There is nothing more traumatic than losing your home. Especially if it is justified by your leaders. If it is forced by threats to murder your family, rape your women, abduct your children. If it is done from institutions in your neighborhood at the time of prayer from loudspeakers blaring from all sides. If religion is used to incite violence and anger against your family by your own neighbors, people you grew up with. If it is buried by the highest judiciary of your own land. If you are a refugee in your own country, rejected by two majorities, the one in your state and the other in your country.

This is the only instance of a holocaust where the majority of a state claims victimhood while being the oppressor. Where those who swore to protect the culture of their land did their utmost to vandalize it. This is the story of the ancient land of Kashmir, one of the most beautiful places on earth, the Indian Switzerland. This is the story of Kashmiri Pandits, refugees and discards, smudge on the highway of global politics.

How do I know this story? Because those who were displaced are my friends since childhood. Because they work in my organization. I live with them, eat with them, play with them, and work with them. They are a voiceless people and they have no one to stand up for them. They are my brothers and sisters.

They are not connected. They own no media platforms. They are mute spectators of their own depredation.

I have seen the silent pain in their eyes that they carry with quiet dignity while the world carries on (me included) with the most superficial concerns. I have seen them hold back all reactions when painful things are said about their culture or country out of sheer ignorance and arrogance. I have seen the inner reason of hell.

And that hell is here. Every moment, staring in their faces.

Every sensation, every breath. To lose everything their child might hold special, every memory. With a trauma that one does not wish to imagine for one’s worst enemies. Each instant, a fist rising from nowhere and bloodying their face, with numbness and humiliation, with a laceration so deep only a Jesus or Buddha could heal.

Even today, when Modi attempts to reverse those decades of betrayal, I do not see a sense of victory or euphoria in them. Who will recover them their home? Their childhood? Their trust in their people?

Today, I see vain politicians looking to score points in India or UK or USA from both sides, and I think of my friends who never evoked such compassion. When they were herded out of their land in terror of losing their lives or women in the dead of night. When their holocaust did not concern the most liberal politician or reporter in the world.

When those who speak against zulm and swear by their belief did not raise a finger or a voice to condemn it, let alone work towards their repatriation.

But, I must say, I was surprised when my father, a lifelong opponent of the BJP, the party that Modi belongs to, supported the move to split Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories and take away the special treatment that it got for 72 years in independent India. None was more liberal than him. And none more fair.

I did not say a word to him this time. We have argued for years and are polar opposites in our political thought. I did not say, I told you so. I did not feel validated.

When the patient is dead, of what value is a post mortem to justify your diagnosis?

Or shall I say, it is a state worse than death. It is being dead while alive. It is to be turned into a non-entity, a thing, a zero. To exist, to be, in a glare where you have no shame, no hope, no recourse.

That is why there is no triumphalism here. Nor is there sympathy for those who cry chacha.

The law of karma is agnostic to religion. Or rather, what we profess as our religion.

The oppressor shall turn into the oppressed. The tyrant becomes the victim.

And I have only one piece of advice for the ex-cricketers who brandish swords or wish to go nuclear. Beware when a child suppresses a sob or a mother holds back her wail. Beware when a tear goes dry before it has a chance to well up. When decades of oppression is turned back upon you not out of violence but as retribution from God.

Because when God listens, you have only one option. To beg for forgiveness and repent. And if you do not do so, you will be worse off next time far more than you may imagine.

This is the time to reflect and bend your knees. To justify oppression from us while suggesting everyone fight oppression from them is hypocrisy. More vile than the worst degradation possible to man.

Terrorism has no religion, they say. Nor does oppression.

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