In any free country, the forced exodus of a community should be a national wound not a footnote. The story of the Kashmiri Pandits is precisely that: a wound that still festers, not just because of what was done to them, but because of what wasn’t done by those who could have stood up.
It’s easy to blame external forces. But what about the internal silences?
Ramchandra Kak, the last Kashmiri Pandit Prime Minister of princely Jammu & Kashmir, resisted accession to India not out of disloyalty, but out of strategic caution. He was jailed and erased from mainstream narratives.
T.N. Kaul, a seasoned diplomat and confidant of Nehru, held the power to shape global narratives. Yet, when the valley burned, his voice was conspicuously absent.
Romesh Bhandari, Governor of J&K during the buildup to the insurgency, failed to anticipate or respond to the growing threat. Karan Singh, heir to the Dogra dynasty and a lifelong Congress statesman, spoke often of Kashmir’s spiritual legacy but rarely addressed the Pandit exodus with urgency.
Even within the bureaucracy, Kashmiri Pandits in the IAS, IFS, and IPS those with institutional access chose silence over solidarity. Their reluctance to speak out or resign in protest is a moral failure rarely discussed.
This isn’t about vilifying individuals. It’s about a pattern: elite Kashmiri Hindus, despite access to power and platforms, often chose detachment over advocacy. The tragedy of 1990 wasn’t just a failure of security it was a failure of memory, responsibility, and courage.
The deeper question remains: why have Hindus, time and again, failed to stand up for Hindus not in the spirit of exclusion, but in the spirit of justice?
If we cannot name our own silences, how will we ever break them?
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