JAMMU/DELHI: When a Kashmiri Pandit dies far from home, the grief comes in two waves. The first is the ordinary sorrow of loss. The second is the knowledge that the rites cannot be performed as they used to.
For generations, the mortal remains of the community’s dead were carried to Shadipora Sangam in Pulwama. At this sacred confluence, river waters absorbed the ashes of ancestors and carried them onward, fulfilling a ritual older than living memory.
“We have a 5,000-year-old history connected to these places,” says Rakesh Handoo, 59, a displaced Kashmiri Pandit from Rainawari in Srinagar, now living in Faridabad. “We believed this brought peace to the soul. We never had to go to Haridwar. Today, because of compulsion, we do — and it hurts our souls.”
Then, after a pause, he says, “Someone living in Bengaluru, or outside the country, cannot always come to Kashmir. The nearest option becomes Haridwar. This pain will haunt us till our death.”
The pain Handoo describes accumulates in small, irreversible ruptures: in the bodies that cannot return to the rivers that are symbolically central to the community’s identity. The rituals are now improvised in unfamiliar cities.
Over three decades after the mass exodus of 1990, the Kashmiri Pandit community, dispersed across Jammu, Delhi, Mumbai, the United States and across the globe, is grappling not only with questions of rehabilitation and political justice, but with a deeper question: what remains of a civilisation once it has been severed from the soil that gave it meaning?
A Temporary Home
The entrance to one of Jagti’s internal lanes looks like a corridor of slow ruin. Four-storeyed residential blocks rise on either side; their lower walls a patchwork of faded red and cream paint, their upper stories stripped almost entirely bare where the falling plaster now clings in fragments, grey concrete stains peeping through.
A messy web of electrical wires lies overhead. On the tiny and cramped balconies, and between the buildings, clothes are hung to dry. Some windows are completely dilapidated and the residents have covered the openings with blue tarpaulins. A hand-painted sign on the rightmost block reads: BLOC - the rest of the word cut off, left mid-sentence like everything else.
At the end of the lane, framed by the decaying blocks on either side, stands the Shri Radha Krishna Mandir Jagti. It is painted a vivid, almost shocking pink. Its facade is clean, the flags at the top still bright. A black water tank looms on a tower behind it. The contrast between the temple and the buildings flanking it reveal the story of a community’s passion to maintain a communal structure with effort and devotion while the rest, supposed to be maintained by the state, fades into shambles.
The neglect of this complex, accumulated over the years, precisely records the larger story of government neglect of the community.
More than 4,250 two-room flats were built here under the Prime Minister’s Rehabilitation Plan, intended to house roughly 5,000 families and 20,500 people. The government called it a township. The people who live here call it the camp.
“If someone has aging parents, children, a full family, where are they supposed to live?” demands Handoo. “One bedroom, a small kitchen, a bathroom. How can this be called rehabilitation?” His question is not rhetorical, but one tied to daily existence.
Many residents here survived worse before: the sweltering tented colonies of the 1990s where Kashmiri Pandits arrived with whatever they could carry, and where many died of snake bites, heat stroke, and despair.
Jagti is, for many, their third displacement. They were moved from tents to rooms called tenements, from rooms to here. It was meant to be temporary. Jagti is now in its fifteenth year.
Three Decades of Displacement
Handoo belongs to the generation that was young when the migration happened. He is old enough to carry the memory clearly, young enough that displacement has defined more of his life than Kashmir ever did.
“Our generation still carries the wish of being cremated in the same land where we were born,” he says. “But the government seems uninterested in rehabilitating us.”
The community has not been passive in the face of erasure. Kheer Bhawani temples and ashrams have been built in Displaced KP colonies across India. Hawans and Puran Ahutis are organised wherever Kashmiri Pandits have settled in sufficient number. In California, NRI Kashmiri Pandits have purchased land worth crores to construct their own Kheer Bhawani temple, so that the rituals survive the Atlantic crossing.
Handoo says, “We make an attempt to transport our culture and language to the next generation,” but acknowledges, “Somewhere along the way, we have already lost our language.”
