Kashmiri Pandits: Will their scars ever heal?

"Their relatively small numbers coupled with a tradition of non-violent protest have made the Kashmiri Pandits irrelevant in the political discourse"

Anuja Khushu Jammu

"I want to see my apple trees, take me to my orchards. I want to sit under the Chinar tree. Want to see my fields, my cows, buffalo sheds. Take me to my Kashmir," says Gunwati, 75, everytime when someone happens to pass by her home or comes to see her family.

Neha Pandita, 16, who lives in Mishriwala Camp, says that her parents burst into tears everytime they remember their lives in Kashmir. "Sometimes I enjoy these things, but only in dreams and not in reality. I want to see all these in reality."

Even today, the years of living under constant stress has left women like Gunwati ravaged. While Gunwati longs for the land of her youth, for young Neha, they do not even form the stuff of memories. She has spent most of her growing years in a camp in Jammu, only hearing about the homeland from the older generation. Both the women are Kashmiri Pandits, who were forced out of their homes in the Kashmir Valley because of the violence during the years of militancy beginning in the early 1990s.

The impact of the conflict on these women and on thousands of people is directly related to the daily environment in which grenade explosions, improvised explosive device blasts, killings and encounters were more common than perhaps a routine day at work or a family gathering for the evening meal. The pain of experiencing brutal killings, of damaged residences and watching communities migrating to other regions, all had a direct bearing on the psyche of the people who lived in the conflict zone.

The fallout of this has been highly detrimental to the collective psyche of people across Kashmir leading to wide-spread stress-related disorders. For the community of Kashmiri Pandits, however, this has been compounded by the fact that they have been rendered homeless and rootless. Now, living in Jammu , they still carry the scars.

As many as 300,000 people fled their home and hearth, reduced to living the lives of refugees outside Kashmir. In what appears to be a flicker of a moment, they lost almost everything that their lives were based on: their roots, identity, homes, possessions and, most painful, their sense of belonging. Even their memories were full of the trauma and tragedy of being uprooted.

Even after 18 years of migration, majority of the Kashmiri Pandits are living in squalid camps in Jammu, Udhampur and Delhi with families of five to six people often huddled into a small room. Living in abysmal conditions in camps, they face spiraling health and economic problems. Sometimes, a single room is shared by three generations. At other places, sometimes, six families lived in one hall separated by partitions of blankets or bedsheets. For those who lived in the idyllic environs of the Kashmir valley, this degeneration of life has been unbearable.