The Exodus of Kashmiri Hindus, who are also called "Kashmiri Pandits," is their en masse migration, or large-scale flight, from the mainly Muslim Kashmir valley in Indian-administered Kashmir in early 1990 in the wake of incidents of targeted violence in an uprising initiated by an organization with generally secular antecedents and the predominant goal of political independence. Some 90,000–100,000 Pandits of a total population of 120,000–140,000 felt compelled to leave, and 30–80 individuals were killed. Many Kashmiri Pandits, part of a minority community allied to India, experienced fear and panic which was set off both by the killings of some high-profile officials among their ranks and the public calls for self-determination among the insurgents, and the accompanying rumours and uncertainty might have been the latent causes of the exodus. The description of the violence as "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" in some Hindu nationalist publications or among suspicions voiced by some displaced Pandits is thought to be misplaced.

Quotes

  • McGirk also under-reports the number of Hindu refugees as 90,000 instead of over 200,000; but at least, he acknowledges their existence, till today a rare event in the Anglo-Saxon media... one could have expected a sympathy wave in favour of the Kashmiri Hindus, who were collectively hounded out of the Kashmir Valley in 1989-90. Nothing of the sort ever materialized, if only because most foreign media simply refrained from reporting this event... Hindu NRIs have shown me bunches of copies of their mostly unpublished “letters to the editor” of a variety of media in which they allege gross misreporting on the Kashmir problem... Till the time of his writing, most references to the Kashmir conflict in the international media fail to mention the Hindu refugee problem.
    • Koenraad Elst: Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, Rupa Publications, p. 57 ff.
  • Most of the foreign India reporters borrow not just data, but also opinions and judgments from their Delhi contacts without critically examining them. On top of these borrowed distortions, they themselves also manage to disregard pertinent data which stare every normal observer in the face. Thus, practically every Hindu activist whom I have interviewed between 1990 and 1998 brought up the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits, murdered or expelled from their homeland, as a telling illustration of the true religio-political power equation in India. But most publications purportedly analyzing Hindu nationalism in the 1990s manage to overlook this expulsion of Hindus from a part of India. They have to if they want to uphold the image of India as dominated by an overbearing Hindu majority threatening a hapless Muslim minority.
    • Koenraad Elst: Religious Cleansing of Hindus, 2004, in: Elst, K. The Problem with Secularism (2007) Chapter 6.
  • By now the complaint that "you secularists weren't half as indignant, in fact entirely uninterested, when a quarter million Hindus were cleansed from Kashmir" is entirely worn out and boring, but only because it remains unanswered and hence in need of being repeated.
    • Elst, K. in GUJARAT AFTER GODHRA: REAL VIOLENCE, SELECTIVE OUTRAGE (Har-Anand, Delhi, December 2002) EDITED BY PROF. RAMESH N. RAO & DR. KOENRAAD ELST
  • Where words lose their meaning, people are about to lose their freedom...By this standard, India is in some real danger, for the elite does use some Newspeak frequently... Thus... when Kashmiri Hindus have to flee their homes after reading open threats in the Urdu papers and seeing relatives butchered, they are called "migrants"; but when Bangladeshi Muslims terrorize their Hindu neighbours and then migrate from their Islamic state to India in search of job opportunities, they are called "refugees". This type of inversion of word meanings is part of a wider mind-set of mendaciousness expressed through more ordinary lies, often of breathtaking effrontery.
    • Elst, K. (2010). The saffron swastika: The notion of "Hindu fascism". p 725
  • ..the ethnic cleansing of the near-total hindu population, a quarter-million people, from the Kashmir Valley in early 1990. It remains for future students of political and communications science to describe and explain the unbelievable phenomenon of a world press keeping the lid on this information. [The] New York Times is among the papers which have created the impression with effective consequences for US foreign policy, that the Kashmir conflict is between hapless Muslims and an ugly Hindu state machinery, a distorted impression which would have been corrected to a fair extent if the paper had faithfully reported the undeniable Islamic persecution of the local Hindu minority... But from American journalists and academics, the persistent denial of the forced exodus of the Kashmiri Hindus is inexcusable.
    • Elst, K. (2010). The saffron swastika: The notion of "Hindu fascism". p 753
  • We also witnessed firsthand the basic hostility of Amnesty International to the plight of Kashmiri Pandits. Sunil Bakshi had repeatedly sent invitations to them three weeks before the exhibition. I personally called the head of Kashmir at Amnesty International several times as well as Ingrid Massage, the director, Asia & Pacific Program of Amnesty. First she told us they only reported on first hand facts, I replied these were photographs and statistics which nobody could dispute. Finally, after ten phone calls, she said she had too many files on her desk and that she had no time to come, although the exhibtion was a few blocks from her office. So much for Amnesty's sense of justice.
  • Among those who stayed on is Sanjay Tickoo who heads the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti (Committee for the Kashmiri Pandits’ Struggle). He had experienced the same threats as the Pandits who left. Yet, though admitting ‘intimidation and violence’ directed at Pandits and four massacres since 1990, he rejects as ‘propaganda’ stories of genocide or mass murder that Pandit organizations outside the Valley have circulated.
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