There were actually about 350,000 of Kashmiri Hindus, and not 2 million, who now reside in different cities of India and other countries.

But their story is still worth relating.

No doubt some of them are struggling to make two ends meet, trying to be heard by public officials, and trying to establish a new identity. Some 30,000 are still in the refugee camps of Jammu, in abject conditions of poverty and in dire need of medical help. Their children are languishing in low-level schools, without bright prospects of good college education.

The state of Kashmiri Pandits, 20 years after the unleashing of Pakistan's terrorism in Kashmir, has rendered them economically deprived, politically disenfranchised, and culturally anchorless. What is involved is not only the damage to the physical infrastructure of Kashmiri Pandits' lives but also the damage to their psychological and cultural roots. The original inhabitants of Kashmir, intellectualized and independent minded, are now exiled into the plains of India, looking for a loaf of bread, a shelter, and some respect.

Kashmir, ironically a stunningly beautiful place, has been in the throes of political chaos since 1947, when India gained its independence from Great Britain. Just a few months after India's independence, Pakistan attacked Kashmir, with an intention to acquire it. Over the next 62 years, till now, it still occupies about 35 per cent of it. The Kashmiri Hindus, who are nearly 30 per cent of the population of the state of Jammu&Kashmir, right after the Indian independence, started to be discriminated against by the Kashmiri Muslims.

Again in 1965, Pakistan attacked Kashmir, but it was of no avail.

The pinnacle of Pakistan's ambition to acquire Kashmir came in 1989 when a large-scale effort, with the help of Kashmiri Muslims, was launched. Some 20,000 innocent Kashmiri Pandits were killed and many raped. Almost 90 per cent of the entire community, about 350,000, was forced to flee their ancient homeland of thousands of years, their jobs and their homes, to save themselves, and became refugees in their own country.

The after-shocks of that powerful upheaval are still reverberating in the lives of the displaced Pandits.

- Kanayalal Raina, a Kashmiri Pandit now staying in Canada