Rohit Tikoo
Author and Voice of the Kashmiri Pandit Exodus
Five Thousand Years of History.
One Community's Fight to be Remembered.
Kashmiri Pandits are the aboriginal people of the Kashmir Valley: its original inhabitants, its civilisational bedrock. For over five millennia they built, preserved, and transmitted one of the world's great intellectual and spiritual traditions. Then they were driven from their homeland.
This is where that record lives. Documented. Evidenced. Unapologetic.
Writing the History They Would Rather We Forgot
My ancestors walked the streets of Srinagar for over five thousand years before they were driven from them. Kashmiri Pandits are not settlers. They are the aboriginal people of the Valley, its original inhabitants, the source of its very name and civilisation. The least I can do is ensure that what happened to them, and to Kashmir, is recorded with the precision and honesty it deserves.
I am a Kashmiri Pandit, an author and a researcher who works from primary archives, military memoirs, government records, and oral testimonies. The history of Kashmir is contested terrain, distorted by geopolitics, obscured by diplomacy, and deliberately revised by those with an interest in burying the truth.
This work exists to undo that distortion. One documented article, one verified source, one named soldier and one named victim at a time. Kashmir's history did not begin with partition. The story of its people does not end with exile.
About Rohit Tikoo →Operation Gulmarg: Pakistan's State-Sponsored Invasion of Kashmir
A forensic account of how Pakistan planned, funded, and executed a tribal invasion of J&K in October 1947, while publicly denying all involvement.
Read →Kashmir Militancy: A Complete History from 1947 to 2026
A comprehensive analysis of how Kashmir's conflict evolved across eight decades, from partition and tribal invasion through insurgency, foreign sponsorship, and the present day.
Read →The Kashmiri Pandit Exodus of 1990: The Untold Story
What actually happened in the winter of 1989 and 1990, when the aboriginal people of Kashmir were driven from their homeland in one of the worst forced displacements in modern Indian history.
Read →The Home Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and the Kashmiri Pandit Exodus
A documented examination of the political decisions and failures of will in 1990 that allowed the exodus to happen, and the question of accountability that remains unanswered.
Read →The Books
Three works. One mission: that the story of Kashmir's people is never reduced to a footnote, never relativised in the name of diplomatic balance.
Shadows Over The Valley
A forensic examination of Operation Tupac, Pakistan's covert intelligence operation that engineered the conditions for the 1989–90 Kashmiri Pandit exodus from their ancestral homeland.
View Book →Uprooted & Forlorn
Intimate narratives of displacement, loss, and fractured identity from Kashmiri Pandits living in camps and cities across India, far from the Valley they still call home.
View Book →Kashmiri Pandits: A Tale of Solitude & Survival
A comprehensive chronicle of the Kashmiri Pandit community, spanning over five thousand years of civilisational presence in the Valley, their catastrophic displacement, and their continuing struggle for recognition and return.
View Book →A History That Spans Millennia
The history of Kashmir cannot be understood through the narrow lens of 1947 alone. It is a civilisational story, ancient, layered, and contested.
Kashmir as a seat of Sanskrit scholarship, Shaivism, and Sufi synthesis. Over five millennia of continuous Kashmiri Pandit civilisational presence. The aboriginal people of the Valley, its original inhabitants and intellectual custodians.
The Maharaja's Kashmir under British paramountcy, its unique status, demographic character, and the legal framework that would determine its fate at Partition.
Operation Gulmarg, the Instrument of Accession, the airlift to Srinagar, and the UN ceasefire. The decisions of these months still govern Kashmir today.
The militancy, Operation Tupac, the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, and the ongoing struggle for justice, recognition, and the right of return.
Those Who Gave Everything
So Kashmir Could Remain India's
History must speak their names loudly. Not as footnotes. Not as statistics. As men, each with a face, a family, and a final choice made in the full knowledge of its cost.
Major Somnath Sharma
Brig. Rajinder Singh
Maqbool Sherwani
Kashmiri Pandits
From the Blog
Essays, analysis, and personal testimony from the field of Kashmir history.
The Standstill Agreement Pakistan Never Intended to Keep
On 15 August 1947, Pakistan signed a solemn agreement with Maharaja Hari Singh promising to maintain the status quo in Jammu and Kashmir. Within weeks, it had imposed an economic blockade and was arming tribal fighters for an invasion. This is the story of the first and most consequential act of Pakistani deception, and why it matters that we remember it precisely.
Read the Essay →What It Means to Call a Camp 'Home' After Thirty Years
Operation Jak: The Airlift That Saved the Valley in 32 Hours
Reading Akbar Khan: What Pakistan's Own General Admits
Three Thousand Years in a Valley We Are Not Allowed to Return To
"I write not only as a scholar but as a member of a community whose own existence stands as testimony to what happens when the forces first unleashed in 1947 are allowed to run unchecked. My research is not dispassionate. It is documented. There is a difference."Rohit Tikoo, Author and Kashmiri Pandit