Docuseries: Kashmiri Hindus Talk Hindu-Muslim Peace After Fleeing Violence
“The Dinner Table” is a docu-series produced by Newsreel Asia and co-published with Religion Unplugged. Upcoming episodes will feature India’s other persecuted communities to explore what identity-based discrimination and violence does to the minds and hearts of members of a community. View the first episode here featuring the family of a young Muslim lynched for his faith.
NEW DELHI—Sanjay Kaw is a Kashmiri Hindu who fled his ancestral home in Kashmir in 1990 like more than 70,000 other families under threat from increasing deadly violence by Islamist militants at the time. Thirty years later, Kaw and his wife tell show host Harshita Rathore they still miss their home region, as they are culturally different from the Hindus in northern India.
Kashmir has remained a flash point in Indian politics for many decades and has been the world’s most militarily occupied region, as it was a disputed region until recently. Part of the Himalayan region joined Pakistan and part joined India at its 1947 independence under an agreement that allowed semi-autonomous rule. The Indian government revoked that status in August 2019.
Kashmir’s political atmosphere became increasingly hostile to the minority community of Kashmiri Hindus in the late 1980s. In 1990, Islamic militants sponsored a large procession asking Kashmiri Hindus to leave the region. Some mosques issued such threats on loud speakers.
“A place that was called a paradise witnessed a bloodbath,” Sanjay Kaw said. He said his parents never expected they would have to leave their own homes.
The mass migration of Kashmiri Hindus began in early 1990 and continued until 2000. The population of Kashmir, according to varying estimates, decreased from roughly 140,000 before 1990 to about 3,500 by 2000, according to media reports. While a large number of the displaced Kashmiri Hindus resettled in the northern Jammu region, which borders Kashmir, some live in and around the national capital of Delhi.
In this second episode of “The Dinner Table,” an observational docuseries produced in partnership with India-based Newsreel Asia, host Rathore cooked a meal with the Kaws and sat down to have supper with them while the crew filmed all the unscripted, heart-to-heart conversations that took place.
The upcoming episodes of “The Dinner Table” will feature India’s other persecuted communities to explore what identity-based discrimination and violence do to the minds and hearts of members of a community.