Kashmir Exodus: The Ethnic Cleansing India Tried to Forget

1989-1990: How India’s Oldest Hindu Community Was Erased in One Night

Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash

They had lived there for five thousand years. Five thousand years. Before the pyramids of Egypt were complete, before the Roman Empire was even a thought, before the Vikings sailed, before Shakespeare wrote a single word, the Kashmiri Pandits were already there. They were there when Kashmir was called Rishibhumi, the land of the sages. They were there when the great scholar Panini composed the world’s first grammar in the forests of Kashmir. They were there when Patanjali taught yoga on the banks of the Jhelum. They were the keepers of one of the oldest civilizations on earth.

And in a single night, January 19, 1990, almost every single one of them was driven from their homeland. Not by war. Not by natural disaster. Not by famine. By terror. By coordinated, calculated, systematic terror.

The world watched. The world did nothing. And within weeks, Kashmir, one of the most ancient Hindu lands on earth, became Hindu-free.

This is not a story that made international headlines. This is not a story that filled the front pages of newspapers in London, New York, or Paris. This is not a story that drew the outrage of the United Nations. This is a story that was buried, buried under political calculations, buried under the noise of other conflicts, buried under decades of silence.

But it happened. Every single word of it happened. And it is time the world knew.

Who Were the Kashmiri Pandits?

Before we talk about what was done to them, you must understand who they were. Because what was done to them cannot be understood without understanding what was lost.

The Kashmiri Pandits, also known as Kashmiri Brahmins, were the indigenous Hindu inhabitants of the Kashmir Valley. They were not newcomers. They were not settlers. They were not outsiders. They were the original people of Kashmir, tracing their roots back thousands of years to the earliest civilizations of the Indian subcontinent.

Kashmir was, for millennia, one of the great centers of Hindu learning and culture. It was here that some of the most profound works of Sanskrit literature were composed. It was here that the philosopher Abhinavagupta wrote his masterpiece on Shaivite theology, *Tantraloka, in the 11th century. It was here that the poet Kalhana wrote the Rajatarangini*, the river of kings, which remains one of the most important historical chronicles of India. It was here that scholars like Panini, one of the greatest grammarians in human history, did their life’s work.

Kashmir was called Sharada Peeth, one of the sacred seats of learning in Hinduism. Temples rose across the valley like prayers made permanent in stone. The Martand Sun Temple, built in the 8th century by King Lalitaditya Muktapida, was one of the architectural wonders of the ancient world, a grand complex of 84 shrines built on a plateau overlooking the entire Kashmir Valley, dedicated to the Sun God Surya. The Shankaracharya Temple sat on the hill above Srinagar like a crown, built over two thousand years ago.

This was not just a religious community. The Kashmiri Pandits were scholars, poets, administrators, judges, doctors, teachers. They ran the bureaucracy of Kashmir for generations. They were the intellectual backbone of the valley. They spoke a language, Kashmiri, that was shared with their Muslim neighbors. They ate the same food. They breathed the same mountain air. They had lived side by side with Muslims for centuries, and for all the tensions that had come and gone across the ages, Kashmir had maintained a fragile, complex coexistence.

By the 1981 census, the Kashmir Division had 124,078 Hindus, the majority of whom were Pandits. Scholar Alexander Evans estimates that by 1990, there would have been approximately 160,000 to 170,000 Pandits in the Kashmir Valley. They constituted roughly 4 to 6 percent of the total population, a small minority, but an ancient one. A minority that had survived centuries of invasions, conversions, and persecutions and had still held on. Until 1990, when they held on no longer.

The Seeds of Destruction: The 1987 Election and the Birth of Insurgency

The story of January 1990 did not begin in January 1990. It began years earlier, in the slow, grinding accumulation of grievances, political failures, and outside manipulation that turned Kashmir into a powder keg.

In March 1987, state assembly elections were held in Jammu and Kashmir. The Muslim United Front, a coalition of opposition parties, was widely expected to win. They had grassroots support. They had popular momentum. They had the people behind them.

