Last month, a Kashmiri Pandit organisation called the All Parties Migrants Coordination Committee planned to revive a pilgrimage called the Kousar Nag yatra or the Vishnu padyatra. The six-day pilgrimage was set to begin on July 29. Kausar Nag is a glacial spring in the Pir Panjal range. It is located in Shopian district in south Kashmir. But even before it could begin, the yatra faced fierce opposition from separatists, members of mainstream parties like the National Conference, and large number of social-media users.



On August 2, the NC-Congress state government gave into the pressure and decided to cancel the pilgrimage.



The people opposing the pilgrimage cited two reasons: the fear of environmental degradation and a conspiracy to change the state’s demography.



There is no merit to the argument that the pilgrims would harm the environment because local people don't seem to care much about their environment to begin with. That is clear to anyone who has visited the Dal Lake in Srinagar, a stinky water body filled with filth, which has shrunk due to encroachment. Every year, crores of rupees are spent annually to revive it. The results have been shoddy at best, mainly due to massive corruption in the exercise.



Besides the Dal, other lakes in Kashmir, such as Wular, Nageen and Aanchar have either shrunk or are polluted. Other water bodies in Kashmir have disappeared altogether. They include the famous Nadeir Sar situated in Bijebehra in north Kashmir. Besides, homes being built on forest land receive barely any condemnation.



Under such circumstances, it is clear that 40-odd people on a pilgrimage would not have caused great harm to the environment. The same objection greets the annual pilgrimage to the Amarnath temple, a popular Hindu pilgrimage centre in the Anantnag district. Yet, no one seemed to protest with the same vehemence when the revival of the old Mughal Road between Jammu and Kashmir left behind a huge trail of environmental destruction.



Baseless argument



This argument over that the pilgrimage was a conspiracy to change the demography of Kashmir is quite bizarre. From even before the state’s accession to the Indian union in 1947, Kashmiri Pandits have been leaving the Valley, albeit gradually, for a variety of reasons. If the Indian government had the will, vision and intention to change the demography of the region, it could have resettled the people who had left much earlier, long before the tensions that began in the early 1990s.



In fact, the case could be made that the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1990, after the onset of separatist insurgency in the region, was the event that distorted the state's demography. Kashmiri Muslims blame this exodus on Jagmohan, the governor at the time, claiming that he urged Pandits to leave for fear of their lives. As a capable administrator, Jagmohan would have understood the perils of displacing an entire community. In reality, the exodus was the result of intimidating slogans against Kashmiri Pandits blaring out of mosques across the valley on January 19, 1990, and the mayhem it generated on the streets.



It is no secret that if there were any demographic changes, they occurred in the Jammu region. For example, Poonch district has witnessed a decline in the proportion of Hindus from double digits to a mere 5% since the early 1990s. In area after area, from Poonch in the west to Kishtwar in the East, the population of Hindus has dwindled. No Muslims seem to have protested against this.



Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a Muslim separatist leader from the Valley, has often said that once Kashmir secedes from India, Pandits will have all minority rights, as per Islamic jurisprudence. If a Pandit cannot undertake a pilgrimage in India, that too with a right-wing government at the centre, what can our community really expect in an independent Islamic state? This opposition is not merely against the pilgrimage. It reflects, by and large, the attitude of the majority community to the Pandits. The reaction to the pilgrimage is a fitting reply to all those who keep on asking as to why Kashmiri Pandits haven’t returned.



There are also those who claim that the Kousar Nag yatra was never part of a set of pilgrimages undertaken by Kashmiri Pandits. That is a distortion of history. In addition to this yatra, there were many other pilgrimages that I have personally undertaken as a child. My eyes become moist as I think of these shrines, be it Chotta Amarnath in Bandipore, Gow Padar near Baramulla and Roop Bhawani in Vaskur. They form an important integral part of my childhood memories. But efforts are being made to pretend that they don’t exist.



