(Note: The continued attacks by terrorists affect all residents in the area – Hindu, Muslim,
Sikh, police and army personnel, and civilian authorities. Army, police, and paramilitary
personnel tend to be overwhelmingly Hindu, reflecting the population characteristics of
the country. Below, we record only the attacks specifically in which Hindu civilians died
or were attacked and their property and places of worship destroyed. There are many
reports in which we could not access details regarding the religious affiliation of the
victims; thus, we have not used those reports. Since most Hindus have been forced from
the Kashmir Valley, the number of Hindu victims is correspondingly lower than that of
the number of innocent Muslim victims of Islamist terror.)
January 2004: On January 3, seven people were killed and 15 others injured at a Jammu
railway station:
Terrorist attack 7
Injured from terrorist firing 15
TOTAL 22
March 2004
March 9, 2004 — The Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly endorsed a long-standing
practice whereby women in the State lose their permanent resident status and right to own
and inherit property in the State after marriage to a non-local. Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus)
argued that this law is calculated to harm their interests and amounts to treating the State
as an entity separate from the country. The president of Kashmiri Samiti, an organization
seeking to protect Hindu interests, said that the step would mainly affect Kashmiri
Pandits who have been forced out of the valley and “have lost domicile rights.” Another
organization, the All India Kashmiri Samaj, termed the move as a “sinister design” of the
J&K government to “deprive” Pandit women of their constitutional rights.45 The
discriminatory nature of this law was recently elaborated upon by columnist Arvind
Lavakare. 46
April 2004: On April 20, six human rights activists traveling as election observers were
attacked. One person was killed and five others were injured in the attack. Among the
injured was Kumar Bharati, a journalist-turned human rights activist from Bangalore47:
Attack leading to death 1
Injuries 5
TOTAL 6
May 2004: On May 23, 29 Border Security Force personnel and their civilian family
members were killed and nine others injured when their bus hit an improvised explosive
device on the strategic Jammu-Srinagar highway. The Hizbul Mujahideen claimed
responsibility for the blast48:
Explosive attack 29
Wounding due to blast 9
TOTAL 38
June 2004: On June 12, terrorists tossed a grenade inside a restaurant resulting in
injuries to 22 persons. On June 23, 21 people including a policeman were injured in a
grenade explosion. On that same day, unidentified gunmen abducted a senior engineer,
Sudhir Kumar Pundir of Indian Railways Construction (IRCON), along with his brother
and two other men. The gunmen demanded a ransom of Rs. 5 million.49 The terrorists
subsequently killed the engineer and his brother by slitting their throats.
Kidnapping for ransom (followed by death) 2
Grenade explosion 43
TOTAL 45
October 2004: Attacks on two temples during Navratra puja, an annual festival, injured
one Hindu.50 Militants opened fire at two temples during the Navratra puja, an annual
festival, in Rajouri and Doda districts in Jammu and Kashmir. One girl was injured and
hospitalized. Militants attacked the Mangla Mata temple on the outskirts of Rajouri town
the night before, but no one was injured.
November 2004: There were five attacks against Hindus and their interests in the month
of November51:
Shooting 3
Seizure and shooting by suspected militants 2
TOTAL 5
The plight of Kashmiri Pandits, residing as refugees within their own country, is
illustrated in an essay by columnist Kanchan Gupta, who wrote on January 19, 200552:
There are no Kashmiri Pandits in Srinagar, or, for that matter, anywhere
else in the Kashmir valley; they don’t live here anymore. You can find
them in squalid refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi. As many as 300,000
Kashmiri Pandits have fled their home and hearth and been reduced to
living the lives of refugees in their own country.
Two-thirds of them are camping in Jammu. The rest are in Delhi and in
other Indian cities. Many of them, once prosperous and proud of their rich
heritage, now live in groveling poverty, dependent on government dole
and charity. In these 15 years, an entire generation of exiled Kashmiri
Pandits has grown up, without seeing the land from where their parents
fled to escape the brutalities of Islamic terrorism, a land they dare not
return to, although that land still remains a part of their country.
A large number of them are suffering from a variety of stress and
depression related diseases. A group of doctors who surveyed the mental
and physical health of the Kashmiri Pandits living in refugee camps, found
high incidence of “economic distress, stress induced diabetes, partial
lunacy, hypertension and mental retardation.” Statistics reflect high death
rate and low birth rate among the Kashmiri Pandit refugees.
And thereby hangs a tragic tale that has been all but wiped out from public
memory.
An entire people have been uprooted from the land of their ancestors and
left to fend for themselves as a weak-kneed Indian state shamelessly
panders to Islamic terrorists and separatists who claim they are the final
arbiters of Jammu and Kashmir’s destiny. A part of India’s cultural
heritage has been destroyed; a chapter of India’s civilisational history has
been erased…What has been lost is part of India’s Hindu culture, what has
been erased is integral to India’s Hindu civilisation.
Therefore, the government makes bold to record that the Kashmiri Pandits
have “migrated on their own” and their “displacement (is) self-imposed”;
the National Human Rights Commission, after a perfunctory inquiry,
refuses to concede that what has happened is “genocide” or “ethnic
cleansing”, though facts add up to no less than that, never mind that
300,000 lives have been destroyed.
Source : Hindu American Foundation 2005