They did not win. The ruling National Conference, backed by Delhi, swept to victory in what many observers, including journalists on the ground, described as one of the most brazenly rigged elections in Indian history. Ballot boxes were stuffed. Votes were miscounted. Candidates who had clearly won were declared losers. The Muslim United Front’s candidates, who had gone to the polls confident of victory, watched their mandate stolen before their eyes.

This election did not just decide who would govern Kashmir. It decided the future of the valley. For the young men of Kashmir, educated, politically aware, furious at what they saw as Delhi’s casual contempt for their democratic will, the 1987 election was the moment everything changed. The ballot box had failed them. The system had failed them. And so they looked for other ways to fight.

Many of them crossed the Line of Control into Pakistan-administered Kashmir. There, they found training camps. They found weapons. They found ideology. And they found Pakistan.

Pakistan’s Shadow: Operation Tupac

The insurgency that erupted in Kashmir in 1989 was not a spontaneous uprising born purely of local grievance. It was fed, armed, trained, and directed from across the border.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI, had been planning for this moment for years. The operation was codenamed Operation Tupac, also known as the Kashmir Plan, the Zia Plan, or the Liberation Plan. It was conceived and initiated in 1988 by Pakistani President General Zia-ul-Haq, though it was activated and expanded after his death that same year in a mysterious plane crash.

The plan was elegant in its cruelty. Pakistan would not send its own soldiers into Kashmir, that had failed before, in Operation Gibraltar in 1965. Instead, Pakistan would train local Kashmiri youth in weapons and guerrilla warfare. It would divert the Afghan mujahideen, the fighters who had just defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with CIA and Saudi funding, toward Kashmir. It would create militant organizations, fund them, arm them, and direct them.

The timing was perfect. The Soviet Union had just withdrawn from Afghanistan in 1989. Thousands of battle-hardened mujahideen fighters, trained by the ISI in Pakistan’s tribal areas, were suddenly without a war to fight. The weapons that had poured into the region, Kalashnikovs, RPGs, explosives, were freely available. And the ISI, flush with experience from running the Afghan jihad, was ready to apply the same playbook in Kashmir.

The goals of Operation Tupac were laid out with brutal clarity: to provide arms and finance to separatists and militants, to train Kashmiri youth in the handling of sophisticated weapons, to destabilize and discourage the state administration, and, most significantly, to make the Kashmir Valley a Hindu-free Muslim area.

This was not an accident. This was not a side effect. The elimination of the Hindu minority was part of the strategic design.

The Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front: The First Blood

The organization that opened the account of killing Kashmiri Hindus was the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, the JKLF. Headquartered in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and coordinated from London by its leader Amanullah Khan, the JKLF had begun armed insurgency in the Kashmir Valley in the mid-1980s with outright ISI support.

The JKLF’s first major target in Kashmir was not a soldier. It was not a politician in Delhi. It was a Hindu. September 14, 1989. A sunny day in Srinagar.

Pandit Tika Lal Taploo was stepping out of his home in the Bhan Mohalla locality. He was a lawyer by profession, enrolled as an advocate of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court since 1971. He was the Vice-President of the BJP’s Jammu and Kashmir unit. But more than any of that, he was a beloved figure in Srinagar, beloved by Muslims and Hindus alike. He was called *Lala,* elder brother, by the common people, a term of affection that cut across all religious lines. He was known for his social work, his spartan lifestyle, his deep commitment to his community and his valley.**

He had received threats. Many threats. He had taken his family to Delhi to keep them safe. But he had come back. He came back because he believed that running away was not the answer. He believed that Kashmir was his home, and he would not be driven from it by fear.

That morning, as he stepped out of his door, he saw a small girl crying outside. He recognized her as the daughter of his Muslim neighbor. He lifted the child in his arms, turned, and walked to the neighbor’s house. The mother said the girl needed writing material for school but had no money. Tika Lal took a five-rupee note from his pocket and handed it to her. To the child, he said, “My child, school is the place for you.”

He left them and turned to walk to the High Court where he practiced law. He had hardly walked seventy steps.

