Delhi their home but pandits yearn for Valley
It was the Janmashtami of
1990, and Rashneek Kher, a 16-year-old Kashmiri pandit in exile in the squalid
refugee camps of Jammu, stood in line at the milkman's. In addition to selling
milk, the vendor also stored copies of the morning newspaper, which Kher would
hungrily pore over. That day Kher read that his house was burnt down. "My
father didn't speak to anyone for a month. He had built that house himself,"
says Kher.
According to United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 26.4 million ended 2011
as internally displaced people, a figure far higher than the number of
refugees. Kher and his clan know what internal displacement means, having lived
like refugees in their own country since 1990, when an estimated 3.5 lakh
pandits left the valley. Yet their flight from Kashmir remains shrouded in
silence.
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