PUNE: To mark the 30th year since the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits (KPs) from Kashmir, the community members based in Pune organised an exhibition on the life of people, who had to live in tents and were forced to leave their homes in Kashmir Valley.
Several generations of Kashmiri Pandits were present and narrated how they have survived for the past 30 years. The exhibition was held on the ground of Ajeenkya DY Patil University campus in Lohegaon on Sunday. Many tents were erected to showcase their ‘refugee’ lives in camps in Jammu.
After the abrogation of Article 370, the Kashmiri Pandits want to return to their homeland and re-establish their culture. To do so they demand the establishment of Panun Kashmir, a proposed union territory in the Kashmir Valley, which is intended to be a homeland for Kashmiri Hindus.
Rohit Bhat, an engineer, said, “The declaration of Kashmir as Union territory has been of no benefit to us yet as we are still a minority over there. Our old homes are either burnt and destroyed or inaccessible to us. I cannot live with the people who killed my family. We have struggled and faced extreme living conditions, which many couldn’t survive. We still exist and we want what should be rightfully ours because any community is zero without its land, without its roots.”
He said, “My children have lived a much more stable and privileged life, but we have to keep our legacy alive. They must know what their people have gone through, their suffering because if not our own people then who else will carry our history forward?”
Rahul Kaul, President of Youth 4 Panun Kashmir, said, “We were cast out of our land because we supported our nation. We had the option of accepting Islam and we would have been welcomed with open arms but as Pakistanis. We chose to be Indian and that led us being driven out of our homes and the killing of our people. We are called refugees and immigrants even though we are as Indian as anyone else in the country. All we ask from the government is a permanent solution and it is not just for a few hundred of us either. There are more than three lakh of us without a place to call home. We have faced mass exodus seven times so far. If we return this time we want an assurance that we won’t have to run for our lives again. The government refuses to accept that genocide happened to us. Unless they do so, the cycle will never end.”
The third generation of Kashmiri Pandits since the exodus made it clear that the struggle for reclamation of land won’t fade away with older generations.
“Although we can’t share the empathy as we haven’t lived it, we believe that it needs to be passed on from generation to generation because we won’t be aware of it anyway else,” said law student Anushka Kaul.
Shehjar Kaul, a journalism student, added, “To go where you belong and yet not be able to call it home, that’s beyond sad. We want our land back and would go their occasionally too as we can’t just abandon our lives here but it is a necessary step in rebuilding our culture and our right.”
An elderly woman broke into tears while recalling her life in the Valley. “We had a three-storeyed house with all facilities. Life turned upside down and we were forced to live in tents,” she narrated her ordeal.