Three men with their faces wrapped in dark cloth appeared at the blind turn of the lane. They shot him dead.

Tika Lal Taploo’s killers were never caught. They were never punished. They walked free. And their freedom sent a message through the Kashmir Valley that echoed in every Pandit household: we can kill any one of you, anywhere, at any time, and nothing will happen to us.

The Judge Who Sentenced a Terrorist: Neelkanth Ganjoo

The second major killing came less than two months later, on November 4, 1989.

Retired Judge Neelkanth Ganjoo was 72 years old. He had served as a Sessions Court Judge in Srinagar. In 1968, over two decades earlier, he had presided over the trial of Mohammad Maqbool Bhat, the founder of the JKLF and a convicted murderer. As a Sessions Court Judge, he sentenced Bhat to death in August 1968. This sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court of India in 1982. Bhat was hanged in Tihar Jail in Delhi on February 11, 1984.

Judge Ganjoo had paid for that judgment with his life, though the payment came 21 years later.

That morning, he had gone to the Jammu and Kashmir Bank branch on Hari Singh Street, near the High Court in Srinagar. It was a routine errand. Three JKLF terrorists spotted him. They fired several shots from close range. He died on the spot.

His body lay on the street for hours. Unmoved. Unattended. Buses resumed their routes. Shops reopened. People went about their business, some averting their eyes, others too terrified to even approach a dead man on the street.

Radio Kashmir announced the killing in a single sentence: “Unknown assailants gunned down a former Sessions Judge in Maharaj Bazaar, Srinagar.”

That was all. One sentence. For a man who had spent his life delivering justice.

Six attempts had been made on Judge Ganjoo’s life at his home in Karan Nagar. He had been denied elaborate protection. And on that November morning, his assassins finally succeeded.

As of August 2023–34 years after his murder, the Jammu and Kashmir Police’s State Investigation Agency reopened the case and appealed to the public for information. The case remains unsolved.

The Rubaiya Sayeed Kidnapping: When the State Broke

Between the killing of Tika Lal Taploo and the night of January 19, a third event occurred that would change everything. An event so politically charged, so deeply revealing of the rot at the heart of India’s handling of Kashmir, that it effectively handed the keys of the insurgency to the militants.

December 8, 1989.

Dr. Rubaiya Sayeed was 23 years old. She was a medical intern at Lal Ded Memorial Hospital in Srinagar. She was returning home in a minibus when armed men intercepted her vehicle.

Her father was Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, India’s first Muslim Home Minister. He had assumed office only six days earlier, in the government of Prime Minister V.P. Singh.

The kidnappers were JKLF militants. They demanded the release of five of their imprisoned comrades in exchange for Rubaiya’s life. The five militants they demanded were Abdul Hamid Sheikh, Sher Khan, Noor Mohammad Kalwal, Altaf Ahmed Bhat, and Javed Ahmed Zargar.

For five days, Rubaiya Sayeed was held captive. The central government negotiated. Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, who was in London on a medical trip, flew back and opposed the exchange furiously. He warned that releasing these terrorists would open the floodgates. The central government threatened his government with dismissal if he did not cooperate.

On December 13, 1989, the five militants were released.

Rubaiya Sayeed was freed two hours later.

What happened in Kashmir next was extraordinary. Thousands of young men gathered at Rajouri Kadal to take the freed militants out in a triumphant procession. The streets erupted. Anti-India slogans filled the air. The term “Indian dogs” was scrawled on the walls of Srinagar. There was, as one journalist reported, “no sympathy for Rubaiya. The people were all with the militants.”

The V.P. Singh government had, in one stroke, demonstrated to every militant in Kashmir and every handler in Islamabad that the Indian state could be coerced. That it would cave under pressure. That kidnapping worked.

One of the five men involved in Rubaiya’s abduction was Yasin Malik, who would go on to become one of the most notorious separatist leaders in Kashmir’s history. Decades later, in 2022, Rubaiya Sayeed identified him in court as one of her kidnappers. Malik is now serving a life sentence in Tihar Jail, but not for the kidnapping. For terror funding.

