminent death. Most families hid their womenfolk in attics or store rooms and gave them clear instructions to kill them just in case the crowd barged in. This was the night of doom and gloom one that refused to end. The darkness hid faces of people who were our friends and neighbours, our classmates and teammates, ones we had grown up with, yet those who were baying for our blood or wanting to rape our daughters and sisters.
The message was loud and clear. Raliv Galiv ya Chaliv - Join us, Die or Flee.There wasn’t one village, one street, one locality, one society where these slogans weren’t shouted. The pre-planned and well orchestrated mobs that had descended on the streets of Kashmir left no one in doubt about the fate that awaited Kashmiri Pandits. As usual the administration or police was nowhere to be seen or heard of. It was an era when there was no social media and no mobile phones, and telephone density in Kashmir was next to nil. The unthinkable was to be done. Most Kashmiri Pandits started packing whatever little they could under the given circumstances and started fleeing to save their honour and lives. People fled in whatever they could. They hid under canvas covers of trucks, left in buses, hired taxis. The exodus had started. The government, intelligentsia, the seculars, the conscience keepers of this nation - all had gone to sleep. No one even talked about it.
The days that followed the night of January 19, 1990 saw Kashmiri Pandits being killed in scores every day. Atrocities against KPs had become the order of the day. From one corner of Kashmir to another corner of valley there was hardly a day when Kashmiri Pandits weren’t been killed. Most brutal forms of torture from gouging out of eyes, to cutting genitals, to burning bodies with cigarette butts and even chopping off body parts were used to kill
The exodus meanwhile carried on. By 1991, most of Kashmiri Pandits had fled the valley. They were housed in huge inhospitable torn tented camps on the fringes of Jammu city and other places. More than 50,000 families had fled and were living in camps which were bereft of even basic facilities like toilets. Each family was allotted a tent, sometimes more than 10 members shared a ramshackle tent where privacy was literally non-existent. In these camps, deaths were reported because of disease, more because of snakebites and, as the summer came, hundreds died of sun stroke and heat. No one seemed to bother. Neither the state administration nor the champions of human rights. No international aid agencies came to their rescue, neither did the government of India. The Kashmiri Pandits were left to die.
Now very very little Kashmiri Pandits were living in Kashmir . The process of ethnic cleansing continued in Kashmir with terrorists and a lot of Kashmiri Muslim population burning and desecrating shrines and temples of Hindu worship. Looting and arson took place in abandon. Thousands of Pandit homes, hundreds of temples were burnt and razed to ground. The land was later encroached upon. All this was happening in a multicultural, secular India but the secularists did not seem bothered.
. As we stand today, not one person has been convicted, leave alone punished for the killing of more than a thousand Kashmiri Pandits. No commission of enquiry on the lines of 1984 anti Sikh riots or 2002 post Godhra riots has ever been commissioned to go into the cause of killings and exodus of Kashmiri Pandits. No government has bothered to go after the murderers of Kashmiri Pandits. As our homes lie deserted, encroached and our temples in ruins, we stand at the verge of extinction, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue bothering either our political parties or the so called human rights activists.
" Get together to save your community " | | | | |
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