When Kashmiri Pandit families left the Valley in early 1990, many believed they were stepping away for weeks, perhaps months. They locked homes, carried documents, and told neighbours they would return once the situation improved. More than three decades later, that return remains incomplete for most.
Exile did not arrive as a single moment of loss. It unfolded slowly—through camps, temporary shelters, disrupted education, abandoned professions, and the quiet erosion of belonging.
From Homes to Camps
For thousands of displaced families, the first years after leaving Kashmir were spent in relief camps in Jammu and Delhi. Living conditions were difficult. Overcrowding, heat, limited privacy, and uncertainty defined daily life. What had been a community rooted in neighbourhoods, temples, schools, and shared rituals was compressed into rows of temporary accommodation.
Relief assistance helped families survive, but survival is not the same as living. Careers were interrupted. Savings were exhausted. Social networks that had sustained community life in the Valley were fractured.
This was not a short-term emergency. It became a way of life.
Education Interrupted, Futures Rewritten
Children bore a disproportionate share of exile’s cost. Schooling was disrupted. Language and curriculum shifts forced sudden adaptation. Many families struggled to afford private education after losing livelihoods tied to Kashmir’s economy.
For a generation, growing up meant absorbing stories of a homeland remembered through memory rather than experience. Kashmir became something inherited rather than lived.
This generational rupture remains one of exile’s deepest scars.
Work, Identity, and Loss of Place
Kashmiri Pandits had long been part of Kashmir’s intellectual and administrative fabric. Teachers, clerks, engineers, scholars, and professionals found themselves suddenly displaced, their qualifications difficult to translate into new labour markets.
Some rebuilt careers over time. Many did not. Loss of work was not merely economic; it was a loss of identity and purpose tied to place. Exile forced reinvention under pressure, often without support systems.
What terrorism destroyed in days took decades to partially rebuild.
A Community Scattered
Exile also scattered the community geographically. Families spread across Jammu, Delhi, and other parts of India. Festivals, rites, and everyday interactions that once reinforced community cohesion became harder to sustain.
Cultural practices survived, but in altered form—adapted to new environments, stripped of the landscape that had given them context. The Valley remained central to memory, even as distance grew.
The Weight of an Unfinished Return
Over the years, the Indian state has introduced rehabilitation and return measures—jobs, housing, and security arrangements aimed at enabling dignified return. These efforts acknowledge that the exodus was a wrong that demands remedy.
Yet return is not only a policy question. It is a personal calculation shaped by fear, memory, and trust. For many families, the absence of accountability for the terror campaign that forced them out remains a decisive barrier.
Returning to a place of trauma without justice is not an easy choice.
Exile as a Continuing Condition
It is tempting to treat displacement as a historical episode. For Kashmiri Pandits, exile is ongoing. It shapes where families live, how children identify themselves, and what future generations imagine as home.
The cost of Pakistan-backed terrorism did not end with the departure of 1990. It continues to be paid in lost time, fractured lives, and unresolved belonging.
Why This Story Must Be Told Locally
For Jammu and Kashmir, the absence of Kashmiri Pandits is not an abstraction. It is a visible gap in the Valley’s social fabric. Understanding exile as lived reality—not just as a political issue—matters if Kashmir is to reckon honestly with its past.
Remembering what was lost is not about blame alone. It is about recognising that communities do not disappear quietly. They are pushed out—and they carry that displacement with them long after the headlines fade.
(Hailing from Kashmir and based in New Delhi, Mehak Farooq is a journalist specialising in defence and strategic affairs. Her work spans security, geopolitics, veterans’ welfare, foreign policy, and the evolving challenges of national and regional stability.