The Night Everything Ended: January 19, 1990

By the first weeks of January 1990, the Kashmir Valley was a place transformed. The air was thick with fear, with threats, with the sound of gunfire in the distance. Kashmiri Pandits had watched two of their most prominent leaders gunned down in the space of two months. They had watched the state capitulate to terrorists over the Rubaiya kidnapping. They had seen threatening letters appear at their doorsteps. They had heard the whispers in the bazaars.

And then came the newspaper.

January 4, 1990. The Srinagar-based Urdu newspaper Aftab published a press release attributed to the militant organization Hizbul Mujahideen. The message was addressed to every Hindu in Kashmir. It read: “We order you to leave Kashmir immediately; otherwise, your children will be harmed. We are not scaring you, but this land is only for Muslims, and is the land of Allah. Sikhs and Hindus cannot stay here.”

The note ended with a warning: “If you do not obey, we will start with your children. Kashmir Liberation, Zindabad.”

Walls across Srinagar were pasted with posters. Unknown masked men with Kalashnikovs forced shopkeepers to reset their clocks to Pakistan Standard Time. Shops, offices, and establishments were painted green as a sign of Islamic rule. Posters appeared on the doors of Hindu homes ordering them to leave.

Kashmiri Pandits were given three choices. These three choices were spoken aloud, whispered in markets, printed on posters, and, most chillingly, broadcast over loudspeakers. The choices were in Kashmiri: “Ralive, Tsaliv ya Galive.” Convert to Islam. Leave Kashmir. Or die.

And then came the night of January 19

It was cold. January in Kashmir is bitter cold. There was no snow on the ground, but the nights were freezing. Around 9 PM, the Kashmir Valley erupted.

Loud, thunderous slogans pierced the air from every direction- Allah-o-Akbar, Pakistan ka matlab kya, La ilaha illallah, Islam zindabad, Pakistan zindabad- raised collectively by tens of thousands of voices and relayed through deafening loudspeakers mounted on the tops of mosques across the valley.

These slogans were not new. But the odd hour, the coordinated timing, the simultaneous eruption from mosque after mosque across the entire valley, this spoke of something organized. Something planned.

The slogans carried a specific, horrifying message for the Pandits. The loudspeakers did not just chant prayers or political slogans. They carried threats. One slogan repeated through the night was: *“Asi gachchi Pakistan, Batao roas te Batanev san” *- “We want Kashmir to become Pakistan, with Hindu women, without their men.”**

A threat to rape Hindu women and kill Hindu men. Broadcast over loudspeakers. From mosques. For the entire valley to hear.

Then the phones started ringing. Mobile phones did not yet exist in Kashmir in 1990. But landline phones rang across Pandit homes in Srinagar. Relatives calling relatives. Friends calling friends. Each caller asking the same question, a question that carried the weight of the entire night underneath its simplicity: “Are you all right?” They were not all right.

A blackout swept through the valley. Electricity was cut, except in the mosques, which continued to broadcast their inflammatory messages into the darkness.

Between the night of January 18 and the early hours of January 19, the newly installed Governor, Jagmohan, who had been appointed only hours earlier after Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah resigned in protest, received a flood of desperate phone calls from Pandits across the valley. “Tonight is our last night,” some of them told him. “Our womenfolk, our sisters, our mothers, would be abducted and we menfolk slaughtered.”

Governor Jagmohan did not order the Pandits to leave. He did not organize buses to evacuate them. There was no government machinery in place, Abdullah had resigned, and Governor’s Rule had only just been imposed. What Jagmohan did, and this is the part that haunts the survivors, was this: he said that if the Pandits decided to leave, refugee camps had been set up for them. And if they chose to stay, he could not guarantee their safety.

To the radical forces in the valley, this was the green light they had been waiting for.

The Exodus: One Night, One Community, One Valley Lost

From the morning of January 20, 1990, Kashmiri Pandits began to leave. Not in an orderly procession. Not with government assistance. Not with dignity.

