According to accounts published by many eminent Kashmiri Pandits, on the night of January 19, 1990, threatening slogans were heard over loudspeakers from mosques, and on the streets. While some say around 1,00,000 of them had left the valley, others suggest figures as high as 1,50,000 to 1,90,000. A report by the Jammu and Kashmir government said that as many as 219 people from this community were killed in the region between 1989 and 2004. The Kashmiri Pandit community decided to leave. On January 20, the first stream began leaving the Valley with hastily packed belongings in whatever transport they could find. A second, larger wave left in March and April, after more Pandits were killed.
According to some estimates, notably by the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti (KPSS), of 75,343 Kashmiri Pandit families in January 1990, more than 70,000 fled between 1990 and 1992. The flight continued until 2000. The KPSS has placed the number of Kashmiri Pandits killed by militants from 1990 to 2011 at 399, the majority during 1989-90. Some 800 families have remained in the Valley through these three decades.
Asian Voice reached out to Vinod Tikoo, a Kashmiri Hindu, born and brought up in Kashmir, to learn more about his lived experience of the exodus and how he wishes to observe this year’s anniversary. Vinod represents the Jammu and Kashmir Study Centre, UK and is also associated with the Kashmiri Pandits Cultural Society, UK.
Tikoo gave a very visual depiction of that day and said, “19.01.1990: Kashmir Pandits Ethnic Extermination, 31 Years and counting: Walking around today’s cosmopolitan Berlin, it is hard to believe that it was only 80 plus years ago that Adolf Hitler transformed a democratic germany into a totalitarian dictatorship overnight, paving the way for a war that would claim an estimated 75 million lives, including the systematic murder of 6 million Jews and 5 million other ethnic minorities.”
“During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, up to one million people perished and as many as 250,000 women were raped, leaving the country’s population traumatized, its infrastructure decimated, and sending shock waves through the international community. In the years following the genocide, more than 120,000 people were detained and accused of bearing criminal responsibility for their participation in the killings. To deal with such an overwhelming number of perpetrators, a judicial response was pursued on three levels: the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the national court system of Rwanda, and the Gacaca courts.”
“Contrast this to the situation in Jammu & Kashmir, the ab-original residents of Kashmir, the Kashmiri Pandits (KP’s) were ethnically exterminated from the valley in 1990, in the name of Jihad, and we are now entering the 31st year of being exiled from our own ancestral land, and yet there is no sign of justice, truth or reconciliation. Not a single perpetrator of the heinous crime against the KP community has been tried in court or punished for mass murder, rape and cultural vandalism. As we wait another year, the hope to return stays as alive as it has always been and a promise to keep the flame burning so the world recognises that although we are a minority, but we should not be forgotten,” he added.
Manu Khajuria is a Dogra Hindu from Jammu and Kashmir. Sharing her sentiment on the exodus with Asian Voice, she said, “Kashmiri Hindu Exodus Days is a painful remembrance, and a reminder that injustices that happened with the minority Hindu communities of JK, remain unresolved. The perpetrators of the most heinous crimes against Hindus in the Kashmir Valley, still walk free. 31 years and the Kashmiri Hindus have not returned. There are also many lesser known massacres like that of Prankote and Champnari, Chawalkote that occurred in Kishtwar, Doda, Reasi, Poonch & Rajouri of Jammu Region which also lead to the forced migration in the Jammu hills. All this can be traced back to the bloodiest, and total annihilation of Hindus and Sikhs of POJK in 1947. So many stories. So much pain. Still no justice.”
