Start of the 7th Exodus of Kashmiri Hindus

(Image Courtesy : Kashmiri Overseas Association)

Since 1990, Kashmiri Hindus all over the world have been observing this day to pay homage to all those who laid down their lives while battling terrorism in Kashmir.

It was on the morning of 14^th September 1989 when Pandit Tika Lal Taploo, an advocate and senior BJP leader, was assassinated by the militants at point blank range outside his residence while he was leaving home for his daily business. Several bullets were pumped into his body and he succumbed right in front of his residence.

The news of his assassination spread like wild fire throughout the city of Srinagar and in particular in the Habba Kadal Assembly constituency from where he had been contesting elections as a BJP candidate. He was a well-known social activist and a lawyer and had developed a personal rapport among all the sections of voters, despite being one of the most consistent and ardent BJP leader.

As the situation was unfolding, other prominent Kashmiri Pandits were getting brutally killed. A former judge, Pandit Neelkanth Ganjoo was killed in broad day light in Hari Singh High Street while returning from his court work as an advocate. His body lay on the road for some time because a diktat had been issued by a militant outfit not to move it and people did not move it out of fear and followed the diktat. The militant outfit had meticulously executed this murder scripted by ISI, and their Spokesman later officially acknowledged that the killing was done to avenge the judge’s role in the death sentence of its leader.

Meanwhile, the killings of prominent Muslim activists and political leaders also started and those nationalist Muslims and political leaders who condemned such brutal attacks of innocent citizens were done to death in a more gruesome manner.

The majority community, scared of gun wielding and trigger happy youngsters, and abject failure of State Government became voiceless to stop the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits and other Muslim targets.

(Compilation from an article, Courtesy : RisingKashmir.com)

In a seperate article, Col (Dr) Tej Kumar Tikoo (Retd.) writes :

Most of the Kashmiri Muslims behaved as if they did not know who the Pandits were. This frenzied mass hysteria went on till Kashmiri Pandits’ despondency turned into desperation, as the night wore itself out.

For the first time after Independence of India from the British rule, Kashmiri Pandits found themselves abandoned to their fate, stranded in their own homes, encircled by rampaging mobs.Through the frenzied shouts and blood-curdling sloganeering of the assembled mobs, Pandits saw the true face of intolerant and radical Islam. It represented the complete antithesis of the over-rated ethos of Kashmiriyat that was supposed to define Kashmiri ethos.

The pusillanimous Central Government was caught napping and its agencies in the State, particularly the army and other para military forces, did not consider it necessary to intervene, in the absence of any orders. The State Government had been so extensively subverted that the skeleton staff of the administration at Srinagar (the winter capital of the State had shifted to Jammu in November 1989) decided not to confront the huge mobs. Delhi was too far away, anyway.

(Excerpts from an article,Courtesy : IndianDefenceReview.com)