A SMALL TRIBUTE TO AMAR NATH VAISHNAVI

                                             

AMAR NATH VAISHNAVI ( 1925-2012 )

Amar Nath Vaishnavi Ji was not merely a leader. He was the quiet, aching conscience of a community torn from its soil. A trained artist by discipline, he set aside his canvas for six decades and offered his trembling hands to bind the wounded dignity of Kashmiri Pandits. He never chased the media glare. He never asked for a garland, a stage, or a headline. In 1947, when the Valley burned and fear sat on every doorstep, this young man stood guard over Srinagar’s frightened families without once asking their faith. During the Parmeshwari Handoo  agitation of 1967 , his voice did not crack with rage  it rose, firm and clear, with “Jaikara .....” ; not to inflame, but to gather a shattered people, to give their  sorrow   a direction, and turn their brokenness into disciplined, lawful resolve. He taught them , without ever preaching, that true service does not need a microphone. It needs only a spine that will not bend, and a heart that refuses to calculate the cost.

Then came the long night of 1990. When nearly four lakh people from his community  were made strangers in their own land, when children slept on footpaths and mothers wept into darkness, Vaishnavi Ji, already in his sixties, became their roof, their ration card, their last hope. Along with other leaders, he worked till his body gave way : arranging  tents, pleading for relief, lighting the fires of community kitchens so that no  child would sleep hungry. He never forgot the help and support  he received from the then  Divisional Commissioner Vijay Bakaya, and spoke of it with folded hands, because gratitude was his religion. In the scorching, airless tents of Muthi ,Mishriwala and Purkhoo, he sat on broken chairs hour after hour, listening, listing, fighting for the uprooted exiles on paper so that they would not be erased. When funds dried, he quietly pulled out his own pension. When power was offered, he declined it with a smile and went back to his  room with minimum material comforts. He laid his Dastaar ( headgear )at Balasaheb Thackeray’s feet, not for a ministry, not for a ticket, but so that boys and girls from his exiled community could sit in engineering and medical colleges with their heads held high. He gathered the poorest children for  the Samuhik Yagyopavit , whispering to each one: “Poverty will not steal your Dharma from you.” A real selfless leader ;  he weighed his life only by what he emptied from his hands, never by what he collected.

Men like him are not born anymore. Vaishnavi Ji lived with nothing, and died with nothing, except a ledger of Seva that no government, no auditor, no historian can ever balance. Today, when we watch leaders hire cameras to record their charity, his silence roars in our ears. His absence is not a void ,  it is a wound that refuses to heal. He set the standard of Nishkaam Seva so high that those who claim to lead the community now cannot even see it from where they stand. The exiled, the scattered, are his only monument. Every engineer who studied under that quota, every doctor who crossed through that door he  helped to open, every boy whose father could not afford a  Yagyopavit but who still wears the sacred thread ; they are his breath, his blood, his living proof. 

Vaishnavi Ji  is  gone. But walk into any Pandit home tonight. Listen. His Jaikara still trembles in  walls. It rises in  prayers. It beats, stubborn and unbroken, in every heart that refuses to forget who they  are, and who Vaishnavi  Ji was for them .

( Avtar Mota )

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Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.