Genocide and

We cannot be selective about

the past in Jammu & Kashmir |
Opinion
if we’re going to recall what’s happened to Pandits in 1990, then it’s wrong not to
remember what happened to Muslims in Jammu in 1947. Hundreds of thousands
were killed or expelled
COLUMNS  Updated: Sep 15, 2019 10:38 IST

Karan Thapar

Kashmiri Pandits protesting for their rights.(HT File Photo (Representational image))

     

These days, we hear a lot about what happened to Kashmiri Pandits

in 1990. It’s often described as “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide”.
For some, it’s justification for the recent de-operationalisation of
Article 370. But not a word is spoken about what happened to
Muslims in Jammu five decades earlier. That’s been completely
forgotten. Yet, as Wajahat Habibullah, who was divisional
commissioner (Kashmir) in 1990, when the Pandits were targeted,
tells me this was “even more a case of genocide or ethnic
cleansing”.
Now, it’s not my intention to diminish what happened to the
Pandits. That was unacceptable and unforgivable. It was completely
wrong. My aim is to tell you about the forgotten story of Jammu
Muslims in 1947. If it’s right we should never forget or forgive the
treatment of Pandits, then we have no excuse not to remember and
continually condemn what was done to Jammu’s Muslims.

First, a little correction about the Pandit story. We’re told nearly
300,000 were thrown out of the Valley. Official records, however,
suggest different numbers. In March 2010, the state government
informed the legislature that of the total number of 150,000 Pandits,
24,202 families migrated in January 1990. At five persons per
family, that comes to 121,010 people. The number of Pandits killed
between 1989 and 2004 is put at 219.

Habibullah puts the figures a little higher. He says the total number
of Pandits in 1990 was 200,000. After the migration that year,
20,000 were left. Over the next quarter century, that’s come down to
around 3,500 people.

I turn now to Jammu just after Independence in 1947. At the time, it

was a Muslim-majority city. But literally, in weeks, communal riots,
mass killings and forced migration turned it into a Hindu-majority
one. Both contemporary accounts and those of historians put the
numbers killed or expelled in hundreds of thousands.
Writing in The Spectator in January 1948, Horace Alexander says:
“Hindus and Sikhs of the Jammu area … apparently with at least the
tacit consent of state authorities, have driven many thousands of
their Muslim neighbours from their homes”. Citing Mahatma
Gandhi, he asserts “some two hundred thousand are … not
accounted for”. Christopher Snedden, in Kashmir: The Unwritten
History, estimates between 70,000 and 237,000 Muslims were
killed. Arjun Appaduri and Arien Mack in India’s World believe
200,000 could have been killed and a further 500,000 displaced.
Last year, the columnist Swaminathan Aiyar wrote: “In sheer scale
this far exceeded the ethnic cleansing of Pandits five decades later”.

So why is a horror of this scale not remembered? Habibullah, who’s

written about it in My Kashmir: The Dying of the Light, suggests
two reasons. First, it occurred when communal riots and brutal
massacres were happening right across northern India. In that bigger
outrage, this smaller tragedy seems to have been forgotten.

His second reason is intriguing. Sheikh Abdullah, then the

undisputed leader of the Kashmir Valley, who one would have
expected to draw attention to this massacre, deliberately chose to
ignore it because the Muslims of Jammu did not support his
National Conference, but leaned towards Jinnah’s Muslim League.
The Sheikh’s politics seems to have silenced his conscience.
I realise that in terms of how much has changed since 1990, leave
aside 1947, India is a very different country today. I also accept we
need to move on and must not keep reliving the past. But if we’re
going to recall what’s happened to Pandits in 1990, then it’s wrong
– actually immoral – not to remember what happened to Muslims in
1947.

This is not a matter of intellectual honesty, though it’s that as well.

It goes far deeper. It touches upon the unity of the multiple peoples
and their identities that constitute India. We need to be conscious of
all of them. If our memory becomes selective, it also becomes one-
sided and that could divide us. We could end up a very different
country to the one we want to be.

Karan Thapar is the author of Devil’s Advocate: The

Untold Story

Hindustan: history of genocide and

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Shahrukh Mehboob
March 07, 2020

After 73 years of bloody partition, the Delhi riots and bloodshed have
recalled the horrors of Indo-Pak partition. Like bungalows and
mansions were burned and looted, women were raped, children were
killed in front of their siblings. After decades Delhi is facing the same
violence and chaos under the fascist government of Narendra Modi.

