Abu Zolfiqar
Rest in Peace
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Since it's a Human Rights Council of UN ... can a case be made against how the poor persecuted Muslim Kashmiris made Hindu Kashmiris flee the valley? How threats of raping Hindu women and converting them were aired through the loud speakers of the mosques after the Friday prayer sermons.
Kashmiri Pandits: Why we never fled Kashmir - Kashmir: The forgotten conflict - Al Jazeera English
Sanjay Tickoo remembers it well. It was a warm summer's day in 1990, when he found a poster pasted to the outside wall of his home in Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir. It was written in Urdu, which Sanjay could not read, so he took it to his grandfather and asked him to translate it.
"As he read it out to us, tears rolled down his cheeks ... it basically instructed our family to leave the valley or die," Tickoo tells me as we sit in a café at the foot of Jhelum River in Srinagar.
But, unlike the estimated 100,000 Hindus from the valley - known as Kashmiri Pandits - who embarked on a mass migration south to Jammu following the start of the insurgency against Indian rule in 1989, Tickoo's family refused to leave.
"Over the past 20 years, we estimate that 650 Pandits were killed in the valley," Tickoo says, adding: "The figures of 3,000 to 4,000 killings [as suggested by some Pandit organisations] is propaganda, which we reject."
"Not that 650 is a low number, because even one killing should be not ignored, but we must get the numbers right."
While Tickoo's organisation says that 399 Pandits were killed between 1999 and 2008, and 650 in total, this pales in comparison with those estimates that put the figure at 3,000, but exceeds the state's suggestion that 219 were killed between 1990 and 2008.
But collating the numbers, or even unravelling the language of migration and exodus, is part of the historical ambiguity that surrounds the Pandits' flight from the valley. And it has been made all the harder by the fact that Pandits outside Kashmir have dominated the narrative