By Asif Amin Tibet Baqual

Rahul Pandita
Rahul Pandita

Rahul Pandita!

Your opinion piece in the digital daily Scroll (http://bit.ly/1PZRDRQ) piqued my interest just for the fact that how hatred can consume a person to the core and render him nothing but a soulless twat. Who else will get worked up by a selfless act of unassuming villagers, who took upon themselves to facilitate the last journey of their elderly neighbour, who happened to be a Pandit.

You got irked when PTI reported this ‘heart-warming’ story, which was later picked up by the Indian Express, and the bile inside you gushed forth. You started contorting facts to suit your convoluted narrative. Let’s go by your flow of events and try to put things in right perspective.

In the very first paragraph, you began by stating that the deceased Janki Nath had already retired as a government employee in the early1990s by the time other members of his community were abandoning Malvan. That he bundled off his only daughter to the safer climes of Jammu, and chose to stay back along with his wife. In the very second paragraph you contradicted yourself saying that most of the Pandit families who chose to stay back didn’t had any member with a salaried job and depended on agriculture for sustenance and Janki Nath was among them.

Well, one doesn’t need to be a Yale Fellow to deduce that Janki Nath was already drawing pension after he retired from his government job. As an elderly person he didn’t need to plow the fields and put himself and his wife’s life at stake rather than joining his only daughter and not putting her at the mercy of others. May his soul be placed in the highest echelons of viakunth, what kind of a father and husband are you trying to portray him as?

What actually has irritated the hell out of you is the fact that both the communities have no love lost between them and that makes you writhe with hatred. And it blinded you to the point that while numbering and naming the other members of the Pandit community, who were called by the Muslim neighbours from the nearby villages to take care of the nitty-gritty of the last rites of Janki Nath, you conveniently forgot to mention the absence of his only daughter and son-in-law when he needed them the most.

And this very inconvenient truth made Janki Nath’s death newsworthy. An elderly Pandit couple who were literally abandoned by their next of kin were taken care of, like family, by their Muslim neighbours in a remote village on the edge of a forest for the last 26 years. Where were you and the likes of yours when Janki Nath was convalescing for the last five years, and needed continuous care throughout the day and night!

May be you didn’t deem it fit to leave the hallowed halls of Yale and take some time out of your busy World Fellowship and spend a few days with the forlorn soul of an abandoned community member that you so vehemently try to represent. Now that opportunity is gone, may be you can still try to redeem your wretched conscience by convincing the listless, Rani Ji, to leave this godforsaken Vale. I hope you are aware that she has chosen to stay back, much to your chagrin, even when there is seemingly nothing left here for her.

It’s not your moon but your wits that have got blood clots. It becomes apparent when you get impishly condescending and start spewing diktats like ‘stop engaging with us’. There is no “us” here. You can speak for yourself, not for the Pandit community. The community has not given you any mandate to represent them. And please stop assuming that by writing tosh you have earned the privilege of speaking on their behalf. Well, you can have your opinion. Opinions are like bungholes, everyone has got one. And yours, Pandita, is particularly ugly and stinking of deep rooted malevolence to spite the very kindred spirit of Kashmiriyat.

So next time, you get this uncontrollable urge to have a dump of your shitty sentiment of self-inflicted victimhood, I suggest you roll your misplaced notions into a tampon and shove it up where the sun doesn’t shine, and spare us all the stench of your bilious harangue.

(Opinions expressed in this article are author’s own.)

1 COMMENT

  1. Excellent writing Mr. Asif.
    This chronic wailing and playing victims to beg for freebies and sops has consumed the conscience by now. It may reap dividends now but it shall be the undoing of generations to come…..

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