Kashmiri Pandits and the Hierarchization of Victimhood

Abstract

For three decades the narrative of Kashmiri Pandit migration has developed it as the exceptional event that ruptured the centuries-old secularist traditions of Kashmir. It becomes pertinent to locate this discourse in the local as well as the ‘national’ developments that have shaped it and at the same time impacted by it. The current paper problematizes terminologies such as communalism, secularism, and nationalism in the context of Kashmiri society and Kashmiri Pandit migration and deploys that framework to discuss the Indian occupation of Kashmir and disenfranchisement emerging from class and caste-based marginalization among societies in the subcontinent.