Kashmir's Pandits Were Told to Convert, Leave, or Die. Thirty-Two Years Later, the Government's Own Return Scheme Got One of Them Shot at His Desk

On September 14, 1989, Tika Lal Taploo, a lawyer and the state BJP leader, was shot dead outside his house in Srinagar’s Habba Kadal neighborhood. Six weeks later, on November 4, militants killed Justice Neelkanth Ganjoo on the city’s Hari Singh High Street. Ganjoo had presided over the 1968 trial that sentenced JKLF founder Maqbool Bhat to death for the murder of a police inspector, and he had never stopped receiving threats for it. In February 1990, Lassa Kaul, the director of Doordarshan Kendra in Srinagar, was shot outside his home in Bemina.

By the time Kaul was killed, 21 Kashmiri Pandits, members of Kashmir’s small Hindu minority, had already died in the growing militancy. What came next was not a slow drift but a collapse measured in weeks.

The night of January 19

Jagmohan was sworn in as governor of Jammu and Kashmir on January 19, 1990, as the state came under governor’s rule. That same night, in what survivors call the night of terror, militants went from house to house in Hindu neighborhoods, and a slogan spread through the valley: “Ralive, tsalive ya galive,” convert, leave, or perish.

By the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti’s own count, 75,343 Pandits fled in January alone, and roughly 70,000 more by the end of March. About 650 were killed during the exodus, by that same estimate. Official figures diverge sharply from advocacy-group ones, as they often do in mass-displacement events: the Jammu and Kashmir government’s own recorded count puts Pandit fatalities between 1989 and 2004 at 219, while other tallies for the 1989-2005 period run into the thousands. No single number is settled, and readers should treat any precise casualty figure for this period, including the ones in this article, as an estimate rather than a census.

What is not disputed is the scale of the displacement itself. In 2020, the Ministry of State for Home Affairs told the Lok Sabha that 64,951 registered Kashmiri Pandit migrant families were living outside the valley: 43,618 in Jammu, 19,338 in Delhi, and 1,995 in other states. Advocacy groups put the number of individuals displaced far higher, with estimates ranging from roughly 100,000 to several hundred thousand, a range wide enough to show how incompletely the exodus was ever documented at the time it happened.

A film, and where it departs from the record

In 2022, the film The Kashmir Files brought the exodus to a mass audience decades after it happened, and drew criticism for how it told the story alongside credit for telling it at all. The film put the number of Pandits killed at 4,000, well above the documented estimates. It also depicted a threat published in the newspaper Al-Safa as a cause of the January exodus, when the threat was actually printed on April 14, three months after the night of terror it is often said to explain. And it placed the 2003 Nadimarg massacre, actually carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba, in the early 1990s and attributed it to a JKLF character instead.

None of that changes the documented core of what happened: named men were assassinated for who they were, a slogan calling for conversion or death spread through Hindu neighborhoods, and most of Kashmir’s Pandit population left within months and did not return. But the gap between the film’s numbers and the record is itself worth knowing, since inflated figures are easy to repeat and hard to correct once they circulate.

The return that a killing interrupted

In 2008, the central government approved the Prime Minister’s Development Package, offering government jobs and transit housing to migrants willing to move back to the valley. The jobs component created 6,000 supernumerary posts across state departments. The Tribune reported in 2021 that 3,509 Pandit youths had returned to the valley under such schemes since 2010. By 2022, around 4,000 migrants were working in Kashmir under the Prime Minister’s package.

On May 12, 2022, two Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen walked into a tehsil office in Chadoora, Budgam district, and shot Rahul Bhat, a 35-year-old employee hired under that same package, at his desk. He died at a Srinagar hospital soon after. The Jammu and Kashmir administration offered his wife a government job and financial assistance for the family, and covered his daughter’s education costs.

The day after Bhat’s killing, 350 government employees hired under the package submitted their resignations, saying they no longer felt safe. By some counts, roughly 2,500 of them had left the valley in total within weeks. The Jammu and Kashmir administration’s own tally for 2022 recorded three Kashmiri Pandits among 14 minority-community members killed in the territory through the end of November.