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| Migrants' return to Valley out of question: Pandita | | Food for Kashmiri Pandits' thought | | BL KAK
NEW DELHI | JAN 29
The return of uprooted Kashmiri Pandits to the Valley "is out of question", KN Pandita has pronounced. While ruling out his co-religionists' return to Muslim Valley, Pandita, who has been in the thick of Kashmiri Pandit community's "struggle with destiny" for a long time, has placed himself on record, saying: "For the first ime in a thousand years, we (Kashmiri Pandits) have breathed the air of freedom outside the mountain-curtained Valley of Kashmir".
In his latest write-up carried by 'Paannyaar', an 8-page publication of news and views of Kashmiri Pandits in Noida (UP), KN Pandita's observation on the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits (KPs) from the Valley in the early 1990: "We have been released from the prison house of discrimination, suppression and degradation. We have opened our wings for soaring into the skies and scaling ther heights. This is a rare and unique opportunity for us and our future generations. Let us seize it by our teeth. We have come to the Indian plains with our centuries old ethos, good or bad whatever. We are essentially and historically the people given to intellectual exercise. Professionally we are circumspect".
Admitting that Kashmiri Pandits are "dismally inexperienced" in economic, commercial, entrepreneurial and political spheres of life, Pandita says that while enterprise, initiative and innovation, the essential pre-requisites for a communitty's march onwards to prosperity, have remained trampled under eight hundred years of "brutal suppresion by our adversaries", it will take "us time to come out of that syndrome and look around for these and other new avenues, especially business, managerial and military services". Pandita, who has toured a number of countries in the past one decade or so, has noted: "No land is foreign to us, no territory is alien to us especially the developed world. On the Indian soil it may be dificult for us to maintain our identity, but on a foreign soil, all necessary conditions are available to create, perpetuate and propagate our true identity. This is because we have all the requisite qualifications to make us the true citizens of the world. These qualifications need to be pout to use".
KN Pandita has predicted: "The next generation (of Kashmiri Pandits) will move away intellectually. It will look for space horicontally as well as vertically. In this period, most of our chosen intellectual youth should and will be drawn ro politics and power on national as well as regional level. Our top students will make entry into administrative structures of the country. Our more energetic youth, equipped with linguistic skills, will make room for themselves in political and mas media structures of the country and our emerging entreprenuers will become components of its commercial and economic machine. Thus, by next two or three decades, the community will have put under wrap its saga of exile and exodus; it will have overcome the nightmare of discrimination and suppression".
Pandita, who has played a key role in recent years while conveying what he himself has termed as "piognan saga of our suffering" to international community, has sent out a message of importance to the members of his community: "It is futile to waste our time and energy in running after the Indian political clas for the amelioration of our conditon as it is today. We are nobody's vote bank because we are numerically insignificant--a non entity--and economically bankrupt. Therefore we are a liability, a stinking lot. Being a pariah no political group in this cousntry would own us, do whatever modus of servitude we may. The Indian media considers it a sin to talk a word about us except in negative terms. The saffronites exploit us, the khadiites despise us, and the reds club us with bourgeoise".
Pandita, at the same time, seems deeply upset by the far-from-impressive behaviour of the community of Kashmiri Pandits (KPs) in exile. No wonder, his outbursts of anger: "In Jammu, in particular, where we have a concentration, enormous money is weasted in the building of ashrams, shrines and institutions after this or that saint givng them the new epithet of 'Bubs'. One wonders why we are going along a regressive and not a progressive path". And Pandita has thrown up two important questions: Why don't KPs build technical schools, polyclinics, craft centres, nursing schools, computer learning centres, centres for preparing studfents for professional and competitive exams, gyms, play grounds and the like? What are these ashrams going to dofor the 'destitue' commnity of KPs?
Pandita's yet another important message for the KPs: The loss of a home and the homeland is a situation that has not happened to Kashmiri Pandits only. Human history is replete with this saga. Remember that refugees and migrants have created great civilizations in human history, civilizations along the course of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Oxus, the Danube, the Seine, the Indus, and the Ganges and lately on the Potomac.
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