Twenty years ago, nearly 400,000 Hindus fled the Kashmir Valley, fearful of a separatist insurgency by the area’s Muslim majority. Now they are trickling back, a sign to many here that the Kashmir Valley, after years of violence and turmoil, is settling in to an uneasy but hopeful peace.
The valley’s upper-caste Hindus, Pandits as they are known, are reconnecting with their ancestral home, a few to stay and even larger numbers to visit. More than a dozen shrines have reopened in recent years, said Sanjay Tickoo, a Kashmiri Pandit who never left the valley and is now trying to entice those who left to return.
Their presence was once part of what made the Kashmir Valley a unique and idyllic patch of India, filled with apple orchards and shimmering fields of saffron framed by spiky, snow-capped peaks. A well-to-do but not overly powerful minority, the Pandits lived for centuries in relative harmony with their Muslim neighbors.
Kashmir’s mosaic of relatively peaceful coexistence first began to crack during the partition of British India, in 1947. But it was more than a decade of insurgency beginning in 1989 that turned the region into the battleground of the fierce rivalry between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan, who each control a portion of Kashmir.
Though not all fears or tensions from the past have dissipated, almost everyone here professes to want the Pandits to come back to the valley. Because they had lived here for generations, there is no sense that their return is intended to dilute the region’s Muslim majority.
“The overwhelming majority of Kashmiris believe the place is really incomplete without its diversity,” said Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir. “It is an important milestone in our return to normalcy if they begin to come back.”
M. L. Dhar, a 75-year-old Kashmiri Pandit who lives in a suburb of New Delhi, returned recently to Kashmir for the first time. He was astounded at the warm welcome he received from the valley’s Muslims.