Opinion | Lakhimpur Kheri and the Valley: A tale of two massacres and selective emotional outpouring

It’s a tale of two massacres. The different reactions and sentiment they evoke, however, make it look like they happened in different continents, not just a few hundred kilometres apart in the same nation. For one, a large section of the political elite is more than willing to queue up to meet the victims and their families. A long, arduous trip through the dusty hinterland of Uttar Pradesh doesn’t seem to tire them. Overwhelmed by the magnitude of loss and suffering, one illustrious brother and sister belonging to the country’s ‘First Family’ take the trouble to reach Ground Zero to hug the relatives of the dead. They are not alone. Their humanity flashes across a million TV screens; the event looking like a truly spontaneous outpouring of emotion. In Kashmir, a daughter loses her father . Terrorists shoot him for defying them and staying put in the Valley , an ethnically defined streak in their malignant vision of Kashmir and Kashmiriyat. It’s another matter that the victim, Makhan Lal Bindroo, a pharmacist by profession, has served the people of Kashmir, irrespective of the religion they professed. Barely a few minutes after Bindroo’s killing, terrorists gun down a roadside vendor, Virendra Paswan, hailing from Bihar, and Mohammad Shafi Lone. Two days later, on Thursday, school principal Satinder Kour and teacher Deepak Chand are also killed . The irony doesn’t end here. The details and the nature of the Lakhimpur Kheri massacre in Uttar Pradesh remain shrouded in mystery. Who is the victim? Who perpetrated the crime? It’s not clear if the driver accused of mowing down protesters was actually a victim trying to save himself from a marauding crowd armed with staffs and, possibly, swords. All one can see in the video is a car whose windshield is broken when it’s about to hit the unsuspected protesters from behind. So, who hit the car in the first place? No-one knows. In a post-truth world, however, ideological leanings and political preferences are the matrix of belief. Ironically, no prominent politician, including a former Congress president, who with his sister, gave politics a human touch in Lakhimpur Kheri, have reached out to Kashmir’s newest victims. This despite the fact that in Kashmir, there’s not an iota of doubt about the identity of the victim and the perpetrator. For many Kashmiri Pandits, the recent spate of killings is a chilling reminder of the 1990s. Sanjay Tickoo, president of Kashmiri Pandit Sangaresh Samithi, on Thursday termed the situation for Kashmiri Pandits — who stayed back in Kashmir — similar to that in the ’90s when terrorist activity was at its peak in the Valley. Taking to social media, he wrote: “Welcome back to 1990!” And ironically, like the ’90s, he felt, despite a series of dastardly killings, it was “business as usual” in the Valley! The very mention of the 1990s can be unsettling. In a country where selective amnesia is being induced in the name of secularism — an idea which our founding fathers of the Constitution debated for days but refused to give it a place in the Preamble and which found a backdoor entry during the dark days of Emergency to now claim a place of fundamental irrevocability — very little of the atrocities being meted out to the Pandits could reach the outside world. And whatever reached, turned into urban legends. Those who wanted to believe, believed. And for the rest it was manufactured history. Be that as it may, at least half-a-million Pandits were forced to leave their homes to become refugees in their own country, preferring life over death, honour over incessant humiliations. There are several heartrending stories of killings, betrayals and hardships. Of a neighbourhood “friend” who would regularly take a lift from Satish Tickoo to finally fire a bullet at him. Of B K Ganju, hidden in a drum to escape the wrath of terrorists, being exposed by a neighbour who signalled the armed men to look at the “right place”. Of the blindfolded Girja Tiku who was gang-raped by four men in a moving taxi and when she recognised one of them (“Aziz, are you here as well?” she asked), they took her to a wood-processing unit and cut her alive on a mechanical saw, as Rahul Pandita writes in his highly engaging but equally depressing book, Our Moon Has Blood Clots. The late Jagmohan, who was the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir when the exile took place, recounts in his book, My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir, how the assaults and killings of the Pandits had social approval. Kashmiri society as a whole ensured that the minorities were evicted and, if they resisted, killed. Jagmohan recalls how the police, bureaucracy, press and even hospitals were discriminatory in their support of terrorists and their backers. “I found that, notwithstanding the enormity of the crimes committed, the local police stations didn’t even have photographs of the wanted terrorists… When I called for the files of cases pertaining to serious crimes, I was appalled by the indifference and ineffectiveness. There was no investigation at all. Apart from recording the first information report, practically no action was taken,” Jagmohan wrote. The tragedy of the Pandit saga, however, isn’t just confined to the past — and the dead. It’s equally chilling about those who continue to live and face the ignominy, indifference and, worse, persecution. Rahul Pandita recounts how a Kashmiri Pandit woman working as a teacher in the Valley, as a part of the previous United Progressive Alliance government’s package that announced 6,000 jobs for Pandits in the Valley, believed that she was living in a ghetto. She couldn’t go out and when she did, she was discriminated against, threatened and harassed. “Each day we leave behind something of our identity,” Pandita quotes one woman as saying. “Yesterday, it was the freedom to sing the National Anthem; today it is the freedom to wear a bindi; tomorrow it could be our faith.” In this Orwellian world (I still prefer this word to the oft-used ‘post-truth’), the real victim is often ignored. Many times, he is blamed for inviting misfortune on himself. This explains why politicians have lined up to visit a site where the identity of the victim and the perpetrator remains vague. But they are nowhere to be seen where everything is crystal clear. The problem with several political parties, especially the Congress led by a rent-a-cause prince, who refuses to grow old despite being in his early 50s, is that they are still caught in a time warp. They are yet to realise that the era of identity politics, as pursued by them in the name of secularism — a concept which J Sai Deepak has rightly busted in his new book India That Is Bharat as having inherently Christian roots and character — is well past its sell-by date. Waking up to the political perversion put in place by vote-bank politics, India is currently witnessing a million mutinies. Those who continue to pursue the old, obsolete political manual find themselves pushed to the margins. Unfortunately, that holds true for those who look at the massacres of Uttar Pradesh and Kashmir differently, obviously through their tinted ideological glasses to suit their petty political motives.