After Exile The Second Dispossession of Kashmiri Pandits was Engineered by Property Brokers and other Thieves in Kashmir

 

Fxile was not the end of loss for the Kashmiri Pandits. It was only its beginning. When they left the Valley in the winter of 1989-1990, they fled under the shadow of open threats, selective killings, and the collapse of state protection. Armed militancy had hardened into organised terror. Groups such as Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, Hizbul Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Har katul-Ansar, Allah Tigers and Al-Umar Mujahideen operated with chilling visibility. Targeted killings, bomb blasts, intimidation posters, slogans in the night: all combined to make continued presence untenable for a small, vulnerable minority. But what history must also record is this: the Pandits did not merely lose life and homeland. They lost protection over memory, over property, over sacred spaces and over dignity. And in that vacuum, a second dispossession unfolded.

The Treacherous Property Brokers: They Arrived After Exile

After exile, they arrived. With power of attorneys in their pockets like knives wrapped in sympathy. They swarmed refugee tents, entered ten-by-ten rented rooms where families lived stacked upon one another, followed the exiled into hospital corridors where elders lay on ice blocks fighting heat stroke. They came on the tenth day of mourning when ashes still clung to riverbanks, when grief had not yet 18 hardened into resistance. They tracked families through dust storms in Jammu, through monsoon leaks in Delhi tenements, through winter shivers in makeshift colonies. They knew one thing with terrible clarity: Hunger makes signatures obedient. The pattern, repeated across families, acquired a grim familiarity. A broker, sometimes alone, often in groups, would appear with concern on his face and calculation in his eyes. "Your house is ruined. There are no buyers. There is a diktat coming shortly from the Mujahideen not to buy Pandit properties. In that event you will not get a penny. Sell it for whatever you get at this moment. Keep these fifteen hundred rupees as an advance. A final settlement of seventy thousand rupee." This settlement was for a house valued at twenty lakhs. The difference between market value and paid amount was not negotiation. It was annihilation. They called it urgency. They called it market reality. They called it help. If an owner refused, the pressure escalated. Trees were cut from orchards. Electrical wiring was ripped out. Doors removed. Windows dismantled. Plumbing stripped. What could not be looted was vandalised. And when structures still stood as memory's last refusal, fires were reported. Flames consumed timber roofs that had sheltered generations. Smoke erased what signatures had not yet erased. Then they returned. Heads bowed. Voices lowered. They said: "You were warned. Now it won't fetch even seventy thousand. There are diktats from Mujahideen now. Militants are watching." Driven from their homes in the Valley, families who once lived with dignity found themselves in suffocating tents, cramped rented rooms, and scattered tenements in Jammu and Delhi. They stood in queues outside the Relief Commissioner's office not as property holders, but as displaced supplicants, waiting for rations, documents, or uncertain assurances of return. Their loss was not abstract. It was a house left locked in haste. A courtyard gone silent. And it was there: outside the Relief Commissioner's office, in gathering spots, near camps that the brokers appeared. With folded hands and softened voices, they approached. After the exchange of pleasantries came the ritual question: "makaanachhuva kina know? Did you sell your house or it is still with you?" If the answer was yes, interest faded. If not, persuasion began, wrapped in concern. "You should sell it as early as possible. Conditions are not normal for your return. We too may leave permanently the way things are taking shape. Your house has no value now. Sell for any amount this time, you may not get a penny later? Tell me