India’s capital is grappling with the aftermath of the worst

communal violence in Delhi in decades. The group, the Akhil Bharatiya
Vidya Parishad (ABVP), is the youth wing of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which was founded 94 years ago by men
who were besotted with Mussolini’s fascists, the RSS is the holding
company of Hindu supremacism of Hindutva. According to the role
and its size, it is difficult to find an analog for the RSS anywhere in the
world. In nearly every faith, the source of conservative theology is it’s
hierarchical, that theology is recast into a project of religious statecraft
elsewhere, by other parties. Hinduism, though, has no principal
church, no single pontiff, nobody to ordain or rule. The RSS has
appointed itself as both the arbiter of theological meaning and the
architect of a Hindu nation-state. It has at least 4 million volunteers,
who swear oaths of allegiance and take part in quasi-military drills.
The word often used to describe the RSS is “paramilitary”. In its near-
century of existence, it has been accused of plotting assassinations,
stoking riots against minorities and acts of terrorism. (Mahatma
Gandhi was shot dead in 1948 by an RSS man, for having a soft
corner for Muslims.) The RSS doesn’t, by itself, engage in electoral
politics. But among its affiliated groups is the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), the party that has governed India for the past six years, and
that has, under the murderous Prime Minister Narendra Modi, been
remaking India into an authoritarian, Hindu nationalist state.

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Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Muslims have been facing

mounting threats to their status in the Majority- Hindu country. A week
back they were walloped by new worrisome development. The new
legislation of the “ Citizenship Amendment Act “which is closely linked
with “India’s National Register of Citizens” has turned religion into
means of deciding whom to treat as an illegal immigrant and whom to
fast track for citizenship. This act is bringing chaos and religious war in
the whole state. Delhi the capital of India has been shrouded with the
blood of Muslims.
These riots and massacres with Muslims in India have enough
resemblance with Nazi revolt when Hitler deprived Jews of their
fundamental rights. In November 1938 the German government
encouraged its supporters to burn down synagogues and smash up
Jewish homes, shops, businesses, schools. At least 91 Jews and
probably many more were killed by Nazi supporters egged on by
Joseph Goebbels, the minister for public enlightenment and
propaganda, in what became known as Kristallnacht “The Night of
Broken Glass”. It was a decisive staging post on the road to mass
genocide. On 23 February 2020 in Delhi, Hindu nationalist mobs
roamed the streets burning and looting mosques together with Muslim
homes, shops and businesses. They killed and burned alive Muslims
who could not escape and the victims were largely unprotected by the
police. At least 137 people, almost all Muslims, were killed and many
others have beaten half to death: a two-year-old baby was stripped by
a gang to see if he was circumcised as Muslims usually are, but
Hindus are not. Some Muslim women pretended to be Hindus to
escape.

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Government complicity was not as direct as in Germany 82 years

earlier, but activists of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, were reported as being in the
forefront of the attacks on Muslims. A video was published showing
Muslim men, covered in blood from beatings, being forced to lie on the
ground by police officers and compelled to sing patriotic songs. Modi
said nothing for several days and then made a vague appeal for
“Peace and brotherhood”.

Under the slogan of “everything is fine” the government’s real attitude

towards the violence was shown when it instantly transferred a judge
critical of its actions during the riots. Judge Muralidhar of the Delhi
High Court was hearing petitions about the violence when he said that
the court could not allow “another 1984” to happen, referring to the
killing of 3,000 Sikhs by mobs in Delhi in that year after the
assassination of former prime minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh
bodyguards.

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Accusations of fascist behavior by present-day political leaders and

their governments, similar to that of fascist regimes in Germany, Italy,
and Spain in the 1930s and 1940s, should not be made lightly. Yet
Modi and the BJP appear closer than other right-wing regimes to
traditional fascism in their extreme nationalism and readiness to use
violence. At the center of their agenda is their brand of Hindu
nationalism and a relentless bid to marginalize or evict India’s 200
million Muslims.

The rest of the world has been slow to grasp the gravity of what is
happening in India because the Modi government has played down its
project to shift India away from its previous status as a pluralistic
secular state. The sheer number of people negatively affected by this
change is gigantic, if the Muslim minority in India was a separate
country then it would be the eighth largest state in the world by
population.

The violence in Delhi this week stems from the fear and hatred
generated by the government directed pincer movement against
Muslims in India. One pincer is in the shape of the Citizenship
Amendment Act (CAA), under which non-Muslim migrants can swiftly
gain Indian citizenship but Muslims cannot. Even more threatening is
the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which is likely to deprive
many Indian Muslims of their citizenship. It was the non-violent
protests and demonstrations opposing these measures that provoked
the Hindu nationalist mobs into staging what was close to a pogrom
earlier this week. Just how far Modi and the BJP will go in their anti-
Muslim campaign is already in evidence in Jammu and Kashmir, the
one Indian state with a Muslim majority. Mass detentions and torture
are the norms according to the few witnesses able to report what they
have seen.
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Yesterday it was Kashmir and Assam, today its Delhi, now what’s next
for millions homeless Muslims? India’s rapid saffronisation threatens
the secular and democratic ethos India has cultivated over the
decades. Though this genocide and communal violence in the state, is
bringing a radical break with this history and has greatly strain the
pluralistic fabric of fascist democratic India.