A Forgotten Massacre: The Exodus of Kashmir's Hindus
A Forgotten Massacre: The Exodus of Kashmir's Hindus
"Ralive, Galive ya Chalive."
Convert to Islam, die, or leave.
That was not a metaphor. According to survivors' accounts, on the night of 19 January 1990, slogans like this were blasted from mosque loudspeakers across the Kashmir Valley, alongside others that survivors recall: "Kashmir mein agar rehna hai, Allahu Akbar kehna hai" (if you want to live in Kashmir, you must say Allahu Akbar) and a chant demanding Kashmir without its Pandit men but with their women. It was a three-option ultimatum addressed to one community: the Kashmiri Pandits, the Valley's indigenous Hindus.
Thousands of them chose the third option. They left in trucks and buses and on foot, through the winter night, with what they could carry. Many never saw their homes again. Today, more than three decades later, the largest forced displacement of a religious community in modern India is still treated as a footnote.
The People Who Were Erased
The Pandits are among the oldest communities in the subcontinent. Kalhana wrote his Rajatarangini, the great chronicle of Kashmir's kings, in the 12th century. Abhinavagupta, one of the towering philosophers of Shaivism, came from this soil. The Valley's tradition of Sanskrit learning, its temples, and its shrines were built and kept alive by the people now living in tents and rented rooms thousands of kilometres from them.
By 1990 they were a small minority, a few percent of the Valley's population. Small enough to be targeted. Too small to defend themselves.
The Killings Before the Exodus
The exodus did not begin on 19 January. It was preceded by a campaign of selective murder designed to terrorise the community into flight.
On 14 September 1989, Tika Lal Taploo, a prominent Pandit lawyer and political figure, was shot dead in Srinagar. On 4 November 1989, Justice Neelkanth Ganjoo, the judge who had sentenced JKLF founder Maqbool Bhat to death, was killed in broad daylight. On 13 February 1990, Lassa Kaul, the director of Doordarshan Srinagar, was murdered. These were not random killings. They targeted the lawyer, the judge, and the media official: the people who represented the state and the rule of law. The message was that the law would no longer protect Hindus.
Posters appeared on walls ordering Pandits to leave. Neighbours who had lived beside them for generations turned silent, some out of fear, some out of agreement. A few Muslim neighbours helped and hid Pandit families, and that must be said too. But the radicals set the terms, and the terms were that Hindus had to go.
The Brutality, Without Euphemism
The accounts that survive are harrowing, and any honest article must not look away from them. Note that some individual cases are disputed in their details, and I include here only those that are widely reported in survivor testimony and in the writing of journalists and authors such as Rahul Pandita.
Bal Krishna Ganjoo, an engineer, was hiding from militants in a rice drum, according to the accounts that circulate. He was found and shot, and his wife was allegedly forced to eat rice soaked in his blood. Girija Tickoo, a lab assistant, is reported to have been abducted, gang-raped, and killed by being cut in half on a mechanical saw. These stories are told by the community because the community lived them, and because no court ever examined them.
Rape and the threat of rape were weapons. The chant demanding Pandit women without Pandit men was not an accident of language. It was a statement of intent.
Violence did not end with the exodus. On 21 March 1997, seven Pandits were killed at Sangrampora. On 25 January 1998, 23 Pandits, including children, were massacred at Wandhama. On 23 March 2003, 24 Pandits were shot at Nadimarg after being lined up. These were not battles. They were executions of civilians for their religion.
Farooq Ahmad Dar, known as Bitta Karate, a JKLF militant, reportedly said in a 2006 interview that he had killed around 20 Pandits, a claim he later disputed. Yasin Malik, the JKLF chief, stands accused in connection with the 1990 killing of four Indian Air Force personnel and was convicted in 2022 in a terror-funding case. Neither has ever faced a full trial for crimes against the Pandit community.
The Numbers, and the Fight Over Them
Numbers are the part of this story that has been systematically manipulated, in both directions, and you should know the full range.
Displaced: Estimates run from about 100,000 to over 300,000 people. Community organisations such as Panun Kashmir cite figures of 300,000 to 700,000, the highest numbers in circulation. Government registration records show tens of thousands of families, with figures around 60,000 families commonly cited.