the location. I will help you. I am indebted to Pandits. I have been brought up in Pandit families. I know your compassion and moral values. I am going back soon." It sounded practical. It sounded sympathetic. But it was calculated. Addresses were noted. Vulnerabilities assessed. Within days, organised groups would follow, arriving with rehearsed arguments, engineered urgency, and pre-decided low prices. The aim was not assistance, but acquisition. Not empathy, but extraction. Thus began a second dispossession. The first loss was forced by terror. The second by opportunism. Grief was not merely witnessed. It was traded. And in that trading, something deeper was wounded, not just property rights, but trust within a fractured society. Fear was converted into market analysis. "Our bond is nail and skin," they smiled. "In your interest, take forty thousand for that house." Hungry. Sick. Cornered. Families signed. Grief makes good ink. Rents were paid. School fees cleared. Medicines bought. Life extended for some more days. Ancestry liquidated. In many instances, joint properties were acquired for negligible sums through deeply questionable means. Brokers and middlemen identified properties with multiple co-owners and deliberately exploited the legal and logistical complications that naturally arise in joint ownership structures. Their methods often followed a pattern: They first approached the co-owners who were locally available or financially vulnerable. They persuaded them to sign sale deeds or powers of attorney, frequently without full disclosure of the implications. They undervalued the property and misrepresented the consent of other partners. In several alleged cases, they proceeded to fabricate signatures of absentee co-owners, especially those living outside the outside the state, or abroad. Forged affidavits, falsified identity proofs, and manipulated witness attestations were reportedly used to give an appearance of legality. By the time absentee partners became aware of the transactions, properties had already changed hands, mutated in revenue records, or been further transferred to third parties, complicating legal remedies. Many affected parties have formally approached their respective District Commissioners, requesting investigation into these transactions. At the heart of these cases lies the greed that made these brokers act as architects of dispossession. Grief was Traded in Baba Debarked, Srinagar Grief was traded in Baba Demb as if it were timber stacked for auction, as if sorrow could be planed smooth, measured, and sold by the foot in the old quarters of Srinagar. After 1990, when silence fell upon the homes of Kashmiri Pandits who had fled in fear, the deserted houses stood like widowed sentinels, their doors bolted but their memories unguarded. Then came the slow, methodical unmaking. Criminals barged into these deserted houses not in rage but with a tradesman's patience. Deodar doors were lifted off their hinges and carried away. Delicate window frames, once polished, were pried loose and stacked in carts. Entire façades were dismantled as though the houses were carcasses and the market hungered for every bone. Carpentry shops opened in Baba Demb, not to create but to reshape what had been taken. Looted doors were trimmed and resized; window frames were sanded and varnished to hide the scars of forcible removal. Furniture, beds, bookshelves, bedding, brass samovars, brass plates (thalis), bronze thalis, bronze khasus (cups), brass degchas with the names of the owners engraved on the rim, Sanskrit and Sharda manuscripts from Puja rooms, precious miniature paintings of Hindu gods from Puja rooms, brass and bronze idols, pherans, blankets, quilts, family photographs, boxes, gas cylinders, and even cradles that had rocked infants were displayed as second-hand merchandise, stripped of their lineage. Each object bore the fingerprint of absence. Each sale declared that the owners were not expected to return. It was wholesale plunder, systematic and unashamed, conducted in daylight as though legality could be assumed through repetition.

