Kashmiri Hindus ‘Homeland Day’ – 28th December

More than thirty five years ago, Kashmiri Hindus experienced unimaginable devastation when they were cleansed from their ancestral Homeland. Events on 19^th January 1990 reached a fevered pitch and culminated in mass panic and the forced displacement of over 350,000 people, or over 90% of the Kashmiri Hindu population.

Newspapers, posted fliers, mosques issued declarations that called Kashmiri Hindus kafirs (Infidels) and asked them to leave Kashmir, convert to Islam, or they would be killed. The religious persecution and ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus from the Valley resulted in a sudden demographic change that would forever change the Kashmir Valley.

In the months after 19^th January 1990, hundreds of thousands of displaced Pandits were forced to live in refugee camps in the neighbouring region of Jammu and in other parts of India, and some camps still exist today.

‘Panun Kashmir’, an organisation representing displaced Kashmiri Pandits, observes the Kashmiri Hindus ‘Homeland Day’ on 28^th December. For ‘Panun Kashmir’, it is a day of reaffirmation for the entire religiously cleansed Kashmiri Pandit community to carry on the struggle for the reclamation of their ancestral land on their own terms with the free flow of the Indian Constitution in Kashmir so that the dignity, honour and rights of the persecuted community are restored in letter and spirit. Nothing short of Homeland will satisfy the persecuted Kashmiri Pandits.

The Government should accept the mass killing of Hindus in Kashmir in the Year 1990 as a Genocide ! : ‘Panun Kashmir’