National Conference (NC) chief Farooq Abdullah on Saturday appealed to the Kashmiri Pandits to “come back home”. The Kashmiri Hindu community faced a mass exodus in the early 1990s when armed insurgency and terrorism peaked in the Valley, forcing them to flee Kashmir.
In an assurance to the Kashmiri Pandits, Abdullah, who is also J&K’s former CM, said they “should feel that the National Conference government is not their enemy”.
“I hope that our brothers and sisters who have left from here come back home. Now the time has come, they should return to their homes. We do not think only about Kashmiri Pandits, but we also think about the people of Jammu, we should treat them well, they should also feel that the National Conference government is not their enemy. We are Indians and we want to take everyone along,” Farooq Abdullah said.
Abdullah’s NC party, in alliance with the Congress party, swept the recently concluded J&K assembly polls, bagging 42 seats in the 90-member House while the Congress won six seats.
In the polls, more than 35,000 displaced Kashmiri Pandits from across the country were eligible to vote at 24 polling stations in the first phase of the three-phased Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir.
In the second phase, nearly 40 per cent of eligible Kashmiri Pandits cast their ballots across the polling stations in Jammu, Delhi and Udhampur.
The Kashmiri Pandits registered a voter turnout of over 30 per cent in the third and final phase of the elections in Jammu and Kashmir. Spread across 16 assembly segments in three districts of North Kashmir, out of 18,357 registered displaced Pandit voters, 5,545 turned up to cast their votes at 24 specially designated polling booths in Jammu, Udhampur and Delhi-NCR.
How many Kashmiri Pandits were forced to leave?
The migration numbers have changed a lot over time, even in official records, presumably because they are constantly updated.
In the years right after Kashmiri Pandits started leaving, the government put out an estimate of 50,000 families who had left Kashmir because of militancy.
The 2022 estimate is actually lower — at 44,684. The number of migrant people, according to the Union ministry of home affairs in 2022, is a little over 1.5 lakh.