They fled. Families grabbed whatever they could carry, a bag of clothes, some important papers, a photograph, a small idol from their home shrine. They left behind everything else. Houses they had built with their own hands. Orchards that had fed their families for generations. Libraries. Gold jewelry. Cars. Businesses built over decades. Sacred family heirlooms passed down through generations.

They left at night, in the bitter cold, in cars and buses and trucks, with their children wrapped in blankets, terrified that the mobs they could hear on the streets would stop them. Some were stopped. Some were pelted with stones. Some were turned back. Some made it through.

According to the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti, an estimated 75,343 Kashmiri Pandit families fled in January 1990 alone. Around 70,000 more followed by March. By the end of summer 1990, the entire Pandit community, nearly four lakh people by some estimates, though the precise number remains disputed, had left their homes and hearths.

Political scientist Alexander Evans estimated that 95 percent of the Kashmiri Pandits living in the valley left in 1990. A 2010 report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre suggested over 250,000 Pandits had been displaced since 1990. The Indian government registered more than 60,000 families as Kashmiri migrants, including some Sikh and Muslim families.

By 2011, only an estimated 2,700 to 3,400 Pandits remained in the Kashmir Valley. An entire community, 5,000 years old, was erased in a matter of weeks.

What Was Left Behind

When the Pandits left, the valley did not simply become empty of Hindus. It became empty of everything the Hindus had built.

Their homes were looted first. Household goods, furniture, kitchenware, electronic gadgets, small personal libraries, papers, files, documents, all taken. Electricity fittings and sanitary fixtures were ripped out and sold. In many cases, even the doors and windows were removed and stolen. The bare structures that remained were set on fire.

Properties were grabbed. Shops were seized. In villages, the ruins of burned Pandit houses were registered in revenue records as Muslim Endowment (Awqaf) property. If any Pandit managed to sell his property before leaving, he had to accept a fraction of its real value, a throw-away price born of desperation.

The temples suffered the same fate. Between 1986 and 1996, temples across the Kashmir Valley were attacked, vandalized, looted, and destroyed. The Charar-e-Sharif shrine was burned down in 1995, though its custodians were Muslims, the fire that destroyed it was set during a militant standoff that reflected the valley’s total collapse into violence. Smaller temples, crematoriums, and sacred sites across the valley were left in ruins or seized.

The cultural annihilation was total. Kashmir’s Sanskrit manuscripts, some of the oldest in the world, were scattered or destroyed. The intellectual tradition that had made Kashmir one of the great centers of learning for a thousand years was broken.

The Refugee Camps: Refugees in Their Own Country

The Kashmiri Pandits did not flee to another country. They fled to Jammu, to the same nation they had always belonged to. They were Indian citizens, born in India, taxpayers, government employees, professionals with degrees and careers.And they were put in refugee camps.

The camps were a horror. Families who had owned five-storey houses in Srinagar, who had orchards and gardens and businesses, found themselves crammed into one-room tenements. Some lived in tents, in the blazing summer heat of Jammu, which reached 45 degrees Celsius. Some died of heatstroke. Some fell ill from the filth, the overcrowding, the lack of clean water and sanitation.

The government gave registered Kashmiri migrants a monthly sustenance allowance of Rs 2,500 per person, along with 9 kilograms of rice and 2 kilograms of wheat flour. This was what a family of five had to survive on in one of India’s most expensive cities.

Many thousands of Kashmiri Pandits still live in these camps today, in Purkhoo, in Jagti, in Mishriwala, in Muthi. The Jagti migrant colony, about 25 kilometers from Jammu city, holds around 4,200 families. Some of these families have been shifted from camp-to-camp multiple times since 1990, their third, fourth displacement. They have no permanent address. They have no stability. They have no home.

The trauma runs deep. Survivors describe husbands who developed the habit of talking to themselves, asking confused questions, the shock and psychological damage of that night having broken something inside them permanently. Some have gone mad, they say. Many have developed chronic illnesses. The younger generation, born in camps, has never seen Kashmir. They have never walked the streets their grandparents once walked. They carry the weight of a homeland they have never touched.

