Kashmiri Pandit s Sufferance through History Mystery and Tyranny

 

The tale of sufferance's of Kashmiri Pandits in Kashmir dates back to centuries, when they have always been the targets of Islamic wraths from different rulers having Muslim bases. Unfortunately it applies even now to them when they have been systematically wiped out from Kashmir, under a well planned conspiracy abetted by the dynasty based political leaders of Kashmir, who have been ruling Jammu and Kashmir mostly ever since the ouster of Late. Sh. Maharaja Hari Singh Ji, as the last ruler of Jammu & Kashmir. Indian national congress led by Pt. Nehru is equally responsible for it. The history of Kashmiri Pandits under various periods of Muslim rule and during the modern insurgency has been marked by several multiple instances of persecution, violence, and mass exoduses. Historical accounts document multiple episodes of atrocities spanning from the 14th century to the late 20th century. The "past lives" of Kashmiri Pandits refers to their history in the Kashmir Valley, encompassing their ancient origins, their prominence as the indigenous Hindu community, their experiences under various rulers, and the repeated periods of migration and displacement they have faced, most notably their forced exodus and displacement of the 1990s. Kashmiri Pandits faced significant and recurring persecution, or "tyranny," across various periods in history, marked by forced conversions, mass killings, economic disenfranchisement, and multiple exoduses from the Kashmir Valley. Some such worst periods when the Kashmiri Pandits of Kashmir, suffered badly and almost were reduced to extinction are the Sultanate period viz, 14th to 16th century &the Mughal period followed by Afghan Rule, viz, 17th to 19th Century. Rulers like Sultan Sikandar Shah "Sikander the Idol Breaker" around the late 14th century, is known to have destroyed temples and forced conversions upon Kashmiri Pandis leading to the first major exodus from Kashmir. A tyrannical ruler, who imposed strict Sharia, destroyed Hindu temples, when he was crowned with a label to called as "Sikander Butshikan" (Sikander Idol Breaker). He banned Hindu rituals and forced conversions on Kashmiri Pandits to Islam, making Kashmiri Pandits to flee from Kashmir. This period marked a fundamental religious transformation in Kashmir with the valley becoming predominantly Muslim populated due to conversions of Kashmiri Pandits and their migration due to his tyrannical rule. This rule was followed with the Chak Rulers in 15thcentury, who were Shia Muslims, when they continued with the policy of forced conversions, looting, and massacres of Kashmiri Pandits. Many places of Hindu worship were demolished, forcing another large segment of the population to flee or get converted. Historical events of the Chak rule describe the Chak period as one of significant oppression and persecution for the Hindu minority in Kashmir, in particular the Kashmiri Pandits. Some rulers within this dynasty are said as having a policy of forced conversions and religious discrimination, about Kashmiri Pandits. There are reports of discriminatory laws having been imposed on Hindus, such as a requirement to pay an annual tax for wearing the sacred thread, restrictions on their dress, movement, and the repair of their temples. Historical narratives mention that under the oppressive rule, many Hindus were killed, marauded, or pressured to convert. This led to a "massive exodus" of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley seeking shelter in safer regions, а pattern that repeated in several waves throughout the Muslim rule era in Kashmir. Again during Mughal Empire especially under Aurangzeb, in late 17th century, rulers like Aurangzeb were religiously intolerant. Hе reimposed the jaziya and systematically targeted Kashmiri Hindus for conversion. His governor, Iftikhar Khan, was particularly brutal, leading to the third major exodus. A delegation of Pandits appealed to Guru Tegh Bahadur for help, which ultimately led to the Guru's martyrdom. Afghan Rule after the Mughal rule was more atrocious and is considered one of the darkest and most brutal periods. Afghan governors like Amir Khan Jawansher and Mir Fazl Kanth inflicted severe torture and humiliation to the Kashmiri pandits. Accounts from the time describe Pandits being publicly tormented and their lives considered worthless. Many fled to Jammu and Punjab, or converted to survive, pushing the community to the edge of extinction in their homeland. During the Pathan rule, the then heartless governor of Kashmir, Jabar Khan, subjected the hapless Pandits to horrendous atrocities and indignities. There are many instances of his brutal actions. As per the book of Prof. K.L. Bhan, the revered author of his book, "The Paradise Lost", which says that with the damned decree of " Sikandar- Boot-Shiken", seven mounds of the sacred thread of the murdered Brahmans collected from the KP's of that time forcibly which were burnt by Sikandar and all of their sacred books were thrown into the Dal Lake. The KPs numbering over one lakh were drowned in the Lake and were burned at a spot in the vicinity of Rainawari in Srinagar City known as Bhatta Mazar, The grave yard of the Bhattas, the KPS, beyond present day Jogilanker. According to the living memory of the KPs, only eleven KP families stayed back in Kashmir, the rest, rather than abandoning the religion of their father's, chose to migrate leaving behind their beloved homes hearths, lands and everything, only