Loot of Art and Manuscripts from the Deserted Houses

During the period of turmoil in Kashmir, its artistic and cultural heritage did not remain untouched. The houses of prominent artists such as Triloke Kaul, P. N. Kachru, and Mohan Raina were broken into, and their precious paintings were stolen. These were not ordinary thefts. The apparent aim was to deprive the artists of their life's work and leave them with nothing. Almost all the paintings by Som Nath Butt that adorned the walls of many reputed institutions, 20 premier colleges, the University of Kashmir, th Tourist Reception Centre (Srinagar), and othe public places suddenly disappeared. At the sam time, certain so-called art collectors or art broke of valuable illuminated Sharda and Sansk manuscripts all looted from deserted house were active in the Valley, dealing in these stole objects. Some of these works are believed have reached European markets, far from the land in which they were created. In an auctior conducted by Bonhams in London on June 2014, pages from a manuscript of the Bhagava Gita, with miniature paintings created in Kashm in the nineteenth century, were sold. At Sutto Hill Farm Country Auctions, Leicester, UK, nineteenth-century Kashmiri painting depicting Vishnu reclining on the serpent Sheshnaga was sold on November 15, 2019. Similar case involved a Mahishasura Mardini sculpture from Kashmir that was taken abroad and later brough back to India following high-level intervention In another instance, a portrait of S N Butt, painted in Kashmir by S H Raza, was sold at public auction by an art house. These incidents sugges not merely isolated thefts, but a systematic assault on cultural heritage, in which art manuscripts, and sculpture became casualties of conflict. Sudesh Raina (son of Mohan Raina) told the author: "My father had about 1,000 paintings stored in our Badiyar Bala house in Srinagar. He did 400 watercolours in the two years he lived after his retirement. All this treasure was looted after 1990, when our family had to leave Kashmir suddenly due to armed militancy. Our house was set on fire and completely destroyed. From some overseas friends, I have come to know that some of my father's paintings have travelled to the US and the UK. God alone knows when and how this happened. I want to write a book on my father, but I do not have anything significant to show. This loss is greater than the house and other belongings that we lost in Kashmir. I was told by Triloke Kaul, the pioneer of modern art in our state, that all his paintings were looted during the turmoil of the 1990s. He feels as if he has never used the brush." Before the arrival of the printing press, Kashmiri Pandit artists had already developed a distinct school of manuscript painting, producing religious texts adorned with numerous folios of exquisite miniatures. The paintings of Gauri Tritiya once graced every Puja room, forming an intimate part of domestic devotion and cultural life. This author personally witnessed some of these looted manuscripts, miniature paintings, and other stolen objects being sold on the footpath of Hazoori Bagh in Srinagar. For a time, a few cots in the Sunday Market at Polo Ground (Srinagar) openly displayed and sold such plundered items. In 1999, similar illuminated manuscripts and miniatures were seen in Chor Bazaar opposite the Amritsar Railway Station. The author also encountered comparable pieces in museums in the United States. Meanwhile, a handful of so-called art collectors have emerged within Srinagar itself. Today, these works are frequently traded by reputed art auctioneers across the world. Such transactions reveal the existence of a vast and organised network of traders of grief.

Civil Society and the Collapse of Moral Guardianship3

 The tragedy was not only the conduct of opportunists. It was the silence surrounding it. In every society, there exist moral buffers: civil institutions, community elders, intellectuals, religious leaders who protect minority property as sacred trust during conflict. In Kashmir during those years, that moral buffer fractured. There were some voices of individual compassion, stories of neighbours who protected keys, and refused to encroach. Although these stories are very limited in number yet these few persons deserve honour. But institutionally, collectively, there was no visible, organised social voice against the mass distress sale of minority homes. No Valley-wide declaration that abandoned houses were inviolable. No collective monitoring to prevent coercive transfers. No sustained civil protest demanding government protection of exiled property. The absence of organised resistance to exploitation deepened the wound. It created an impression, whether intended or not that dispossession was being normalised. To lose one's home to terror is tragedy. To lose it to opportunism in the shadow of terror is devastation.

Sacred Lands, Profane Transactions

The erosion extended beyond private homes. Temple lands, some attached to shrines centuries old, also fell into neglect and alleged encroachment. A report by journalist Ishtiyaq Kar in Morning Kashmir dated July 11, 2023, noted that authorities-initiated probes into alleged illegal leasing and encroachment of temple properties in the Valley. Special Investigation Teams were reportedly formed under the direction of the Divisional Commissioner, Kashmir, to examine such cases. The report referenced approximately 952 temples in Jammu and Kashmir, around 700 of them non-operational and many in dilapidated condition. Representatives of the displaced community stated that for over three decades, protection of temple properties had not been systematically enforced. They alleged that in the absence of the community, some defunct temple trusts were operated between 1989 and 2022, and properties were leased or sold in controversial circumstances despite court directions. The spiritual geography of Kashmir once dense with shrines dedicated to ancient traditions: thus suffered both abandonment and alleged exploitation. When a shrine falls silent, a civilisation whispers.

