The displacement of Kashmiri Pandits remains one of the most painful and contested chapters in the modern history of Jammu and Kashmir. More than three decades later, memories of the events of 1989-90 remain sharply divided, and those competing memories continue to influence politics in the region.
Pandit organisations have largely held militancy and sections of Kashmiri Muslim society responsible for their displacement. Many Kashmiri Muslims, meanwhile, believe the circumstances were beyond their control and that the migration was subsequently used by the Indian state to delegitimise a broader political movement.
Neither narrative, taken in its most absolute form, adequately captures the complexity of what happened. Yet both contain painful elements that Kashmir has still not confronted honestly.
Migration is never easy, particularly when people leave amid fear and violence. Losing one's home, neighbourhood, places of worship, friendships and familiar landscape create wounds that cannot simply be measured in years away from home.
The suffering of Kashmiri Pandits should therefore neither be denied nor diminished. But acknowledging their suffering should not require erasing the suffering of others. Nor should the tragedy of one community be transformed into a political instrument against another.
That, unfortunately, is what has happened too often over the past three decades.
Successive governments and political parties have repeatedly invoked the displacement of Kashmiri Pandits to frame the entire Kashmir conflict through the prism of terrorism. Their tragedy has frequently been used to push aside uncomfortable questions about Kashmir's disputed political future, the demand for self-determination, human rights violations and the enormous security apparatus that has governed everyday life in the Valley.
The Pandit community, highly educated and prominent in bureaucracy, academia, media and professional life, has considerable visibility in national discourse. Instead of using that position to build bridges between Kashmir and the rest of India, sections of its political leadership have increasingly allowed themselves to become associated with the hardest positions of the Indian establishment.
This became particularly visible after August 5, 2019, when the Indian government revoked Jammu and Kashmir's special constitutional status under Articles 370 and 35A and divided the former state into two Union Territories.
The decision was celebrated across sections of India as a historic triumph. Yet the response within Jammu and Kashmir itself was considerably more complicated. Even in Jammu, concerns emerged among Dogras and other communities about land, jobs, political representation and the erosion of protections previously available to permanent residents.
Who Exploits Kashmiri Pandits
Against that backdrop, Kashmiri Pandits were repeatedly presented as beneficiaries and validators of the August 5 decision. Their support was projected as evidence that New Delhi had corrected a historical wrong.
This reduced a profoundly complicated political dispute to an unsettling communal binary: a victory for one community and a defeat for another.
Such an approach cannot produce reconciliation.
The recent Pandit conclave in Srinagar, followed by visits to temples and pilgrimage sites under extensive security arrangements, should have provided an opportunity to reopen communication between communities separated by more than three decades.
Instead, much of the symbolism surrounding the event risked reproducing familiar political narratives.
A genuine return cannot be measured by the number of buses arriving in Kashmir, temples visited, television interviews conducted, or security personnel deployed along a pilgrimage route. Nor should "reconnecting with roots" become another carefully managed political spectacle.
Kashmiri Pandits have every right to return to their homeland.
Indeed, their absence represents a wound in Kashmir's social fabric. The Valley without its Pandits is incomplete, just as Kashmir would be diminished by the permanent exclusion of any of its historic communities.
But there is an important distinction between visiting a homeland and rebuilding a life there.
The Indian state, with its vast security machinery, can organise protected visits. It can secure temples, escort pilgrims and arrange conferences. What it cannot manufacture through military power is the one thing indispensable to permanent return: trust.
Settlement requires security, certainly. But security alone is not enough.
It requires neighbours who trust one another. It requires jobs, homes and schools. It requires a political environment in which people do not feel that one community's presence represents another community's defeat.
Above all, it requires justice and an honest reckoning with history.
Other Migrants
Any serious conversation about displacement must also acknowledge something routinely missing from India's national debate: Kashmiri Pandits are not Kashmir's only displaced people.
Thousands of Kashmiri Muslims and members of other communities have also been uprooted during successive periods of conflict, including the upheaval of 1947 and the wars of 1965 and 1971, as well as the conflict that began in 1989.
Families crossed the Line of Control. Villages were emptied. Homes were abandoned or destroyed. Relatives were killed. Generations grew up away from the towns and villages their parents and grandparents called home.
Many rebuilt their lives in Muzaffarabad and elsewhere in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Their memories of home are no less real because their religion is different, and their claims to dignity cannot simply disappear because their displacement does not fit the dominant political narrative.
