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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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