Dear Prime Minister of India,

I am writing to you again, after four years, with displeasure over your government and party’s assurances on the matter of Kashmir’s minority community—the Kashmiri Pandits—to which I belong.

January 19, 2019, marks the beginning of our 29^th year of forced exile away from our roots and land. Under your regime, we have seen roughly five more years of exile. As the year’s pass, governments change, but our number of years in exile keep growing sequentially, like that of an arithmetic progression. Consequently, with each passing year, our homeland distances itself a bit further. However, the hope to return to our homes and hearths, persist. The flame of hope doesn’t fade. While the winds of adversities blow from all sides now and then, we don’t let the flame to die. Such is the longing for home, such is the nature of hope.

As you and your organisation, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are gearing up for 2019 Lok Sabha elections, I am waiting for your manifesto to see how you mock our plight. It will be interesting to see what words your party will choose to express the hollowness in regard to the Pandit community. It has to be seen how the BJP makes a mockery of our exile this time, given that the Pandit community has been used as a political tool to win TV debates by your party spokespersons.

BJP’s 2014 Lok Sabha election manifesto, titled Ek Bharat-Shreshtha Bharat, stated: “The return of Kashmiri Pandits to the land of their ancestors with full dignity, security and assured livelihood will figure high on the BJP’s agenda.” What happened to that? That promise remains unfulfilled.

Let me remind you of a campaign rally for the Jammu & Kashmir state legislative assembly elections in Samba, Jammu, on December 8, 2014. You affirmed to rehabilitate all the refugees since India’s partition in 1947. You were referring to the West Pakistani refugees, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) refugees from 1947, 1965 and 1971, and internally displaced Kashmiri Pandits. You blamed past governments for their mistakes, compulsions, and lack of will in resolving these matters. 

After the J&K state elections, you joined hands with your political opponent, the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). We saw your party enjoying power in the state for around three years, anchored on a guiding document, the Agenda of Alliance (AoA). The AoA said: “Protecting and fostering ethnic and religious diversity by ensuring the return of Kashmiri Pandits with dignity based on their rights as state subjects and reintegrating as well as absorbing them in the Kashmiri milieu. Reintegration will be a process that will start within the state as well as civil society, by taking the community into confidence.”

Neither have we seen ethnic and religious diversity in Kashmir nor have we seen any reintegration process while keeping intact the dignity of Pandits. Instead, the situation in our homeland, Kashmir, has worsened under your watch—with the permeation of new radicalisation, influenced by transnational jihad, among sections of the populace.   

You visited J&K many times since you became the Prime Minister. But you didn’t pay a visit to any of the Pandit settlements in Jammu. You didn’t directly address the community even once. Rather, you maintained a safe distance from the matter of Pandits, on the back of your party’s political adventures in the state. We all know about it.

Our fundamental issues continue to persist in 2019: justice for the killings of Pandits and the rapes of Pandit women, return to Kashmir with dignity and security, restoration of temples and shrines, reversal of encroachments of Pandit properties etc. We didn’t see much headway in resolving any of the issues faced by the Pandit community.

Mr Prime Minister, you turned out to be no different from your predecessors when it comes to the issue of displaced Kashmiri Pandits. It won’t be inappropriate to say that you have failed us Kashmiri Pandits. Don’t promise us anything now—neither verbally nor through poll manifestos. It is exasperating.

I still wish you the best for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

Sadly,

An exiled Kashmiri.