BEHIND HIGH WALLS

: Will Kashmir's new colony for Pandits heal wounds or fester old ones? is it based on the assumption that the communal divide in kashmir is permanent?

RUSH mats, mortar and pestle, kangdis, utensils and the effortless Kashmiri chatter. There was nothing to tell apart the pheran clad Kashmiri Pandits from their Muslim neighbours as they hauled their belongings into their new homes in the first separate, fortified colony built for them by the state government. The frail Dulari Devi, who lost her husband and son in the 1997 massacre of seven Pandits in her village Sanghrampora, was indistinguishable in this din—lost in conversation with some Muslim men who were greeting her on her new home.

“Praise be to God. I got a house where I can die with satisfaction,” she says. Her son was a post graduate student of Kashmir University when militants dragged him out of his home with his farmer father, lined them up with five other Pandit men and shot them dead. Dulari now lives with her daughter’s family and is relieved that her daughter and her grand children finally have a shelter of their own.

Her rough brush with Kashmir’s violent days has taught her to value security. The massacre forced her to leave her village. Her family spent 10 years in a migrant Pandit colony in Budgam, which she shared with two other Pandit families. The state Government lodged 31 other Pandit families—all of them had fled to Budgam following the Sanghrampora massacre—in a guarded cluster. Now behind a 16-feet-high wall topped by barbed wire fencing and a security post at the gate, Dulari feels safe. “I have no fear. But I think the walls are necessary,” she says.

Dulari’s case typifies the Kashmiri Pandit predicament. They were battered by Kashmir’s secessionist violence, which forced them to flee the Valley in 1990, but security and rehabilitation have been at the centre of the displaced community’s demands. The Pandits face an even bigger challenge—the fear of ethnic extinction. Nothing exemplifies this better than websites like kplink.com and kashmiribhatta.in whose task is to document the names and profiles of Kashmiri Pandits in the country and their diaspora. “Knowledge about the community is fading,” say the promoters of kashmiribhatta.in.

The community is also paranoid about its institutional and religious properties in the Valley, which, it alleges, are being sold off in the absence of effective government legislation to check it.

“We are...

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