Rahul Pandita’s memoir, Our Moon Has Blood Clots is not merely a personal history but a searing document of precarity, a condition of social and political vulnerability that is deliberately manufactured by a failure of the state. Pandita’s personal narrative provides a powerful counter-discourse to dominant state narratives and the prevailing intellectual “apathy” that has, for decades, rendered the Kashmiri Pandit experience largely invisible.
The Anatomy of Precarity: The Failure of the State
Pandita’s memoir meticulously details the systemic and institutional failures that led to the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1990. The precarity of the Kashmiri Pandits, in this context, is not an accidental or inevitable byproduct of a complex conflict; it is a direct consequence of the state’s dereliction of its fundamental duty to protect its citizens. This failure is evident in several key aspects:
- Erosion of Security and Authority: Pandita recounts a slow but steady erosion of state authority. The memoir portrays a growing climate of fear where local administration and law enforcement become either complicit with or incapacitated by the rising insurgency. The state’s retreat from its protective function is starkly illustrated by the pervasive threats, the targeted killings of prominent Pandits, and the public warnings broadcast from mosques. The state, which is supposed to be the ultimate guarantor of life and security, becomes a distant and ineffectual entity, leaving a minority community exposed to a new, brutal form of power.
- Political Indifference and Denial: One of the most damning critiques in the memoir is directed at the political and intellectual class in India who, as Pandita argues, have largely refused to acknowledge the suffering of the Pandits. This refusal to recognize their plight as a valid form of victimization transforms their precarity into a condition of being “ungrievable.” The dominant narrative, often focusing on the human rights abuses by the Indian state against Kashmiri Muslims, overlooks or actively denies the equally valid and traumatic experiences of the Pandits. This intellectual and political apathy effectively denies the Pandits’ reality, making their precarious existence a matter of deliberate omission rather than a subject for empathetic concern or scholarly inquiry.
- Dehumanization and Derealization: The precarity is amplified by a process of dehumanization. The memoir provides chilling anecdotes of neighbours and friends, people with whom the Pandita family had shared a lifetime of social and cultural bonds, turning hostile and treating them as “outsiders” and “infidels.” This collapse of social fabric, enabled by the state’s non-intervention, makes the Pandits not just insecure but utterly derealized in their own homeland. Their lives are no longer seen as having value, and their suffering is deemed politically inconsequential. This state of being, where one’s life is stripped of its value and meaning in the eyes of others, is the very essence of precarity.
A Foucauldian Critique of “Governmentality” and its Failure
Applying Michel Foucault’s ideas, one can analyse the failure of the Indian state not merely as a lapse in governance but as a breakdown in the very art of governmentality. For Foucault, governmentality refers to the complex ensemble of institutions, procedures, and calculations through which the state manages its population. In the context of the Kashmiri Pandit exodus, the state’s governmentality falters spectacularly.
The “art of government,” as Foucault envisions it, seeks to manage a population, ensuring its well-being and security. However, in Kashmir, this system ceases to function for a specific segment of the population. The state, instead of exercising its power to protect, becomes a passive bystander. The Foucauldian framework helps us understand that the violence Pandita describes is not simply a matter of sovereign power (the right to kill or let live) but a failure of disciplinary and biopolitical power—the power to manage and foster life. The Kashmiri Pandits are effectively cast outside the biopolitical sphere of the state, becoming “bare life” in the Agambenian sense, a life that can be killed with impunity because it is no longer deemed worthy of state protection. The failure of governmentality, therefore, creates a vacuum of power that is filled by non-state actors, who then exert a brutal and unregulated form of violence.
Judith Butler and the Politics of “Grievability”
Judith Butler’s work on precarity, vulnerability, and grievability, particularly in Precarious Life and Frames of War, offers a powerful lens through which to understand the traumatic experiences chronicled by Pandita. Butler argues that some lives are considered more valuable than others, and therefore, their loss is grievable, while the loss of others is deemed “no loss” and remains ungrievable. This is precisely the politics of recognition and non-recognition that Pandita confronts.
- Ungrievable Lives: The central argument of Pandita’s memoir is that the Kashmiri Pandit lives and their losses have been rendered ungrievable by the dominant political and intellectual discourse. The narrative of the Kashmiri Pandit exodus is not a story of heroic suffering but one of quiet, marginalized pain. The intellectual and media establishment, in focusing on other aspects of the conflict, has implicitly designated the Pandits as a population whose suffering is not worthy of public mourning or political outrage. This selective application of empathy is a form of violence in itself, as it denies the community’s right to have its trauma recognized and mourned.
- Violence and Vulnerability: Butler posits that recognizing shared vulnerability is a crucial step towards creating ethical communities. Pandita’s narrative exposes a profound failure to recognize this shared vulnerability. The violence against the Pandits, as Pandita describes it, is not only physical but also symbolic. It is the violence of being told to leave your home, of your identity being erased, and of your history being denied. This violence, enabled by the lack of a protective state, exploits the fundamental vulnerability of the community. Butler’s concept of liability—our ethical responsibility to others—is also a crucial tool here. The memoir implicitly asks: to whom are we liable? The Indian state failed in its liability to its citizens, and the wider intellectual community failed in its liability to recognize the suffering of a minority group.
- Forms of Mourning: The memoir itself, as a form of testimony, becomes an act of mourning. It is Pandita’s attempt to reclaim the grievability of his community’s lives. By meticulously documenting the names of those killed and the circumstances of their deaths, he is not just telling a story; he is creating a public record of loss and demanding a space for collective mourning. The book, therefore, becomes a site of resistance against the state’s and society’s attempts to make the Pandit experience a matter of inconvenient history rather than an ongoing, profound tragedy.
The precarity of the Kashmiri Pandits, as presented in Our Moon Has Blood Clots, is a complex condition born of state failure, political indifference, and the politics of selective grievability. Pandita’s memoir, through its raw and deeply personal testimony, challenges us to re-evaluate our understanding of the Kashmir conflict and to confront the uncomfortable reality of lives made disposable. It is a powerful reminder that the true measure of a society is not just how it protects its majority, but how it safeguards its most precarious and vulnerable members.
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