Terror in Kashmir: The Return and the Reckoning

FOR MORE THAN three decades, the exodus of the minority Hindu community (Pandits) from Kashmir Valley has occupied an unusual place in Indian politics. It was invoked constantly, but the examination of why it happened was rarely done. Outside Kashmir, it became a tool for larger ideological battles over nationalism and secularism. Inside Kashmir, it received no acknowledgement, except in ex­tremely cautious and measured voices. In the recent years, every discussion of 1990—the year over 3.50 lakh Hindus were driven out by Islamist extremists—only collapsed into a contest over competing victimhood.

Now, two developments may shift the ground like never before.

Recently, Kashmir’s mainstream and separatist leaders have been reaching out to the Pandit community. Last week, Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) Mehbooba Mufti visited the Hindu shrine of Ksheer Bhawani during its annual fair and appealed to the com­munity to return. Around the same time, the Jammu & Kashmir Police’s State Investigation Agency (SIA) reopened the murder of Sarla Bhat, a young Hindu nurse abducted and killed in 1990. The investigation is among the first serious attempts to revisit one of the targeted killings of the insurgency’s opening months.

The two events, of reaching out to Pandits by Kashmir’s politi­cal leadership, and the concluding of investigation in the Pandit killing, on the face, point toward the same possibility: Kashmir may finally be entering a phase in which the Pandit exodus is treated not merely as a footnote but as a rupture demanding both acknowledgement and accountability. The acknowledgement part without delving into the reasons why it happened is easier. After all, during the last Assembly elections, even the proxy candi­dates of the Jamaat-e-Islami called for the return of the Pandits—a development that would have been unimaginable in pre-2019 Kashmir. The politics of Kashmir has altered profoundly since 2019. The old binaries of Delhi versus Srinagar, or separatist versus mainstream, have weakened, even if they may not have disap­peared. But the two events do not mean the same road. Acknowl­edgement without assigning responsibility carries little political cost in a Kashmir dominated today by the might of the Indian state. Describing Pandits as an integral part of Kashmir’s social fabric is a vocabulary that has become part of mainstream. Accountability, however, is different. It demands a reckoning not merely with the fact of the exodus but with the chain of events that produced it; it requires names instead of abstractions, evidence instead of state­ments, and an acceptance that the violence of 1990 cannot remain suspended in a haze of collective memory forever.

It is one thing to say that the Pandits should return; it is an­other to ask who threatened them, who killed them, who created the atmosphere in which an entire community concluded that leaving was safer than staying. Yes, symbolism of a prominent Muslim leader watching over a dance during a religious cer­emony of a Pandit household normalises a public language that has remained missing in the Valley. But this symbolism has to be matched by something more difficult. An invitation acquires credibility only when it is accompanied by a willingness to con­front the violence that made the invitation necessary in the first place. That is where the investigation into Sarla Bhat’s murder assumes significance beyond a single case. It suggests that, how­ever belatedly, the institutions of the state are beginning to ask the questions that political rhetoric alone cannot answer.

TO UNDERSTAND WHY the Sarla Bhat investigation matters, one has to return to the spring of 1990, when the Valley was in the grip of a fear unlike anything it had experienced before. The writ of the state had collapsed, and as militants began to target Pandits, there was no one to save them. In the beginning, only prominent Pandits—judges, political ac­tivists, government officials—were targeted after being marked as enemies of the movement. But then, soon, ordinary people began to be killed as well. The exodus began.

It was in this atmosphere that the 23-year-old Sarla Bhat con­tinued to report for duty at the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS), where she worked as a nurse in the Neonatol­ogy Department. According to the SIA, she left the hospital on the afternoon of April 18, 1990. That was the last time she was seen alive by her colleagues. Investigators now say she was abducted soon af­terwards by JKLF militants, taken towards Srinagar city, physically assaulted, tortured and finally shot dead. Her body was recovered the next morning at another location.

