Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah’s recent statement suggesting that it was not only Kashmiri Pandits but also many Muslims who were forced to leave the Valley is deeply misleading and amounts to a deliberate dilution of a well-documented and painful truth. Such comparisons neither reflect history honestly nor serve reconciliation; instead, they distort a tragedy that was specific, targeted, and communal in nature.

Yes, some Muslims did leave Kashmir during different phases of unrest, but their departure was not driven by religious persecution. They were not identified and targeted for their faith, they were not threatened through mosque loudspeakers, nor were they given the brutal choice of conversion, death, or exile. Their migration, painful as any displacement is, cannot be equated with what the Kashmiri Pandit community endured.

The exodus of Kashmiri Pandits was systematic and deliberate. Selective killings of judges, teachers, scholars, nurses, and government officials were carried out to terrorize an entire community. Slogans openly calling for our annihilation echoed across the Valley. Names were announced publicly, fear was institutionalized, and the message was unmistakable. Leave, convert, or die. Families fled overnight, abandoning homes, temples, land, and centuries of cultural and civilizational roots, without protection from the state and without any guarantee of safety or return.
No Muslim family was forced to leave the Valley because of their religion. No Muslim identity was criminalized. No community of Muslims was rendered homeless for decades purely on the basis of faith. Most Muslims who migrated retained their social networks, their properties, and above all, the assurance that they belonged and could return. Kashmiri Pandits, even after more than three and a half decades, remain in exile, waiting for justice, dignity, and a safe return.

To equate these two entirely different realities is not a matter of ignorance but of moral dishonesty. It trivializes the suffering of a victimized community and erases the intent behind one of the darkest chapters of modern Indian history. What happened to Kashmiri Pandits was not a normal migration born of conflict; it was ethnic cleansing, religious persecution, and a complete failure of the state and its political leadership, including those who ruled Jammu and Kashmir at the time.
Repeated attempts to normalize or relativize this tragedy insult the memory of those who were killed and reopen the wounds of those who continue to live as refugees in their own country. The Kashmiri Pandit community does not seek sympathy or political validation. It seeks truth, justice, accountability, and a rightful return to its ancestral homeland.
No amount of political rhetoric can alter the facts. What happened to Kashmiri Pandits has no parallel in independent India, and history will remember it as such.
SEVAK
[ Kundan Kashmiri]
Voice of KP community, Kashmir Watcher, political Analyst & President KPC
Mobile No 8802167955