to protect their religion and faith}. It is on record that the great spiritual saint of Kashmir, Swami Jeewan Shah Sahib, the 18th Century Kashmiri Saint, saved a Hindu girl, whenthe Hindu girl was abducted by Pathan soldiers during the reign of a cruel governor, she chanted his name for help. The boat carrying her and the soldiers is said to have miraculously sunk, drowning the soldiers while the girl safely landed ashore. During the "Jabar-Khan's" rule, asis said that Jabar-Khan wanted the Kashmiri Pandits to prove the religious sanctity of their Shivratri religious festival, by shifting this occasion of Shivratri to the month of June, to prove that it invariably snows on that occasion of Shivratri. When the Shivratri was solemnized as per him in June, when to the surprise of all the people of Kashmir irrespective of their religion witnessed that it snowed on that day in June, turning the hot month of June to the cold conditions of February. The immediate verbose amongst the people of Kashmir which became a proverb there after was "Jabar - Jendhe - Har's - Ti - Kurn-Vandhe". (it means that the disliked "Jabar' hasturned the hot season of Kashmir as a winter season). In furtherance to the atrocities met by KP's from time to time, the said book of Professor Bhan "Paradise Lost" mentions as, ("Terrorized by Tamur the Lame - Syyid Mir Ali Hamdani along with 700 Sayyids, his followers, landed in Kashmir and drove a wide and deep wedge between the majority Hindus and minority Muslims. He dictated the Sultan Qutubud-Din to make the persecution and torture of the KPs a state policy. The code he prescribed for the sultan was a model of hatred, distrust, intolerance, bigotry and malignity against the KPs. He compelled the Sultan to officialise the persecution and massacre of KPs unless they embraced Islam. He is the architect of desecration and demolition of the Kalishree temple near Fatah Kadal in Srinagar and raising on its plinth a mosque known as Khanqah-iMulla. With his repressive and precautionary measures backed by state terrorism he achieved the conversion of 37,000 KPs to Islam during the latter two of his three visits. The Sayyids headed by Mir Ali Hamdani openly preached extermination of Hindu religion and Hindu politics from the soil of the Kashmir in order that Islam might flourish and get unshakably entrenched in their place. Following in his father's footsteps Mir Mohamad Hamdani urged Sultan Slkandar (1389-1413) notoriously known as the iconoclast (Sikandar but-shikan) to wipe out infidelity (Hindus) root and branch, from Kashmir and let not even a weed of it survive. The two reinforced by the rabid neo-convert Malik Saifudin unleashed a massive war against KPs with the target of genocide of this highly cul-tured people. Sikandar having pawned his soul to the Sayyids threw all norms of civilized Life and tolerance to winds and issued an atrocious and barbaric Government decree or-dering the KPs to opt for conversion or exile, flight or death. They let loose the floodgates of a reign of terror on the KPs to pressurize them to embrace Islam. Sikander enjoyed and exulted in breaking down images of Hindu deities. No temple anywhere in the city town or village escaped paying the heavy toll. Numerous Hindus fled, numerous were converted and numerous were brutally killed. Many poisoned themselves. This marks the first ominous exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from their native fair homes. It is this mass migration that occasioned the plight of KPs to the neighboring regions of Kishtwar and Bhadarwah via SMITHAN pass and to various provinces of India via Batote (Bhatta-Wath, path of the Bhattas or Kashmiri Pandits to run away)}. Historian Jonaraja and a Sanskrit Scholar of that time documents genocide in medieval Kashmir with some instances as under:- Crowds of Hindus ran away in different directions through passes and bypasses. Their social life was totally disrupted; their life became miserable with hunger and fatigue. Many died in the scorching heat. Some disguised as Muslims roamed about the country searching for their distressed families. Then the Sultan exclaimed proudly that he had succeeded in extermi-nating all traces of Hinduism from the valley by massacring the Hindus, by ravaging, looting and ransacking their prop-erties and more than most by kidnapping and raping there women folk. One of the central features of Jonaraja's Dvitiya Rajatarangini is its painstaking documentation of the demolition of Kashmir's temple heritage. The destruction was neither incidental nor circumstantial - it was a deliberate campaig of religious iconoclasm sanctioned by the state Under Sikandar, ancient temples such as Tripureshwara, Martand, Bijbehara's Vishn shrines and the temple of Vijayeswara were desecrated, razed or repurposed. Jonaraja writes with a tone of anguish: "He [Sikandar] levelled the ancient temples as if they were heaps of clay, casting down the greatimages and silencing the sacred chants thatonce echoed from mountain to vale." Jonaraja details how the Sultanate introduced legal and fiscal mechanisms to incentivize or compe conversion to Islam. The imposition of Jizya (a tax on non-Muslims) was designed not just to burden but to economically suffocate the Hindu populace, particularly the Brahmanas, rendering religious adherence materially unsustainable Traditional land rights were revoked, access to state employment denied and priestly functions criminalized. He records: "When the sustenance of dharma was taxed as a sin, the