‘Leave the Kashmir Valley or die,’ Pran Ji Pandita found written on his door one night in 1990. Over the following months, 95 per cent of the valley’s Hindu population would flee, driven out by Islamist extremists.
Today, after many years spent living in tents, followed by more in a tiny room without a bath or kitchen, the Pandita family find themselves in Jagti Camp in Jammu, the Indian government’s newest residential area for the Hindus who fled south from the terror in the Kashmir Valley nearly 25 years ago. The houses are less than two years old, but the walls and ceiling in the Panditas’ tiny apartment are already beginning to crack. There is no electricity for up to 15 hours per day and water is supplied only twice a week.