Killed: This is where the gap is most striking. A J&K Police response to a 2021 RTI reportedly counted under 100 Pandit deaths since 1990. The state government's figure was 219. The Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti documented 399 names. Some community estimates go above 600. The petition filed by Roots in Kashmir referred to about 700 killings across 215 FIRs, none of which led to meaningful convictions.
The existence of this gap is itself the scandal. A state that cannot agree on how many of its citizens were murdered has not investigated their murders.
In 2017, the Supreme Court dismissed a plea to reopen these cases, citing the passage of 27 years. A curative petition was rejected in 2022. In effect, the system's answer to the Pandits was that it was too late, a delay the system itself created.
Refugees in Their Own Country
The community was dumped into camps in Jammu and Delhi. Families from the cool Valley were housed in tents and one-room quarters in summer heat that regularly crossed 40 degrees Celsius. Elderly people, unused to the climate, died of heat stroke, snakebite, and despair. An entire generation grew up in rented rooms. The Kashmiri language, which Pandits had preserved and enriched, began to fade in their children.
Their properties in the Valley were occupied, encroached on, or sold in distress. Temples were damaged and abandoned.
Two rehabilitation packages, in 2008 and 2015, offered government jobs and transit housing. But most Pandits who returned for work live in fortified, guarded compounds, essentially cantonments for a community that cannot walk its own streets without protection.
The point is hard to escape. In a country with an 80 percent Hindu majority, the Valley's indigenous Hindus cannot live freely in their ancestral homeland. Their return was a promise in every party's manifesto. The reality remained a security-camp existence.
The Killings Never Stopped
When Article 370 was abrogated in 2019, many hoped for a turning point. Instead the targeted killings returned. In October 2021, Makhan Lal Bindroo, a Pandit chemist who had refused to leave the Valley in 1990, was shot dead in Srinagar. In May 2022, Rahul Bhat, a government employee, was killed inside his own tehsil office in Chadoora. Days later, Rajni Bala, a teacher, was shot in Kulgam. Pandit employees went on strike and demanded transfers out of the Valley. Their demand in 2022 was the same as in 1990: let us live.
The Silence
The most bitter part of this story is not only what was done to the Pandits, but how little the country has wanted to hear about it.
For decades, mainstream Indian media, large sections of the intellectual class, and the political establishment treated the exodus as an awkward detail. Pandit testimony was dismissed as exaggeration. Writers who wrote about it were accused of communalism. The framing of Kashmir as a story of Indian state oppression had no room for the story of a minority driven out by militants. Anyone insisting on that story was told they were "politicising" tragedy.
Many Pandits and their supporters accuse the Indian left-liberal ecosystem of this silence, and the accusation has weight. Human rights language that was available for every other conflict zone was hard to find for them. But an honest article must also say that the failure was not one party's. The government in Delhi in 1990 was supported from outside by both the BJP and the Left. Congress and regional parties governed afterward. The BJP has governed for most of the last decade and still has not delivered justice, prosecutions, or safe return. Every party made promises. None kept them.
The Pandits were never a vote bank large enough to matter. That is the cold truth under all the politics.
What Justice Would Look Like
It is not enough to mourn. Specific demands exist, and a serious article should name them:
- A genuine, time-bound investigation into the 1989-90 killings, with the FIRs reopened and perpetrators prosecuted, regardless of how old they are.
- A proper, official census of the dead and displaced, so that history is not left to competing community and government figures.
- Restoration or compensation of property, with real enforcement against encroachment.
- Safe, dignified return, in conditions that do not require living inside a fortress, with guarantees backed by action rather than packages.
- Teaching this history in schools, so that the next generation of Indians learns that this happened.
The Last Word
A community that built a civilisation was driven out in a winter night by people who told them to convert, die, or go. Thirty-six years later, most of the world cannot name a single person killed that winter, and the killers walk free.
The Pandits do not need pity. They need acknowledgement, justice, and a way home. A nation that forgets them is not only failing them, it is failing itself.