twice-born chose to yield or perish. Conversion, therefore, was not purely doctrinal; it was enforced through a calibrated program of legal disenfranchisement, psychological coercion and social marginalization. With the state banning public recitation of scriptures and dismantling traditional Gurukulas, the entire pedagogical ecosystem of Kashmir collapsed. Manuscripts were destroyed, libraries disbanded and teachers either converted or exiled. Jonaraja notes that scriptural instruction in the Vedas and Shastras was outlawed and that students were forcibly removed from their educational lineages, thus severing the transmission of sacred knowledge. In his verse, the displacement of Sarasvati (goddess of learning) from the valley becomes a potent metaphor for epistemic genocide. Jonaraja's account emphasizes that entire Brahmana families, once custodians of Kashmir's cultural and spiritual heritage, were forced to flee to escape persecution, starvation or execution. He writes: "The land of Sharada was emptied of her seers; those who stayed faced hunger or the sword. The mountains bore witness to caravans of exile, the sacred thread torn, the ancestral fire extinguished." Thus, Jonaraja's chronicle ends not with triumph, but with a note of civilizational fatigue, reflecting the irretrievable damage inflicted upon the Kashmiri Hindu population. This all is a tip of an ice berg. For lack of space in this column, much more such awful and wakeful tales cannot be mentioned here. Making a mention of the recent times pertaining to pro 1947 era, the rigmarole about the duping the KP's oftheir fundamental right to live in Kashmir with dignity and honor, started in this period only, when the exodus of KP'S started from Kashmir. So it was a process which was well defined and thought of by the Islamic fundamentalists now having captured the sentimental aura of Kashmir under the big psyche of making Kashmir a purely dominated place of Kashmiri Muslims. Sheikh Abdulla's rule in 1947, embedded the seeds of "Pseudo Secularism, viz half truths about the real concept of true secularism", in Jammu and Kashmir, for which the main suffering population of Jammu and Kashmir were the Kashmiri Pandits. It was in this time only when the Land to Tiller laws were enforced which in particular made Kashmiri Pandits the main targets as most of the Kashmiri Pandits were well established "Zamindars" and their agricultural lands were snatched from them and given to the tillers who were Muslims, with a biased base of communal tinge. Apart from this enough of partialities occurred during that time when KP's were refused proper representations in the government jobs, educational trainings, etc. This is the period when the first mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits occurred towards the plains, for earning their bread and butter with dignity and honor. Subsequent governments in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir followed suit to destabilize the base of the KP's from the valley, under a well knitplan, when mass exoduses of KP's took place from time to time, thus limiting the population of KP's to just to a miniscule one in Kashmir. With the brute advent of militancy in the year 1989-90, during the national conference rule, abetted by the sympathetic support of the Congress party from Delhi, the situation for the KP's became a death knell for them. Mass genocide and exodus of the KP's occurred, which is reverberating still on the fascia and the minds of the KP's and will continue to be so as long as humanity exists in this universe. Prominent leaders, intellectuals, politicians, individuals, government officers and the like amongst the KP's were brutally killed in broad day lights in thousands, along with the mass migration of this minuscule community to their destinations of devastations. It shows an extreme apathy of the government who could do anything and proper to save the KP's from such selected killings by the terrorists. It has put the KP's in extreme despair, to crave for their existence as a community of aboriginal connection with Kashmir valley. Does it mean that Kashmiri Pandits have to forget their birthplace and homeland Kashmir? Why cannot the terror of the Jehadi's and their actions be resisted with an appropriate response by the government and KP's rehabilitated back in Kashmir with honor and dignity. The only solution under the circumstances to this problem is to create a "separate homeland" for the KP's, with in Kashmir, having a status of "Union Territory". It has been repeatedly demanded by KP's for the last more than two decades but there is no response from any of the governments, be it state government or the central government. Now the so called intelligent educated youth like doctors and the like from the valley who are the new modular terrorists from Kashmir, supposedly with deep bases across the border and Kashmir valley. Their brute actions of mass killings are vivid from such actions of theirs while conducting bomb blast at Red Fort Delhi, when dozens of innocent people were killed for no fault of theirs. No one from the valley including the ruling regime ever condemned their actions with force and echo. How can they tolerate Kashmiri Pandits back in valley unless they are not protected well? For this the only solution is to provide the forcibly KP's a separate "Home Land' status in Kashmir, along with enough of security.

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Courtesy:   Er. P.L. Khushu  and Koshur Samachar- February, 2026