July 15, 2013: Before doing the task on hand, a warning is necessary. Those suffering from high blood pressure are advised not to read this review, nor the book, its contents are frightening. But with that one exception, the book is recommended reading for every concerned citizen. 
This book recounts how in the late 80s and 90s Kashmir Pandits were hounded out of their ancestral homes by Islamic murderers with no apology given for their heinous crime by the then rulers of Jammu & Kashmir, starting with Sheikh Abdullah. This man’s advice to Pandits was — in Kashmiri language – Raliv, Chaliv ya Galiv (be one amongst us, flee or be decimated). Thousands were decimated.
Says the back page cover: “‘Our Moon Has Blood Clots’ is the unspoken chapter in the story of Kashmir in which it was purged of the Kashmir Pandit community in a violent ethnic cleansing backed by Islamic militants. Hundreds of people were tortured and killed and about 3,50,000 Kashmir Pandits were forced to leave their homes and spend the rest of their lives as exiles in their own country.”
Rahul Pandita recounts blood-curdling instances of murder, rape, arson and looting that is as shocking as it is damning our despicable secularists from whom we haven’t had one word of sympathy. In this book, Pandita tells the blatant truth. Random House, one presumes, is not run by Vishwa Hindu Parishad, RSS or BJP stalwarts. One also presumes that its editors have checked out every fact of murder, rape and arson reported in page after page in ghastly detail. Has any Hindu retaliated to the injustice done to Kashmir Pandits? Not only did the Islamic militants kill and loot, Pandita recalls the day when “the 300-year old Baba Rishi shrine was gutted in a fire”.
To quote just a few cases of terrorism in which Islamic militants indulged. “Throughout 1990 Pandits are picked up selectively and put to death. They are killed because Kashmir needs to be cleansed of them…” From mosques every day come voices such as: “Eiy zalimon, eiy Kafirom, Kashimir hamara chod do (O tyrants, O infidels, leave our Kashmir). But then they don’t want all Kashmiris to leave. They want the women to stay back, get converted and marry or just get raped and killed.
The killing of men had no logic. It was done anywhere with total indifference. One day a young Kashmir pandit businessman was called but of his house by a few men. The moment he came out he was shot at point blank range. In another place a pandit was accosted by three Muslim militants. He was shot in his knees. As he collapsed he was kicked into a drain. One of the killers then unzipped his trouser and pissed over the naked body of the dead man. One instance that took place in 1986 comes as a more painful shock.
Major anti-Pandit riots took place in Anantnag. Writes Pandita: “Whatever the reason, the Pandits became the target. Houses were looted and burnt down, men beaten up, women raped and dozens of temples destroyed. A massive statue of the goddess Durga was brought down in the ancient Lok Bhavani Temple.” This had followed advertisements appearing in Urdu papers from various militant organisations asking Pandits to leave the Valley immediately “or face the consequences”.
Then there is the case of a brilliant scholar, secular to the core – in his prayer room he even kept a copy of the Koran – whose house was raided by some militants. The militants entered it without notice and the women were told to hand over all the jewellery they had. The women obliged. Watching this were the scholar himself and his old father. There upon the militants asked the two men to accompany them telling the family that their elders would return soon. They didn’t. Hours passed by but they were not to be seen. A day later, the police found their bodies hanging from a tree. The militants had hammered nails between the eyebrows of father and son and their bodies had been ravaged with cigarette burns. They had then been shot. Was there any apology from either the killers or from those who ruled Jammu & Kashmir? The book has many such killings reported in considerable detail.
As Pandita notes, the killings had turned into an orgy. The properties of those killed were unceremoniously confiscated. Pandita’s own 20-room ancestral house was looted. There was an earlier occasion when tribesmen barged into the house of a man called Sansar Chand Sadhu. The family was celebrating the birthday of his grandson who was in the arms of his mother. One of the tribesmen asked her to read the Kalm and then marry him. She refused. She was shot dead instantly with the child in her arms. The entire family of nine was killed. And as they were leaving one of the tribals trampled on Sansar Chand’s dead body, in utter contempt.
Contempt towards Pandits was also shown at a different level. In a bus on her way home a man had helped an old Pandit lady disembark. A fellow passenger, a Muslim woman saw this and told the man: “That woman you have helped is a Pandit; she should have been kicked out of the bus, not helped out.”
Then there is the instance of Sikh men pulled out, shot and their bodies thrown into a river, as were some children. Pandita reports many Sikh women jumping to their deaths in a river to save their honour. These tales are told in a book published not by some vengeful published, but by no less a publishing house than Random House. Our secularists have nothing to say. The feelings of some three and a half lakhs of Pandit families cruelly displaced mean nothing to them.
We live in a secular world which will not recognise the fact that in Kashmir of some 500 temples 170 of them have been badly damaged. Islamic militancy is to be accepted without questioning. That, in sum, is probably what Pandita wants to convey to his readers, if, that is, they care. In Kashmir, wrong is right.

M V KAMATH

Source: freepressjournal.com, DT. July 15, 2013.