Kashmir Page: Ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Kashmir

Introduction

After the end of 1989, over four lakh Kashmiri Pandits, constituting 99% of the total population of Hindus, living in Muslim majority areas of the Kashmir, was grudgingly pushed out of the valley by the Islamists.

Sequence of Events

The exodus took place on January 19th of I989. On that day the loudspeakers of mosques in Kashmir blasted out a message as a threat: “Pandits leave the valley, leaving behind your women. We want Pakistan, without Kashmiri Pandits”. Despite of some organizations, the entire country then stood like silent spectators of this brazen event.

January 19, 1990, a Kashmiri Pandit nurse working at the Soura Medical College Hospital in Srinagar was raped and later killed by Pakistan-backed terrorists. The incident was preceded by massacres of Pandit families in the Telwani and Sangrama villages of Budgam district and other places in the Kashmir Valley. The terrorist intent was clearly to drive non-Muslim 'infidels' out of the State and establish Nizam-e-Mustafa (literally, the Order of the Prophet; government according to the Shariah). Accounts of Pandits from this traumatic period reveal that it was not unusual to see posters and announcements – including many articles and declarations in local newspapers – telling them to leave the Valley. Pandit properties were either destroyed or taken over by terrorists or by local Muslims, and there was a continuous succession of brutal killings, a trend that continues even today.

Ethnic cleansing was evidently a systematic component of the terrorists’ strategic agenda in J&K, and estimates suggest that, just between February and March 1990, 140,000 to 160,000 Pandits had fled the Kashmir Valley to Jammu, Delhi, or other parts of the country. Simultaneously, there were a number of high-profile killings of senior Hindu officials, intellectuals and prominent personalities. Eventually, an estimated 400,000 Pandits – over 95 per cent of their original population in the Valley – became part of the neglected statistic of 'internal refugees' who were pushed out of their homes as a result of this campaign of terror. Not only did the Indian state fail to protect them in their homes, successive governments have provided little more than minimal humanitarian relief, and this exiled community seldom features in the discourse on the ‘Kashmir issue’ and its resolution.

The massacre of 26 Pandits at Wandhama, a hamlet in the Ganderbal area of the Valley on the intervening night of January 25-26, 1998; the earlier killing of eight others at Sangrampora in Budgam district on March 22, 1997; the massacre of 26 Hindus at Prankote in Udhampur District on April 21, 1998; and the killing of 24 Kashmir Pandits at the Nadimarg Village, District Pulwama, on March 23, 2003; these are the worst of the many examples of the terrorists’ tactic to block any proposal for the return of migrants to the Valley. These massacres and a continuous succession of targeted individual killings have ensured the failure of every proposal to resolve the problem of the exiled Pandits. It was, again, this pervasive insecurity that led to the collapse of the proposal to create 13 clusters of residential houses in ‘secure zones’ in different parts of Anantnag for the return and rehabilitation of Kashmiri Pandit migrants from outside the Valley in April 2001.

The massacres of Pandits were vicious, barbaric and inhuman. Killing of Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir by terrorists evidently portrays zealous sadism. All victims have been subjected to extreme torture and terror.

Torture deaths have been brought about by such inhuman practices as strangulation by using steel wires, hanging, branding with hot irons, burning alive, lynching, bleeding to death. Besides these, terrorists have frequently coddled in barbaric acts like performing death dances after killing their target. Many a time, dead bodies were not even allowed to be properly cremated.

According to the Indian National Human Rights Commission, the Kashmiri Pandit population in Jammu and Kashmir dropped from 55 percent in 1941 to 0.1 percent as of 2001. In 2009, Oregon Legislative Assembly passed a resolution to recognize 14 September 2007, as Martyrs Day to acknowledge ethnic cleansing and campaigns of terror inflicted on non-Muslim minorities of Jummu and Kashmir by terrorists seeking to establish an Islamic State.

Failure of Human Rights

All human rights organizations across the globe made use of this incident to affront India in front of the world. But they never speak on the genocide, the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley; they have a culpable silence on the human rights violations executing by the Islamic terrorists tutored by PakistanV

International human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Asia Watch and others have yet to take proper cognizance of the genocide perpetrated on Kashmiri Pandits. Even the representatives of the United nations or other organizations have so far failed to visit the camps in Jammu, Delhi and other parts of India, where thousands of families are putting up for several years.

Panun Kashmir

Lakhs of Kashmiri Pandits have been driven out of their homes from Kashmir and they have become refugees in their own country. They are living in different parts of the country in very harsh environments. Continuing their struggle for survival as a cultural entity and as an ancient race, they are also sustaining PANUN KASHMIR, a movement for the political survival of over 700,000 Kashmiri Pandits in their birth land.

The community had hoped to return after the situation improved, but have not been able to do so till now because normalcy has yet to return to the valley and they fear a risk to their lives.