This is where the politics of selective memory becomes particularly damaging.
If displacement is a humanitarian tragedy, it must be recognised as such regardless of the identity of the displaced person.
If Kashmiri Pandits have a right to return to their ancestral homes, the principle of return cannot morally be restricted to one community while other displaced Kashmiris are denied even a discussion of comparable rights.
One migrant cannot be transformed into a national symbol while another is treated as politically inconvenient.
A just Kashmir cannot be built upon such distinctions.
Pandits as Bridge
This is also why the Kashmiri Pandit community faces an important choice.
Few Kashmiri communities possess comparable access to India's political establishment, bureaucracy, media and intellectual institutions. That influence could be deployed for something larger than defending the interests of one community.
Pandit organisations could demand conditions for the dignified return of their people while simultaneously supporting the rights of other displaced Kashmiris.
They could advocate the release of political prisoners who have not been convicted of violent offences. They could demand an end to the indiscriminate use of laws such as the Public Safety Act and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. They could press New Delhi to begin a genuine and time-bound political dialogue with representatives from across Jammu and Kashmir.
Most importantly, they could use their influence to tell India that Kashmir cannot be permanently governed through security measures and constitutional engineering.
That would transform the Pandits from an instrument in the politics surrounding Kashmir into one of the most important bridges towards reconciliation.
Unfortunately, influential sections of Pandit politics have too often moved in the opposite direction. Kashmir and its Muslim population are frequently described through sweeping generalisations, while the political aspirations of millions are conflated with the violence committed by armed groups.
Such rhetoric may generate applause on television or social media. It will not take a single displaced family permanently back to its neighbourhood.
It merely deepens the estrangement that has already lasted far too long.
Kashmiri Muslim political leadership also bears responsibility.
Expressions of welcome towards returning Pandits are not enough. Kashmiri society must confront honestly the killings, threats and fear that accompanied the Pandit departure. Where individuals were murdered, their families deserve truth and justice. Where properties were seized or occupied illegally, lawful restitution should follow.
Reconciliation demands introspection from everyone.
Muslims cannot ask Pandits to acknowledge the suffering produced by decades of militarisation while refusing to acknowledge the fear that drove Pandit families from their homes. Pandits, similarly, cannot ask Kashmiris to recognise their tragedy while dismissing the enormous suffering experienced by Muslim families during decades of conflict.
There can be no hierarchy of grief.
The way forward is therefore difficult, but it is not mysterious.
Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims must begin speaking to one another rather than about one another. Civil society, religious leaders, writers, academics, journalists and families from both communities should create spaces for sustained dialogue independent of government choreography.
That dialogue must allow uncomfortable questions.
What happened in 1989 and 1990? Who failed to protect civilians? Who benefited politically from the migration? What happened to abandoned properties? How can displaced families return safely? What guarantees would they need? And how can that right of return be extended fairly to every Kashmiri displaced by decades of conflict?
These questions cannot be answered by slogans.
Homecoming Must Mean Peace
Ultimately, however, communal reconciliation cannot be separated indefinitely from the political conflict itself.
Kashmir has experienced decades of violence, militarisation, insurgency, political instability and broken dialogue. No programme for migrant rehabilitation can exist in isolation from that larger reality.
A genuine homecoming therefore requires more than restoring houses or renovating temples.
It requires a political environment in which people can live without fear and express political opinions without being automatically criminalised. It requires accountability, democratic participation and sustained dialogue aimed at addressing the competing aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
The return of Kashmiri Pandits should be part of that process, not a substitute for it.
Kashmir has already lost too many people and too many years. Its graveyards carry the consequences of unresolved conflict. Its prisons and courtrooms reflect another dimension of it. Families on every side continue to live with memories of killings, disappearances, displacement and separation.
The task now should not be to determine whose pain deserves greater recognition.
It should be to ensure that no community's pain is exploited to perpetuate the conflict.
Let the Pandits return. Let displaced Muslims return. Let every Kashmiri who was forced from home have the right to imagine going back.
But let their return be built upon reconciliation rather than triumphalism, justice rather than selective memory, and a genuine search for political peace rather than carefully staged symbolism.
Otherwise, what is presented as a homecoming will remain only a performance.
And Kashmir has had enough of performances.
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