The Ethnic Cleansing of the Pandits of Kashmir

April 8, 2022 By Janet Levy

In Vivek Agnihotri’s recent film, The Kashmir Files, frenzied crowds of Muslims chant Raliv, galiv, chaliv! (Convert, leave, or die!) as Hindu Pandit families cower in their homes. Bands of Islamic militants gun down security personnel and walk into Pandit homes to loot, rape, and murder. Wearing Indian army uniforms, they walk into Pandit villages and refugee camps, trick the residents by saying they must move to a safer location, then line them up and shoot them.

The film is set in Kashmir in the early 1990s. By then, the Pandits had long been reduced to a minority—about 140,000, or three percent of the population—in the beautiful Kashmir valley, their homeland since at least the fourth century BCE. Since the late 1980s, Islamic militancy, in the guise of a freedom (Azadi), movement gained momentum. As Pakistan-backed militants unleashed a campaign of mass murder, rape, and gory atrocities such as sawing a woman alive, nearly 100,000 Pandits were forced to flee. Agnihotri composes some of the shocking events of that exodus into a unified story that has left audiences in India gasping—and angry that a compromised media never gave this ethnic cleansing due coverage.

In fact, the Raliv, galiv, chaliv! formula harks to the 14th century when Islam first arrived in Kashmir. Like the media, leftist historians in India have whitewashed the systematic decimation of Pandits over 600 years. By exposing the 1990 cover-up, the film has made viewers eager to know the Pandits’ story..........To Read More....