The investigation of the killing of a Pandit girl was hardly the state’s priority. The local support around the gun-wielding militants fighting for “aazadi” was so frenzied that when Sarla’s body was cremated, a mob of over 200 people arrived at the crematorium and stomped over her ashes, threatening her relatives that they should leave Kashmir. The next morning, Sarla’s cousin told a TV reporter in Jammu recently, their house was bombed, and the rest of the fam­ily fled from Kashmir. In a matter of a few months, approximately 700 Hindus would be killed, most of them brutally like Sarla was.

For over 35 years, Sarla’s murder, like every single Pandit killing, remained just a statistic. The original police inquiry did not go beyond routine formalities, followed by decades of institutional silence.

Last year, the case was reopened. It is this silence, as much as the crime itself, that the SIA has now attempted to address. After re-examining witnesses, recording fresh statements, reconstructing the crime scene, analysing forensic material and tracing former JKLF operatives, the agency has concluded that Sarla Bhat’s killing was carried out by JKLF militants acting under the direction of the organisation’s leadership, particularly Yasin Malik, who is already in jail in another case related to terror funding. It argues that the murder was not an isolated act but part of a wider campaign of targeted violence intended to terrorise the Kashmiri Pandit com­munity and accelerate its flight from the Valley. But, more signifi­cantly, through the investigation, the SIA has tried to send a deeper message. Here’s the most vital part of the police statement, hours after a chargesheet was filed on June 29: “It [the chargesheet] sends a powerful and unequivocal message that time can never become a shield for terrorism. No matter how many years have elapsed, those responsible for terrorist atrocities will continue to remain answerable before the law. The case demonstrates that while ter­rorism may delay justice through fear, intimidation and violence, it can never permanently defeat the rule of law.”

THAT CONCLUSION HAS implications beyond the courtroom. It puts the ball directly in the court of those making symbolic gestures of peace and brotherhood in the Kashmir Valley. Even a few days after the news of the investigation broke, no Kashmiri leader has so far responded to what is the first-ever investigation in a Pandit killing. A senior police source told this correspondent that there already were signs of unease among certain sections of leaders, who, the source said, had begun question­ing the “intention” behind such investigations. The chargesheet in the case has also coincided with the government’s attempts to retrieve land belonging to the Pandits from the encroachers—so far, over 3,000 kanals has been restored to the rightful owners. But no matter what the reaction of Kashmir’s leadership is, politically, the investigation has shifted the discussion from broader contours of history to specific crimes, with named perpetrators, an alleged chain of command and an articulated motive. A senior police of­ficial, involved in the investigation, has confirmed that this is just the beginning and that in the coming days more such cases of Pandit killings will be investigated. “In fact, during the investigation of the Sarla Bhat case, we have got significant leads into some other killings as well,” he said.

What happens now? Appearance at a Hindu festival is one thing, asking for their return is one thing, making videos with old visiting Hindu friends is one thing; but what happens when the Pandits demand their stake in the Kashmir story, of which bringing their murderers to justice is a crucial part? Whether that convergence matures into a durable political consensus will depend on what fol­lows. If Sarla Bhat’s case remains an exception, the investigation will acquire symbolic value but little transformative force. If, however, it becomes the beginning of a broader institutional effort to revisit unresolved targeted killings from the early years of the insurgency, it could fundamentally alter the terms on which Kashmir remem­bers 1990. That, in turn, would lend greater credibility to the Valley’s new political vocabulary of return, coexistence and reconciliation. Because return is not simply about security or employment; it is about confidence that the society inviting a displaced community home is also prepared to confront the violence that drove it away.

That is what makes the Sarla Bhat investigation politically significant. Reopening the case signals something important: crimes committed during the insurgency’s formative years are no longer regarded as historically closed simply because they are politically inconvenient.

That principle could reshape the conversation around the Pandit exodus. Otherwise, every conversation around it coming from Kashmir is just a word salad.