“If the government assures me that we will be safe in Kashmir, I will pick up my bag right now and go back home,” said one survivor. “We are not happy here, but we are too scared to go back.”

As of October 2015, only one Kashmiri Pandit family had returned to the Kashmir Valley since 1990, according to the Jammu and Kashmir government itself, despite financial assistance being offered for rehabilitation.

The Numbers: How Many Were Killed?

The question of how many Kashmiri Pandits were killed remains one of the most bitterly contested facts of the Kashmir conflict. The numbers vary wildly depending on the source, and the politics behind it.

The Jammu and Kashmir government stated that 219 members of the Pandit community were killed between 1989 and 2004. The Indian Home Ministry recorded 217 Hindu civilian fatalities during the four-year period from 1988 to 1991.

The Kashmir Pandit Sangharsh Samiti, a local organization of Kashmiri Hindus, carried out a survey in 2008 and 2009 and found that 399 Kashmiri Pandits were killed by insurgents from 1990 to 2011, with 75 percent of them killed during the first year of the insurgency. They also estimated that during the last two decades, about 650 Hindus had been killed in the valley.

Panun Kashmir, a political organization representing displaced Pandits, published a list claiming 1,341 Pandits had been killed since 1990. The number 4,000 has been cited in some accounts, though official figures do not support this.

What is beyond dispute is this: the killings were targeted. They were deliberate. They were designed to terrorize an entire community into leaving. And they succeeded.

The Killings That Made History: Specific Murders Before and During the Exodus

The targeted killings of Kashmiri Pandits in 1989 and early 1990 were not random acts of violence. They were surgical strikes against the community’s most prominent members, designed to maximize fear.

*Tika Lal Taploo- *BJP President, Kashmir Chapter, advocate. Gunned down September 14, 1989, in front of his home. Killers never caught.

*Sheela Tikoo- *A Kashmiri Pandit woman. Gunned down November 1, 1989, near Habba Kadal.

**Judge Neelkanth Ganjoo- **Retired Sessions Court Judge who had sentenced JKLF founder Maqbool Bhat to death. Shot dead November 4, 1989, on Hari Singh Street, Srinagar. Case unsolved for 34 years, reopened in 2023.

**Advocate Prem Nath Bhat- **A lawyer and popular social figure in Anantnag, liked by people of all communities. Masked militants barged into his house, dragged him out, and shot him. Gunned down December 27, 1989.

*Pandit Avtar Krishen Raina- *Deputy Director, Food Supplies. Gunned down in his office in Srinagar in December 1989. He had questioned his subordinates about how a truckload of government grain had been diverted to militants.

**Lassa Kaul- *Director of Doordarshan (Television) Srinagar*. Gunned down outside his house on February 13, 1990, while visiting his handicapped father. He was accused of relaying anti-militancy news. He left behind his wife and two children. His wife had lost her own father during the violence of 1947.

**Professor Nilakanth Raina- *An eminent historian and researcher of the Jammu and Kashmir Government’s Higher Education Department. He was conducting research into the Buddhist antiquity of Jam’a Masjid mosque* in Nowhatta, Srinagar. Armed gunmen called him out at dusk from his home in Fateh Kadal and shot him at point-blank range.

Up to January 19, 1990, the exodus day, as many as 20 innocent Hindus had been murdered in cold blood. And the killing continued after the exodus began.

The Silence of the World

The ethnic cleansing of the Kashmiri Pandits, the forced displacement of an entire Hindu community from their ancestral homeland, received almost no attention from the international community.

No United Nations resolution was passed. No international tribunal was convened. No sanctions were imposed on Pakistan for its role in sponsoring the insurgency that drove the Pandits out. No Western government made a serious diplomatic intervention. The story was not front-page news in London, Washington, or Paris.

In India itself, the story was muted. The national media, dominated at the time by voices sympathetic to the “Kashmiri cause” or simply indifferent to the fate of a small Hindu minority, gave it limited coverage. The V.P. Singh government, which had released the militants in the Rubaiya kidnapping, did not take decisive action. The BJP, which later championed the Pandit cause most loudly, did not withdraw its support from the V.P. Singh government during the critical weeks when the exodus was unfolding.

