Diaspora: Internal and External Threats

Diaspora: Internal and External Threat

More than a decade after the Kashmir Brahmins known as pandits left the valley, a national daily still uses the word “forced” within quotes to indicate that there is a qualified meaning the reporter attaches to how the pandits moved out of their birthplace. Jagmohan who was governor of Jammu and Kashmir is alleged to have made the pandits take government bounty and move into relief camps. The camps turned into refugee camps and then transit points for the community member to migrate to other parts of the country and overseas. They had no identity crisis till 1988 and immediately after that. I had stayed in Kashmir for a fortnight with my family in the closing days of 1988 and the beginning of 1989. More than 50,000 pandit families lived in the state. The Brahmins lived cheek by jowls with the Muslims and there was no ill feeling between the two. When my wife wanted to buy kahva, local tea, a Muslim trader dealing in tea as a matter of fact suggested us to contact his fellow trader, a Hindu, for quality. Similarly most of the banks and offices were manned by the pandits with no discernible unease among the clients. Two decades later my daughter works in Lifeline hospital of Nashik but lives in a flat owned by a Kashmiri pandit lady. Both the landlady and the tenant are quite friendly, ala members of a family. Pandits and Muslims follow lunar calendar. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” By shifting the pandits to camps did Jagmohan think that ‘Good fences make good neighbours”?

Dispersal entails the crisis of collective identity. Excepting 5000 families still living in refugee camps all others have left. A closely knit community with its age old traditions and mores is now exposed to diverse cultures, national and global. Delhi based Dr HL Saraf may use www.kashmiribhatta.in to hold the community together in matters of locating families and individuals, popularizing traditions and festivals, acquainting historical facts, geographical details, pilgrimage sites or tourists places and features of prominent personalities to fellow community members, but their world has been transformed beyond repair.

Insurgency in one place and economic and social insecurity in another is raising walls between people. The gujjar agitation of 2007 will go down as another hall mark of a closely knit community forced to fend for itself as it discovers its neighbours turning into avenging doppelgangers. Their juggernaut for getting reservation put them at loggerheads with the Meenas. Villages and localities marked out and barricaded would have produced yet another exodus had not the storm subsided, at least for the time being. However convener of Gurjar Aarakhshan Sangarsh Samiti Kirori Singh Bhainsala is far from being pacified as he has gained support from UP Chief Minister Mayawati for reservation. Across the breadth of the country from there, in Assam the situation is simmering. The tribals there hate fellow tribals from Orissa and Bihar and other neighbouring states. They call them adivasis. The tribals of Assam enjoy reservation which they do not want to be extended to the tribals who have migrated from neighbouring states. The violence in the state has often triggered migration. The society teeters on the verge of collapse but veers into a pause. The lull in the storm has not brought the tornado as yet.

But the early straw in the wind blew from Nashik and Mumbai from February 3rd onward. The news that more than ten thousand northerners were leaving Mumbai in packed trains was the early straw in the wind. The storm has weakened in force but has not died down altogether. But the very possibility of such storm around the land is a cause of concern for all right thinking people whose concern should be not parochialism but nationalism. Targeting and vandalizing property and people from the north cannot be nationalistic by any yardstick. Equally reprehensible is the talk of arming with sticks or swords one section against another.

If the situation does not stabilize then the worst scenario would inevitably be “riot to rout.” First there would be riots, then forced migration, blockades and the scourge of these: bloodbath. That is the staple course of partition. We have had one and no one would like another. In the worst scenario the multiple identities will boil down to the religious identity. It is this identity that walls others out and walls ours in. That is what had happened in Ahemdabad in 1986 the agitation against reservation launched by the upper castes had turned against the Muslims.

The Bihari-UP diaspora in Mumbai is still entrenched in the economic capital of the country. There is Maharashtrian diaspora in Barkatpura of Hyderabad or in Vadodra in Gujarat or Ujjain and Gwaliar in Madhya Pradesh. There is no tension in these latter places as there are no fire eaters holding out threats to people who speak different languages than their own.

If the Indian state does not exercise its power the situation is still fluid and can turn volatile. People offering sun prayer in Chowpatty or molesting migrant family members in Nashik may turn out to be the last straw on the back of the camel.

However the situation has gone beyond that in some places. In Kashmir a significant factor for violence has been the support of the Mirpuri Kashmiri diaspora in England. In the Jaffna peninsula in Sri Lanka the Tamil diaspora in the west has contributed by funds what the Tamils of Tamil Nadu have given in moral support. The Gujarati diaspora in England and America has such economic clout that now it wants Narendra Modi to be the next Prime Minister. It was also held responsible for transferring funds collected for the development of the backward Hindus to funding the pogroms of Muslims in Gujarat 2002. There are reports of food and wine pouches supplied along with cash to the marauders. This fits in the picture of Samuel Huntington’s tertiary support of the clash of civilizations. As he observes that ‘the most devoted and whole hearted support for the primarily level parties [in a conflict] normally comes from diaspora communities who intensely identify with the cause of their kin and become ‘more Catholic than the Pope’”