In the ten years of insurgency in the Kashmir valley and the border hill districts girdling the epicentre of conflict, more than half a million people have been displaced on both sides of the Line of Control (LOC). The exodus includes, 200,000 Kashmiri Pandits, 70,000 Kashmiri Muslims to India and 120,000 to Pakistan. From Kargil and the border districts some 35,000 people have been displaced in Pakistan and 100,000 in India.

As the guns fall silent along the LOC, after the Kargil war, the people of the border districts will return to bury their animals, rebuild their homes and replant their crops till the artillery duels across the LOC erupt again. But for the thousands of displaced Kashmiri Pandits, can there be a return home? Can there be a return to the ‘homeland’, a return to a remembered society imbued in the ethos of Kashmiriyat i.e. a common Muslim–Pandit identity constructed around a shared history, language and culture?

The mass exodus of Pandits from the valley in 1990 played into the hands of the propagandists on both sides and people who had grown up in a culture of social and economic interdependence have been communalized. The poison of communal politics has constructed negative images of the Pandit as abandoning his Muslim brethren to the guns of the Indian state and the Muslim as waiting to grab the property of his Pandit neighbour.