Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits

01The killings begin

The Pandits had lived in the Valley since before the Rajatarangini was written. In 1989 an armed separatist movement rose there. On 14 September 1989 the lawyer and BJP leader Tika Lal Taploo was shot dead in Srinagar; on 4 November the retired judge Neelkanth Ganjoo, who had sentenced the JKLF founder Maqbool Bhat to death, was killed near the High Court. Lists and posters naming Pandits followed. In January 1990 a Srinagar Urdu paper printed a notice from Hizbul Mujahideen telling Hindus to leave.

02The night of 19 January

On 19 January 1990, the day Jagmohan was sworn in as Governor, crowds filled the streets of Srinagar through the night and slogans calling for Pandits to leave were broadcast from mosque loudspeakers. In the weeks that followed, families left in trucks and buses for Jammu and Delhi, most believing they would return within months. Killings went on through 1990, among them the nurse Sarla Bhat and the teacher Girija Tickoo.

03The count

The Union Home Ministry’s annual report for 2020–21 counts 64,827 Pandit families who left the Valley in the early 1990s, along with some Sikh and Muslim families. In 2010 the Jammu and Kashmir government told its Assembly that 219 Pandits had been killed since 1989; the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti has counted 399 killed between 1990 and 2011, most of them in 1990. Those who stayed faced later massacres, at Wandhama in January 1998 and Nadimarg in March 2003.

04In exile

For years families lived in tents and one-room tenements at camps in Jammu such as Muthi and Purkhoo, before the flats of Jagti were built. Temples in the Valley, Kheer Bhawani among them, were left with few worshippers, though the Jyeshtha Ashtami mela at Tulmul brings Pandits back each year. The community marks 19 January as its day of exile.