Satish Mahaldar, 52, frames the loss in civilisational terms. “The original language of Kashmir was Sanskrit, which was later shaped by Urdu and Arabic. Our language has been distorted. Since the 1990 migration, our culture too has gradually been diluted.”
But language is only the surface of what he mourns. He speaks of sacred springs. Almost every district in Kashmir once had one, each tied to specific rituals and community memory that his people can no longer reach. He speaks of the winter folk tradition of singing Lal Ded Vaakhs while facing the mountains.
“How can those rituals truly survive outside Kashmir?” he asks. No answer satisfies.
“Fish and rice were part of our cultural identity,” Mahaldar adds. “Displacement has not only uprooted people physically. It has disconnected us from an entire civilisation.”
The community’s marriage patterns have also shifted: inter-caste unions, once uncommon in Kashmiri Pandit society, have become unremarkable in the diaspora. “We have changed altogether,” Handoo says in a matter-of-fact way.
The Unfinished Promise
When the Kashmiri Pandit community left the Valley in 1990, there were roughly 25,000 of their number employed in government service.
The Prime Minister’s rehabilitation package, introduced under the Congress-led UPA government, recruited approximately 6,000 people. Handoo elaborates mathematically: “If the government was serious about rehabilitation, would they not have doubled or tripled that number?”
Of those 6,000, many are still living in rented rooms in Srinagar, waiting. In Zewan, 27 residential buildings have sat under construction for four years. Allotments have been made; possession has not been transferred.
The community’s transit accommodation in the Valley - the flats provided to KP employees working under the PM’s package - became a focus of national attention in 2022 after the killing of Rahul Bhat, a government employee shot at his office desk in Budgam. The killings did not stop there. Each one renewed the feeling that the rehabilitation was not merely incomplete but potentially dangerous.
Sanjay Dhar, a Kashmiri Pandit from Qazigund and political activist, says “Our community continues to live in poor conditions, with no meaningful renovation of rehabilitation settlements. Beyond speaking of security concerns, the government has failed to present any concrete roadmap for our rehabilitation. What we continue to receive are assurances.”
He raises the question of lack of political representation, which further invisibilises the community. “Whether it is DDC elections, municipal elections, or panchayat elections, representation for Kashmiri Pandits must be ensured through reserved seats,” is his demand.
Justice Deferred
The comparison that Handoo reaches for is the 1984 anti-Sikh violence in Delhi. “In that case, many of those responsible were eventually convicted after Supreme Court intervention. But in our case, justice is nowhere to be seen. None of those responsible for our suffering have been convicted.”
The comparison is not about the equivalence of suffering but about the differential application of accountability - a question that the Indian state has never satisfactorily answered.
The pursuit of legal justice for Kashmiri Pandits killed during the violence of 1989-1998 has been marked by repeated institutional failure. Despite over 200 FIRs lodged, not a single case reached the stage of a charge sheet or conviction. Roots of Kashmir, an organization of displaced Pandits filed a petition to know the answers but the Supreme Court dismissed their plea in April 2017, reasoning that evidence was unlikely to be available so long after the events of 1989-90. A review petition was subsequently dismissed, and in December 2022 a bench headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud rejected a final curative petition.
At the investigative level, the record is equally bleak. Hundreds of FIRs filed during and after the mass exodus of 1990 were quietly marked as "untraced" over the following decades, victims of witness fear and vanishing evidence, as seen in the 1997 Sangrampora massacre and 2003 Nadimarg cases, whose files were closed without result.
The Jammu and Kashmir Police, according to the Roots in Kashmir petition, failed to make any meaningful progress across the hundreds of cases in its custody, prompting calls for transfer of all relevant FIRs to an independent agency such as the CBI or NIA.
Some limited movement came in recent years: the J&K State Investigation Agency revived the 1990 murder and abduction case of Kashmiri Pandit nurse Sarla Bhat and Neelkanth Ganjoo killing, and the High Court reopened the closed case of the 2003 Nadimarg massacre of 24 Kashmiri Pandits in 2022.
