Living as refugees in their own land, Kashmir Pandits await justice 30 years since their exodus

It was on this day in 1989 that the community of Kashmiri Pandits were asked to flee their homeland or convert to Islam or die, amid spiralling violence and atrocities on them that followed, finally forcing an exodus. Pandits observe this as Holocaust Day.

According to the most commonly referred website of today, the Wikipedia, the Kashmiri Pandits (also known as Kashmiri Brahmins) are a Saraswat Brahmin community from the Kashmir Valley, a mountainous region in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. It says Kashmiri Pandits are the original inhabitants of the Kashmir Valley and are the only remaining Kashmiri Hindu community native to Kashmir.  

But three decades since they were hounded out of the Valley by the Islamic terrorists, there is no hope yet for these original residents of Kashmir to return to their original land and live peacefully.

While international organisations highlight the human rights abuses by Indian army- who are pitted against Pakistan sponsored terrorists- or the use of rubber pellets that blind many innocents in the global hotspot that is Kashmir, the Kashmiri Pandits hardly find any mention in the narrative of the Kashmir situation and its troubled political history of the past decades.

Kashmiri Hindus (Pandits) are in exile since early 1990 after Islamic religious fundamentalists in the valley of Kashmir took to armed subversion and terrorism and drove them out of their centuries old habitat, read a petition some five years ago on Change.org.

It said "hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits who were forced to leave their sacred land because of the war waged by Islamic terrorists must now live in despicable conditions in their own country and are on the verge of extinction as a race."

Called "migrants" by the administration, the Kashmiri Pandits are  refugees in their own country due to total failure of the Indian State to provide security and safety to them when they were ruthlessly persecuted, threatened, tortured and murdered by the Islamic terrorists, according to the petition.

Journalist Aditya Raj Kaul a few years ago had tweeted a ticket his family had purchased this day on Jan 19, 1990 to flee the Valley.

"Ticket to exile: Bus ticket purchased by family on 19th Jan., 1990 when we were forced out of Kashmir. #KPExodusDay" his tweet read.

The exodus of the Kashmir pandits was preceded by atrocities and killing and rapes.

According to Panun Kashmir, in one such case a wife of a Border Security Force (BSF) was abducted and gangraped by the militants and then her body with broken limbs were abandoned on the road. A Hindu nurse met the same fate.

Pandits fled Kashmir to live in other parts of India besides the makeshift camps in pitiable conditions.

Filmmaker Ashok Pandit tweeted: "On this #30yearsinexile of #KashmiriPandits I thank respected #BalasahabThackeray for taking us in his arms and giving us shelter and education in Maharashtra. He was the only leader who understood the pain of our genocide. @uddhavthackeray @AUThackeray"

While many are not even sparing Narendra Modi for failing to give back the Pandits their original land despite heading a saffron government, a BJP leader in Kashmir said both the state government and the centre have done little to  reverse the process of genocide and rehabilitate the displaced community in Kashmir, during last three decades of exile.

According to a Daily Excelsior report,  the BJP MLC, G L Raina in a statement issued on the eve of 30th Holocaust Day today said this failure dealt a serious blow to the aspirations of the Pandits, who are determined to return to the land of their origin and ancestors.

He said for restoration of confidence of the community the Government must institute a Commission of Inquiry at the earliest to look into the whole issue of targeted killings of Kashmiri Pandits in 1989-90, and subsequent exodus from Kashmir.

"It must also reopen prosecution cases against self-proclaimed killers who are roaming free in Kashmir. Besides. the people in administration who are misusing their official positions to undermine ethnic cleansing of an entire civilizational continuity by manipulating data and concealing facts be taken to task," he said.

Three decades since they were mercilessly massacred and brutalized, Kashmiri Pandit groups are angry.

When in 2017 after the Supreme Court  rejected a petition seeking probe into the genocide of Kashmiri Pandits  during 1989-90, a Kashmiri youth organisation Roots In Kashmir posted on Facebook: "If you have a Ram Mandir-Babri case for 150 years, an anti-Sikh riot case for 34 years and if you can reopen the Gujarat riot cases suo motto then in Kashmiri Pandits’ genocide case when both the accused and the witnesses are still available, how can the Supreme Court say that the evidences won’t be found?"

A pinned tweet of prominent Kashmiri pandit activist Sushil Pandit read: "Where were you for 27 years" is what the CJI asked before denying justice to us #KashmiriHindus. But 70 years later they reopen #GandhiCase

As Junail Quereshi tweeted: “...The return of the Kashmiri Pandits to the Kashmir Valley depends on the goodwill of the majority community in the Valley. That is no more to be found nor is there wisdom enough within the leadership of the Kashmir Valley...”.