She Taught Him The Alphabet: He Repaid Her By Helping Drive Her Out Of Kashmir – OpEd |
Some tragedies are best understood not through statistics, but through stories. This is one of them.
In Srinagar, in the late 1980s, a young woman taught at a government school. She was a Kashmiri Pandit—a teacher by profession, a believer in education, coexistence and the fragile idea that knowledge civilises societies.
Every morning, she entered her classroom carrying books and hope. Among her students was a boy from downtown Srinagar. She taught him to read. She corrected his mistakes. She shaped his early years, as teachers do around the world.
Little did anybody know that years later, that same student would emerge as a leading figure in the militant movement that swept through downtown Srinagar and the teacher would be forced to flee Kashmir, fighting for life.
On the night of January 19, 1990, the Kashmir Valley changed forever.
Loudspeakers from mosques pierced the winter darkness with threats. Names were called out. Slogans demanded that Kashmiri Pandits leave, convert, or face death. Posters appeared. Killings had already begun. Fear was no longer abstract—it had an address. What followed was not migration. It was an exodus under terror.
Within weeks, nearly the entire Kashmiri Pandit community—indigenous to the Valley for thousands of years—fled. Homes were abandoned. Temples were desecrated. Libraries, land records,........