These remain exceptions, and no further progress on these cases has since been made..
Compounding the denial of justice is a persistent dispute over the basic death toll itself. A 2021 RTI response from the Srinagar district police headquarters stated that only 89 Kashmiri Pandits had been killed by militants "since the inception of militancy 1990" but the reply excluded the year 1989.
According to a J&K police report cited in The Indian Express in 2008, 209 Pandits alone were killed. Official state government figures cited in The Hindu in 2010 placed the total at 219 killed between 1989 and 2004, while the Roots in Kashmir petition cited a figure exceeding 700 over the broader period to 1998.
This unresolved ambiguity in the official record has further undermined the prospects of accountability and perpetrators remain unprosecuted.
The NAFSA Debate: Welfare or Erasure?
The most recent flashpoint in the community’s fraught relationship with the state concerns NAFSA - the National Food Security Act. Its implementation among displaced Kashmiri Pandits has divided opinion sharply.
Pyare Lal Pandita, a political activist from Kupwara now living in the Jagti settlement, argues the case for inclusion straightforwardly: before NAFSA, many community members were excluded from welfare schemes such as Ladli Beti, widow pension, and senior citizen pension.
“Those who now possess NAFSA cards have started receiving ₹1,500 per family member from January 2026,” he notes. “This is a parliamentary decision based on the principle of ‘One Card, One Nation.’ Why should Kashmiri Pandits be excluded?”
Others hear in the scheme’s logic a quiet threat to the community’s distinct status. Sunil Pandita, a social activist in Jagti, is among them. “Rehabilitation remains our primary demand. Providing five kilograms of ration cannot be projected as a major solution to long-pending problems.”
The argument is not about food. It is about what category the state intends to place the community in - and, by extension, what obligations that category does or does not impose on the government.
Sanjay Tikoo, a socio-political activist and member of the Sangarsh Samiti who chose not to leave Kashmir during the exodus, is unambiguous about what he believes is happening. “This is a move aimed at eventually removing the migrant status of Kashmiri Pandits,” he told the Kashmir Times.
He is also critical about the food security policy: “Eleven kilos of ration, two kilos of flour, and one kilo of sugar - is this what you call food security? The NAFSA scheme is meant for migrant labourers who move in search of work. Are we migrant labourers?”
Mahaldar widens the frame. NAFSA, he points out, applies to all Kashmiri migrants, including Kashmiri Muslims who were displaced, and the principle of a portable national identity extends well beyond this community.
“A migrant from Punjab living in Maharashtra still carries his original identity,” he says. “The Act should include a provision recognising the distinct status of displaced communities. I am not here by choice. Just because someone is living in Himachal Pradesh or another state does not mean they cease to belong to their homeland.”
The Kashmir Times contacted Relief Commissioner Arvind Karwani for a response to the community’s protests over NAFSA. Despite repeated calls, he could not be reached.
The Real Question
Mahaldar is careful not to apportion collective blame. “We cannot blame the entire Kashmiri Muslim community,” he says. “There were miscreants, and such elements exist in every society. Kashmir was once a diverse and pluralistic region, and such diversity cannot be preserved through force alone.” But he is equally clear about what is at stake in the present.
“The real question is why we were forced to migrate in the first place. Even if that question is no longer being addressed, the focus should now be on rehabilitation so that our identity and cultural roots remain intact.”
“Kashmiri Pandits have tolerated what most people cannot even imagine,” Handoo says, recalling his time volunteering at Geeta Bhawan in Jammu during the early 1990s - a makeshift relief centre where ten families might share a single hall.
But the community continues to feel abandoned decades after their displacement. “A Kashmiri Pandit is neither recognised as a refugee nor properly acknowledged as a displaced person,” Handoo says. “In reality, we became refugees in our own country.”
In the meantime, the dead continue to be cremated in distant lands. The ashes are immersed in rivers where they never belonged. Back in Kashmir Valley, the Shadipora Sangam flows on without them.
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