The world is full of stories of displacement. Very few, if any, have stories of return.
The idea that Kashmiri Pandits will return en masse to the Valley is a convenient delusion, circulated with political motives, humanitarian posturing, and moral grandstanding. It ignores psychological truth, historical precedent, and lived reality. The generation that wanted to come back is either frail, forgotten, or buried under headstones with their dreams. The younger generation doesn’t want to return – not out of fear, but out of sheer lack of connection or respect for what Kashmir has become. Irrespective of earnest calls for Chalo Kashmir (for tourists, not for Pandits) and imposing selfie points, not many will tell you it has become a psychological hell. The wonderful smile that you will find on an average Kashmiri’s face would tell you the least about the tumult that he carries. But that is a different topic – maybe some other time!
Edward Said, writing about the exile in “Reflections on Exile,” said: “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place.”
For Kashmiri Pandits, that rift is permanent. It will always be permanent. Someone who tricks you into believing that you will return is being criminally dishonest with you.
History Speaks: No Return is the Norm
The Jews took 2,000 years to come back, and even then, it was into contested violence and international fragmentation. Palestinians haven’t returned. The Greeks of Asia Minor, driven out of Turkey in the 1920s, still sing laments of Smyrna but never moved back. Sindhi Hindus uprooted during Partition never reclaimed Karachi. The Tibetans in exile across India still pray for Lhasa, but even the Dalai Lama has tempered his tone.
Displacement is final. Even more so when the social fabric that once hosted you no longer wishes to. Or, even if it does, you deem it fit not to venture in.
Reverse migration is not a bureaucratic process. It is not about job packages, prefab accommodations, or security bunkers. It is about being wanted by your neighbors, not tolerated by a state. For Pandits, the state doesn’t exist – neither in Delhi nor in Kashmir.
The generation of Kashmiri Pandits who fled in 1990 were still emotionally tied to their walnut trees, shrines, and childhood alleys. They wrote poetry, saved handfuls of soil, and never unpacked their suitcases. They waited. They petitioned. They hoped.
Today, they are dying. Every day. And most are already dead.
What remains are stories. Nostalgic, elegiac, but increasingly irrelevant to younger minds shaped in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, and Houston. The bonds of land are weakening; the memories fossilizing. Hearts atrophied.
There is no return to a house that no longer has walls.
Young Pandits do not look at Kashmir with yearning. They look with disbelief. What Kashmiri Muslim society still puts up as a façade is what they don’t, maybe, identify with. What kind of culture erases morning school prayers to insert religious syllabi of another faith? What intellectual environment shuts its doors to cultural pluralism, turns education into indoctrination, and weaponizes identity as currency?
They don’t see their future in Kashmir. They see its refusal to change. They don’t even see any inclusive future for Kashmiris venturing outside. They are an intelligent lot. And can see life far more clearly than their fathers or forefathers could see.
The Government throws packages at the idea. Jobs. Colonies. Transit camps. None of these work.
A job does not make a home. A bunker does not offer belonging. A camp is not a cradle of heritage.
More critically, land records are manipulated, homes are occupied, temples desecrated, and Pandit names erased from revenue records. The infrastructure of return is absent both materially and psychologically. And nobody cares. Not even the Hindutva brigade.
When Hannah Arendt wrote about displaced Jews in post-war Europe, she pointed out that return wasn’t an option for most: “No one can go home again, not really. The home they dreamt of no longer exists.”
Silence of Society
The silence of Kashmiri Muslim civil society over the decades is deafening. When mobs shouted slogans and broke locks of homes, few intervened. When temples were desecrated, no protests erupted. When Pandits were being assassinated, no public outrage rallied around them. That silence has accumulated into an unforgivable debt.
Ironically, the same civil society now pleads for tourists to return, writing editorials and slogans of peace. Yet in 35 years, it has not mustered the courage to admit, even in part, its own complicity or silence in the Pandit exodus.
It is not fear alone that keeps Pandits away. It is alienation. They do not feel welcome. They do not feel wanted. Their songs, customs, dialects, and rituals are now considered outsider practices.
A community cannot return to a land that no longer speaks their tongue.
Displacement is not just about geography. It is about memory. And memory can become a chain.
Children of migrants grow up with the trauma of stories, the burden of injustice. But they also grow up with the tools of assimilation. They make new homes. They travel. They educate. They prosper. Their return to the homeland is a gesture, not a goal. Their goal is the world now; and most of it they have conquered.
Few want to trade a stable life in Noida or New Jersey for fenced transit camps in Budgam.
Also, globally, there is no successful model of mass return after ethnic conflict without deep reconciliation and structural overhaul. Rwanda tried. The Balkans struggled. Myanmar failed. Syria is a scar. Afghanistan, a grave.
The idea that some bureaucratic formula can reverse decades of hostility, violence, and erasure is ahistorical and naive. It is foolish. Someone who propounds it is a fool too.
The political class in Delhi invokes the Pandit return only around elections or when cornered internationally. Their sincerity ends at photo ops and token welfare schemes.
There is no genuine political architecture for safe, dignified, and permanent return. Why? Because there is no pressure to create one. Because Pandits are not a vote bank in the Valley. And outside, they have moved on. They are not a vote bank anywhere.
Closing the Chapter
The community, as a collective, must accept this: mass return is not going to happen. The dream must now evolve. From return to remembrance. From resettlement to cultural revival. From homes in Kashmir to shrines in memory.
As Salman Rushdie once wrote: “Exile is not just a separation from home, but from self. The journey back is always imagined, not lived.”
The reverse migration of Pandits is a myth that serves everyone but them. It cushions the conscience of the state. It provides talking points to the political class. It keeps civil society distracted from its own failure.
But for the Pandits, it offers little more than nostalgia.
The return was never structured. Never demanded. Never internalized by those who remained. A homeland cannot be reclaimed where there is no acknowledgment of loss.
The Valley, in all its beauty, is no longer home. The forests remember. The stones remember. But the people have forgotten.
Return is not just physical. It is spiritual, emotional, social. And that door – barring a miracle – has closed.
Not with hate. Not with violence. But with indifference.
And that, perhaps, is the most unforgivable closure of all.
