Home, in general parlance, is something we don’t even think about; what it means or what the word entails. It’s like a default setting in the hard drive of our empirical being. Most of us know our homes and what, who, or where our home is like we know our names. It is part of that primary, almost primordial acquired piece of information, which becomes instinctual.
So, what is home? A place of origin that nurtures you; where you belong and are free from any fear of being who you are. Technically, it is our natural habitat.
Home for a majority of Kashmiri Pandits and others in Kashmir for over three decades has been a complicated abstraction. It is a bitter-sweet nostalgia; a perpetually open laceration through the heart, which refuses to completely heal; an imperfect, frail yet a joyful utopia (at least in memories); an “Eldorado” never to be traced back by our dislocated selves even when we reach it physically. Home is indeed where our heart is but heartbreakingly for us, hearts are the only place we can find our home, anymore.
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Socio-politically, Kashmiri Pandits were ethnically cleansed or as per the rationale of those responsible for crimes, Kashmir was finally now a land of pure. Recently, this dichotomy of pure and impure, insider and outsider, collaborator and defector, has caught the wind, and eventually like everything that catches wind in Kashmir this time too it has ended up drawing the blood of innocents.
For a miniscule minority which in its living spirit endured the never-ending nightmare and is still present there or have returned, these targeted killings bring back the memories of the cold nights of three decades ago accompanied with existential despair, sheer helplessness of being on the mercy of those have nothing but empty words and promises for them. What can one do? Run for life or accept life in fear or just get singled out for your beliefs and be murdered. In Kashmir, these are the only real choices for any individual from minority or someone who doesn’t follow the diktats of the so-called “unknown/unidentified gunmen”.
They say “pen is mightier than the sword” but to date anyone who has wielded a pen against the sword in Kashmir has been murdered, driven out, and brutally silenced. Maybe, after all, pens are not mightier than the Kalashnikovs. Moreover, those wielding pens against the guns in Kashmir have seldom gotten any support, and their sacrifice any recognition from so-called champions of liberty elsewhere. Politics and ideology do make some strange bedfellows. The contention of how pure Kashmir has become is for everyone to see but it sure has become a graveyard. In the context of the human spirit, this notion of purity or azaadi (liberty) in or of Kashmir has never been and never will be anything but an elaborate farce.
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Pakistan-backed communal jihadis and their followers in furore of establishing “nizam-e-Mustafa” and to create a new pure Kashmir demolished the very habitat which though was not perfectly secular, harmonious, or idyllic yet had its tolerances. This loss of habitat was not just for Kashmiri Pandits who got exiled but also other minorities, and the majority of Kashmiri Muslims too. After the forced exodus of Pandits, Kashmir is no longer a home that it was or was supposed to be and though it is not as conspicuous and not many still in Kashmir would admit it explicitly, yet the absence of Pandits in Kashmir for the last 30 years has left a void. This void is not just demographic or socio-cultural but also psychological and even ontological. And, efforts have been made right from the start to fill it with false justifications, elaborate lies, conspiracy theories, and even nostalgic stories of brotherhood and love which tread on the perilous porous demarcation between fiction and truth.
The recent killings are nothing but a bid to make this loss of habitat irreversible and to forever trap Kashmir in a permanent time capsule of unending desolation/dislocation. Thus, as of now, there doesn’t exist any home in Kashmir for anyone. At the same time, it is now a tipping choice for a majority populace of Kashmir; do they want to let their home slip further to all-engulfing dark hole of humanity, which they themselves might have to flee one day, or are they ready to rebuild the home that we carry in our hearts? As the latter would have to be constructed from scratch again. The heart that our souls painfully yearn and long for will have to be founded again. And needless to say, the habitat will have to be re-designed, and a period of acclimatisation will have to be endured again.
The writer is a Delhi-based public policy professional, working as an independent analyst and a development consultant. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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