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.

The Night That Broke Kashmir

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, and memories were left behind in locked houses that would never reopen.

This was ethnic and religious cleansing, carried out not with gas chambers, but with something just as effective: targeted fear.

A Child Hidden to Survive

That teacher was now a mother and her son was two years old.

As threats intensified, her family prepared to escape. But an infant’s cry could be a death sentence. So they did something no parent should ever have to do: they hid their child inside a rice sack, carried him out under the cover of darkness and ran.

A baby was smuggled not across borders, but away from murder.

The child survived. He grew up outside Kashmir. He is my friend.

Like tens of thousands of others, his family rebuilt life from nothing—refugee camps, cramped rooms, borrowed dignity. They survived. Survival, however, is not the same as justice.

When the Student Becomes the Executioner

Imagine the psychological violence of recognition. Years after fleeing, the teacher would see images and reports of a militant leader spearheading the movement in downtown Srinagar. She recognised him immediately. He was once her student.

This is not a story of political disagreement. It is a story of civilisational collapse—where education failed to protect humanity, and radicalisation, nurtured, armed, and supported by forces across the border, weaponised young minds against their own neighbours.

The Shadow Across the Border: Pakistan’s Role

The exodus of Kashmiri Pandits did not occur in a vacuum. It was fueled, nurtured and weaponised by forces across the border who sought unrest, division as well as fear in Kashmir. 

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its network of militant proxies provided funding. It trained and provided strategic direction by turning communal tensions into an organised campaign of terror.

Militant groups, some trained in camps across Pakistan, deliberately targeted the minority Hindu community to reshape the valley’s demographic and cultural landscape. The attacks were not random. They were meticulously planned and orchestrated to instill fear, uncertainty and inevitability. This forced an entire population to flee.

By weaponising religious ideology, Pakistan converted the vulnerability of local youth into instruments of terror, leaving generations of Pandits homeless, displaced and silenced.

This was not collateral damage. This was planned displacement, backed by state-supported infrastructure and cross-border agendas.

The Kashmiri Pandit tragedy is therefore not merely a local misfortune. It is part of a broader pattern of proxy conflict. Minorities become expendable while perpetrators operate with impunity.

Erased From the Narrative

What makes the Kashmiri Pandit tragedy uniquely cruel is not merely what happened but the silence that followed. 

While global attention focused on allegations against the Indian state and the suffering of Kashmiri Muslims, the near-total cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits which did not find momentum from the international discourse. There were no sustained campaigns. No urgent UN resolutions. No enduring media outrage.

The world rightly remembers other exoduses—Armenians, Jews, Rohingya, Balkan Muslims. Recognition does not diminish any of these tragedies. It honours them. But the Kashmiri Pandits remain a people without acknowledgment.

The Longing to Return

My friend’s parents are old now. They do not speak of revenge. They speak of home—of the smell of earth after rain, of temples that still stand locked and abandoned, of neighbours they once trusted.

They want to return—not as symbols, not as political tools—but as human beings reclaiming dignity.

Why This Story Matters

Because when a teacher is driven out by her student’s gun, something fundamental has gone wrong and also because when a baby must be hidden in a sack to survive, humanity has failed. Because when an entire community is erased and the world looks away, silence becomes complicity. January 19 is not just a date. It is a warning. 

If the world cannot acknowledge the genocide and exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, it signals that justice depends not on suffering—but on narrative power. And that is a lesson no civilisation can afford to teach its children.