We Cannot Be Selective About The Past In Jammu & Kashmir

if we’re going to recall what’s happened to Pandits in 1990, then it’s wrong not to remember what happened to Muslims in Jammu in 1947. Hundreds of thousands were killed or expelled.

These days, we hear a lot about what happened to Kashmiri Pandits in 1990. It’s often described as “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide”. For some, it’s justification for the recent de-operationalisation of Article 370. But not a word is spoken about what happened to Muslims in Jammu five decades earlier. That’s been completely forgotten. Yet, as Wajahat Habibullah, who was divisional commissioner (Kashmir) in 1990, when the Pandits were targeted, tells me this was “even more a case of genocide or ethnic cleansing”.

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