The Kashmiri Pandits became, in the words that have followed them for three decades, refugees in their own country.

In 2009, the Oregon Legislative Assembly in the United States passed a resolution recognizing September 14, the date of Tika Lal Taploo’s killing, as Martyrs Day, to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and campaigns of terror inflicted on non-Muslim minorities of Jammu and Kashmir.

In June 2022, Justice Chandra Dhari Singh of the Delhi High Court made a significant observation during a hearing, noting that hate speeches have historically triggered demographic shifts and citing the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits as a prime example. It was, in many ways, the closest the Indian judiciary had come to formally acknowledging what had happened.

36 Years Later: The Wound That Does Not Heal

It is 2026. Thirty-Six years have passed since the night of January 19, 1990. The Kashmiri Pandits have not gone home.

Not because they do not want to. Not because they have forgotten Kashmir. Not because they have built comfortable lives elsewhere and have no reason to return.

They have not gone home because they are afraid. Afraid of what will happen to them if they go back. Afraid that the valley they left is no longer a place where they can live.

And the evidence supports their fear. In May 2022, a Kashmiri Pandit government employee named Rahul Bhat was shot dead by two Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists at his Tehsildar office in Chadoora, Budgam, in the Kashmir Valley. He had returned to Kashmir as part of a rehabilitation program. He was killed within months of his return.

The properties that the Pandits left behind, houses, orchards, shops, land, have, in most cases, been seized, destroyed, or sold off by others. Only 610 Kashmiri Pandits have been given back their properties, out of tens of thousands that were lost.

The government does not officially regard the Kashmiri Pandits as Internally Displaced Persons. It calls them “migrants”, a word that carries none of the weight of the truth. In 1995, the Pandits petitioned the National Human Rights Commission to be recognized as IDPs. The Commission decided they did not fit the definition. The government argued that “migrant” was more appropriate.

The community that once comprised 4-6 percent of Kashmir’s population now comprises almost nothing. The valley where they lived for five thousand years is, for all practical purposes, Hindu-free.

The Forgotten Voices

“Tonight is our last night,”- the words spoken by terrified Pandits to Governor Jagmohan on the phone, on the night of January 19, 1990.

“Ralive, Tsaliv ya Galive”- Convert. Leave. Or die. The three choices given to an entire community by loudspeakers in the night.

“My child, school is the place for you,”- the last words Tika Lal Taploo spoke to a neighbor’s child, moments before he was shot dead on his own street.

“Her wish was to breathe her last breath at her home, in her garden in Anantnag. I couldn’t fulfil her dream. I will take this pain along with me to my grave,”- Raj Kumar Bhat, speaking in 2020 about his mother, who died in a refugee camp 30 years after leaving Kashmir, without ever returning.

“We are not happy here, but we are too scared to go back,”- a survivor in Jammu’s refugee camps, 2020.

“Even though this reopens wounds, we welcome the news,”- the granddaughter of Judge Neelkanth Ganjoo, upon learning that the police had reopened her grandfather’s murder case in 2023, 34 years after his assassination.

What This Was

There are words for what happened to the Kashmiri Pandits. The words are debated, legally, politically, academically. Some scholars use the term “ethnic cleansing.” Some use “forced displacement.” Some use “genocide.” Some insist that none of these words are appropriate.

But here is what is not debated:

An entire Hindu community, the oldest continuous Hindu community in Kashmir, with roots stretching back five thousand years, was driven from its homeland in a matter of weeks through a coordinated campaign of targeted killings, death threats, inflammatory broadcasts from mosques, threatening newspapers, and systematic terror.

Their properties were looted and destroyed. Their temples were vandalized. Their homes were burned. Their women were threatened with rape. Their men were marked for death.

They fled in the night, in the cold, with nothing but the clothes on their backs and whatever their shaking hands could grab. They became refugees in their own country. They are refugees still. And the world, for the most part, does not know.

Now it does.