Hindus Of Kashmir
A Genocide Forgotten
The expulsion of Kashmiri Hindus in 1990 — its history, its perpetrators, and the conspiracy of silence that followed.
Overview
On the night of 19–20 January 1990, loudspeakers across the Kashmir Valley broadcast a choice: convert, leave, or die. The slogan — "Battav-ya ralive, ya chalive, natte galive" — was not ambiguous. Within weeks, hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus had fled, leaving behind homes, temples, and centuries of continuous presence in the valley. The world barely noticed.
Bansi Pandit's account does not treat this exodus as an isolated event. He traces the pattern of earlier forced departures from Kashmir, identifies the actors who orchestrated them and the agendas they served, and examines the disinformation campaign that worked to bury the testimony of the survivors. The book asks why a genocide that happened in living memory, with documented victims and named perpetrators, could be consigned to silence — and by whom.
Unflinching in its engagement with painful evidence and unsparing about the political forces that made silence possible, this is one of the few books that confronts the full history of what was done to the Kashmiri Pandits.
January 9, 1990 was the longest night of Kashmiri Hindus. Or was it? When lakhs of Kashmiri Hindus were banished from the Kashmir Valley overnight, under the din of the slogans "Battav-ya ralive, ya chalive, natte galive", was it the first time it was happening? And, if not, then what has been the history of the previous exoduses? More importantly, who were the actors, and what were their agendas in ensuring that the Kashmiri Pandits were forced to leave the Valley? What kind of disinformation campaign was unleashed to silence the truth, even as years rolled by? Why was a genocide forgotten? Hindus of Kashmir: A Genocide Forgotten by Bansi Pandit looks into these questions with an unflinching adherence to facts and a sense of objectivity that is hard to maintain when faced with the real, painful genocide, which was further made barbaric and tragic by being brushed under the carpet of a huge conspiracy of silence.
