Our Moon has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir by Rahul Pandita;Published by Penguin Books ; Pages 258 ;Price Rs 399/- ****************************** The book under review is journalist Rahul Pandita’s memoirs of his family’s flight from the Muslim-dominated Kashmir Valley during the onset of the violent insurgency. Pandita is the author of the bestselling Hello, Bastar: the Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement and co-author of the critically acclaimed The Absent State. Traumatised by the pain, drudgery and hardship of exile, the Homemaker withers away. Her son picks up the pieces in this account of his family. Rahul Pandita was a young 14 year old when his family was forced into exile, first from the valley to Jammu and subsequently to Delhi. In this, he and his family joined thousands of others, mainly Kashmiri Pandits but also other ‘Muslims’, not in tune with the prevalent mood of the times and the violent insurgency that had gripped the Kashmir Valley. Like the other ‘displaced’, they became disoriented, unable to come to terms with why they had been targeted, not just by Islamist militants or ‘pro-aazadi’ forces but by the connivance of their neighbours with whom they believed they had excellent relations. To be forced out is traumatic enough; even more difficult to come to terms with is the fact that their dire situation evoked so little sympathy, forget help and support, be it from the administration or from the ‘rest of India’. Life in shoddy and inadequate relief camps or in rented accommodation, with inadequate money, no jobs, even access to schooling for children while being treated as ‘fair game’ by all those who could profit from their helplessness, further added to the agony. The more extreme accounts even saw them as erstwhile oppressors, privileged collaborators with the Dogra regime, who finally got their just desserts. This is a topical account of the ignored and “unfashionable" story of the purge of a thriving minority community backed by Islamist militants in Kashmir. Unlike many from his community, Pandita entertains no hatred for Kashmiri Muslims, not even to those who grabbed his ancestral house (after it had been ravaged by Islamists) and quietly made it their own. Pandita recounts an unexceptional childhood in a Kashmir “so beautiful", according to his grandfather, that “even the gods are jealous of us". Then comes the tough jolt: a page torn from the school magazine in class with a picture of a Hindu goddess covered in snot, celebrations when Pakistan win cricket matches against India, cries for Azadi renting the air—all “well-orchestrated to frighten the Pandits into exile". The escape is fraught with tension. Pandita writes evocatively about passing trucks filled with scared Pandits escaping to Jammu, the women “herded like cattle", and a man showing the family his fist and wishing them death. Stories are recounted of the degradation caused by exile: rapacious landlords, cruel neighbours, severe hardship, creeping xenophobia.The author and his family, like innumerable Pandits, were forced to live as refugees in Jammu before finally settling down in Delhi, changing houses as many as 22 times. "I have reduced my life to names and numbers, I have memorised the names of every Pandit killed during those dark days, and the circumstances in which he or she was killed. I have memorised the number of people killed in each district." Pandita recounts how the Pandits became “nobody’s people" with great precision. However,he has not tackled significant questions. Why did the minority Pandits also end up as “punching bags" in the hostilities? What provoked Sheikh Abdullah, bitter with India, to deliver a prescient warning to the Pandits in the 1940s, telling them to be “one among us, flee or be decimated"? Were the Pandits merely easy, soft targets or were there deeper forces and provocation at work? Pandita simply mentions that the killings of the Hindu minority “turned into an orgy; a kind of bloodlust", and the “armed terrorist" and the “common man on the streets" participated in some of the murders. Pandita skims the surface during a visit to a squalid Pandit refugee township on the outskirts of Jammu in 2011 and misses an opportunity to mine even more compelling tales in exile. He also visits one of the five resettlements set up for a few hundred Pandits who have returned to the Valley and finds them leading bleak and fearful ghetto lives, but the account is sketchy. The Pandits have been been in exile for two decades, and Kashmir, for Pandita, remains “a memory, an overdose of nostalgia". For the writer, who lives in Delhi, exile and homelessness is “permanent". It cannot be a happy state of mind. Only one who has undergone pain and witnessed it first hand could have written this moving account of how the Kashmir Valley forced the Pandits to flee . As exemplifying the larger story of a community torn asunder, it remains somewhat contentious. The accounts of the pre-1989 insurgency past, lyrical and evocative, fail to convey, at least to the non-Kashmiri reader, as to why if the inter-community relations were peaceful, did so many neighbours ‘willingly’ participate in the ‘ethnic cleansing’. Were there no cases of neighbours with a different mindset? Or were they too scared to help? In which case, what is one to make of all the protestations of Kashmiryat, a syncretic culture drawing on the best of the Sufi-Kashmiri Shaivate traditions? Even the Indian media was largely apathetic to the suffering of the Pandits. The Indian state would be accused of brutalising the Valley's Muslim people but what was ignored was "that the same people also victimised another people". This is the story that Rahul Pandita exposes with an evident sincerity. This is a powerful story, one that can't be ignored even as the Pakistan-backed separatist movement rages on, turning large parts of what was once a Sufi land into an Islamist hub. Unlike those who would want to sweep the ugly truth under a carpet, Rahul is prepared to call a spade a spade. He writes how ordinary Kashmir Muslims , at times, helped thugs who shout Azadi slogans to kill fellow Kashmiris in cold blood, only reason being that because they belonged to another religion. The narrative moves between personal story, community memory, historical accounts and ‘political’ judgement. Pandita writes, ‘One major untruth is that the Pandits were made to leave Kashmir under a government design to discredit the Kashmiri secessionist movement’ . ‘Another problem is the apathy of the media and a majority of India’s intellectual class who refuse to even acknowledge the suffering of the Pandits. No campaigns were ever run for us; no fellowships or grants given for research on our exodus. For the media, the Kashmir issue has remained largely black and white – here are a people who were victims of brutalisation at the hands of the Indian state. But the media has failed to see, and has largely ignored the fact that the same people also victimised another people.’ And finally, ‘Another untruth that leaves me fuming is the assertion that nobody touched the handful of Pandit families that had chosen to remain in the valley.’ This is a particular tragedy of Kashmir where every group competes with others for the privileged status of the ‘real’ victim. It is difficult to deny that such a rendering can rarely stand the careful scrutiny of history. What cannot be denied is the reality of pain and suffering. Pandita tries to establish that the madness of Islamic fundamentalists against Kashmiri Pandits enjoyed popular support and complicity of ordinary Kashmiri Muslims. “Killings of the Hindu minority,” Pandita writes, “had turned into an orgy; a kind of blood lust. By April 1990, the mask was completely off. It was not only the armed terrorist who took pride in such killings – the common man on the streets participated in some of these heinous murders as well.” This is the central theme. The author shows how Pandits became a target of a brutal ethnic cleansing. He points to the case of telecom engineer B.K. Ganjoo, who was shot dead in his attic by militants after a neighbour directed them to his hiding place. Similarly, he sees a trend in how the leading actors showed callous disregard to the plight of the Pandits while the organs of the state were aiding and abetting locals in usurping their properties. A great book to understand the real blood-stained history of the 'Paradise on Earth'. A brief timeline at the end summarises the events in chronological order for reference. If you need to understand the stark tragedy in Kashmir , this book is an absolutely vital document which is at once searing and revealing. PPR 23/08/2020.