Violence as Background, Not Excuse

The Valley of the 1990s was engulfed by armed insurgency. Security forces and militant groups clashed with devastating frequencу. Civilians of all communities suffered loss. Yet violence cannot be retroactively invoked to justify coercive acquisition of minority property. If anything, conflict heightens ethical responsibility. The existence of militant diktats or fear cannot absolve exploitative transactions. To leverage someone's vulnerability under threat is not commerce; it is moral failure.

Memory on Social Media

Time has added another layer of pain. Today, some who benefited from distress-era acquisitions participate in public discourse on justice, reconciliation, or cultural harmony. Quotations from Rumi, Muhammad Iqbal, Lal Ded, and Nund Rishi circulate in posts emphasising compassion and coexistence. For those who signed away ancestral homes under distress, such moralising can feel like salt in a wound. Wisdom, when quoted without accountability, becomes performance. Even the chameleon, changing colours by instinct, appears simpler than a human being who can adjust moral tone to circumstance.

Return is Trespass

The early 1990s brought fear to Kashmir. Schools shut down, threats echoed in the streets, political workers were targeted, and many families from many communities fled Kashmir. Members of the majority community also left for safer places. But when the violence recede everybody returned and resumed ordinary l Their exile was temporary. For the Kashm Pandits, it was not. Their houses, shops, аn business establishments were occupie Orchards, fields, vacant land owned by Pand passed into other hands. Distress sales, forge papers, and manipulative brokers quietly altere ownership. In their absence, an economy gre around their properties. The longer they staye away, the stronger vested interests became Their displacement benefited many. When Pandits speak of return, it is met wi silence, delay, or resistance. Occupations are justified. What should be a simple homecoming becomes a battle. Thus a painful irony was bom For Pandits, return is treated as disruption. man who approaches his ancestral door is made to feel like an intruder. Return becomes trespass The homeland remains in sight, yet out of reach close enough to remember, too distant to reclaim .

The Long Question of Return

 Any discussion of return is inseparable from property. Return is not symbolic. It is spatial. A person cannot return to a demolished house or to a house that now belongs, legally or illegally, to someone else. Nor can trust be rebuilt while dispossession remains unresolved. The path forward requires: 1. Transparent audits of distress-era property transfers. 2. Legal review mechanisms with independent oversight. 3. Protection and restoration of temple lands and heritage sites. 4. Restorative justice frameworks that balance legality with moral context. 5. Civil society participation; across communities in acknowledging past failures. Reconciliation without property justice is sentiment without structure. Exile did not end in 1990.It continues. It continues in abandoned shrines where bells rust. It continues in rental apartments where photographs of snow-clad mountains hang on walls. The first dispossession was forced flight. The second was the erosion of everything left behind. Together, they created a fracture not only in geography, but in faith: faith in neighbourly protection, faith in institutional guardianship, faith in civil society courage.

The Moral Imperative

 This write-up is written to record injury. Justice demands clarity. Acknowledging that distress sales occurred under coercive atmospheres does not indict an entire people. It indicts systems, silences, and opportunism. It calls upon society; then and now, to ask:When a minority fled in fear, who guarded their homes? Who resisted exploitation? Who spoke up? Who remained silent? The measure of a civilisation is not how it treats the powerful in calm times, but how it protects the vulnerable in chaos. The Kashmiri Pandits were not only driven out. They were also stripped of what they left behind. Exile took their presence. Distress sales hollowed their inheritance. Encroachments scarred their sacred spaces. And yet, memory survives. It survives in poetry, in documentation, in petitions, in testimonies, and in the stubborn insistence that loss be recorded, not to perpetuate division, but to prevent repetition. Because if the second dispossession is forgotten, the first will be misunderstood. And a wound denied never truly heals.

DISCLAIMER: 

The views expressed in the Article above are Avtar Mota views and kashmiribhatta.in is not in any way responsible for the opinions expressed in the above article. The article belongs to its respective owner or owners and this site does not claim any right over it. Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing."

Courtesy:    Avtar Mota and Koshur Samachar- March, 2026