Kashmiri Pandits: Shattered and forgotten!!

In Jammu and Kashmir, Since March 1990, estimates of between 250,000 to 300,000 pandits have migrated outside Kashmir due to persecution by Islamic fundamentalists in the largest case of ethnic cleansing since the partition of India. The proportion of Kashmiri Pandits in the Kashmir valley has declined from about 15% in 1947 to, by some estimates, less than 0.1% since the insurgency in Kashmir took on a religious and sectarian flavor.

Kashmiri Pandits: Why we never fled Kashmir

Sanjay Tickoo remembers the day he found a poster instructing his family to leave the valley or die pasted to the wall of his home 

Sanjay Tickoo remembers it well. It was a warm summer's day in 1990, when he found a poster pasted to the outside wall of his home in Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir. It was written in Urdu, which Sanjay could not read, so he took it to his grandfather and asked him to translate it.
"As he read it out to us, tears rolled down his cheeks ... it basically instructed our family to leave the valley or die," Tickoo tells me as we sit in a café at the foot of Jhelum River in Srinagar.
But, unlike the estimated 100,000 Hindus from the valley - known as Kashmiri Pandits - who embarked on a mass migration south to Jammu following the start of the insurgency against Indian rule in 1989, Tickoo's family refused to leave.
Instead, Tickoo, who was in his early twenties at the time, decided to take the threat to the local newspaper, where he paid for it to be placed as an advertisement in the classifieds section.
"It was published on the back page. I wish I still had a copy, but they published it as is," he recalls.
No sooner had it been published, than shocked Muslim neighbours and friends congregated at Tickoo's home, apologising for the misdeed and promising that his family faced no threat. They urged him not to leave.

A question of numbers

The Hindu minority in Muslim majority Kashmir shrank from an estimated 140,000 in the late 1980s to 19,865 by 1998. Today, Tickoo says there are fewer than 3,400 Pandits in Kashmir. Others say the number is around 2,700.

But Tickoo, who now heads up the KPSS, an organisation that looks after the affairs of the Pandits who remain in Kashmir, says that the plight of the community is complex.
On the one hand, he says, the community did experience intimidation and violence, which culminated in four massacres in the past 20 years. But, on the other, he says, there was no genocide or mass murder as suggested by Pandit communities based outside Kashmir.
"Over the past 20 years, we estimate that 650 Pandits were killed in the valley," Tickoo says, adding: "The figures of 3,000 to 4,000 killings [as suggested by some Pandit organisations] is propaganda, which we reject."
"Not that 650 is a low number, because even one killing should be not ignored, but we must get the numbers right."
While Tickoo's organisation says that 399 Pandits were killed between 1999 and 2008, and 650 in total, this pales in comparison with those estimates that put the figure at 3,000, but exceeds the state's suggestion that 219 were killed between 1990 and 2008.

India, Pakistan or Azadi?
 

But stuck between majority Muslim sentiment and an indifferent Pandit community in exile, what would be the best scenario for the Pandit community in resolving the Kashmir conflict?
 
"I think the leaning is definitely towards India," he tells me. "People want a better life, and joining India makes sense. A lot of this has always been about power and money, and people realise they cannot be isolated [forever]."
 
"The youngsters who are outside, they are mixing with the world and undergoing a different process. But if they [the authorities] had to go for a census, people have since lost their inclination for Pakistan ... and people will show the tendency towards India."

"Most of the Pandits would love that Kashmir would stay with India, as a state of India, because there is [still] some insecurity ... you know living here, one realises that what Islam preaches and how people sometimes live, can be quite different."

"If we are an independent Kashmir, will we be able to sustain ourselves? Do we have the infrastructure considering that industries aren't developed here?"
 
Tickoo disagrees and says self-determination is at the top of his list of priorities.

-Maybe one day we'll live in India which forgets and forgives all the previous sins and moves towards a peaceful nation, one day!!

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