by ANJALI PURI
A Facebook group to bring Kashmiri Muslims, Pandits together catches on
In a film, this might have looked contrived. In real life, it was a moment of unscripted magic. A few Sundays ago, around a table in a crowded room in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar, sat a couple of dozen people, speaking animatedly. Until a few names were mentioned—Rahul, Sohail, Pradeep, Irfan—it was hard to tell who in that light-eyed, light-skinned, long-nosed crowd was Kashmiri Muslim or Pandit (apart from the odd skullcap-wearer). The talk, in Kashmiri and English, was about conflict, lost identities, shared cultural bonds. As poetic touches gave way to more frank comments, a white-haired man, a Pandit, struck a wry note, asking what use Sufi traditions had been when Pandits had fled in fear from the Kashmir Valley in 1990. A Muslim stood up agitatedly, and it seemed the moderators might have work to do. But before they could intervene, a flute did. As a Kashmiri tune, played by a man who had barely spoken, filled the room, tense expressions dissolved into rueful smiles. Civility was restored.
Will it be anti-climactic now to reveal that Facebook enabled this encounter? In the year of Tahrir Square and Anna Hazare, have the political uses of Zuckerberg’s creation lost all power to surprise? Perhaps yes. But consider then the difference between disaffected people drumming up numbers for marches and sit-ins, and ordinary people venturing, without prodding by the usual sarkari or ngo suspects, into the grey, ambiguous, territory of bridge-building with an intimate enemy.
But “ordinary” may be the wrong word to describe Vivek Raina, Gowhar Fazili and Aamir Jalali, the young Srinagar-born founders of the five-month old Facebook group ‘Saariy Samav Aksey Razi Lamav’ (after a line from a verse by the Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded, which means “Let us pull the common rope together”.) It takes not just youth and optimism, but also compassion and boldness, to do what they’ve done: shed communal straitjackets and create, first in their own minds, then in cyberspace, and finally, on the ground, a meeting place for individuals from the Kashmiri Muslim and Pandit communities, estranged for two long decades.
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(Thanks to Pritam Rohila)