This week, I traveled to Jammu and began interviews in the migrant camps created for Kashmiri Pandit victims over two decades after the exodus. It was in those very first conversations that the magnitude of displacement became clear. Families recounted, often with quiet composure, how they had been forced to rebuild their lives from nothing. Despite starting entirely from scratch, there was a remarkable grace in the way they spoke, accepting their suffering without bitterness, holding fast to dignity even when recounting loss.
Education emerged again and again as the central thread of survival and progress. Parents would often forgo meals to ensure their children could study, while multiple generations lived together in cramped tents that nonetheless became spaces of learning. One participant reflected that the absence of distractions such as television, electricity, or even proper clothing helped him concentrate on his schoolwork. He has since gone on to attend one of the best technology institutes in India and now has a prestigious job. But this was not an isolated story of triumph. Almost everyone I spoke to described how their children braved the hardships of camp life and went on to build successful futures: working at firms like Deloitte and J.P. Morgan, conducting research as microbiologists in Canada, or practicing as engineers in America and beyond.
Yet alongside these stories of courage and perseverance was the glaring reality of structural neglect. The camps, for years, remained in stagnant condition, overlooked and sidelined by those in power. Even more painful was the deeper sense of injustice. Decades have passed, but many shared, with heavy resignation, that they have given up hope of ever seeing justice delivered. No terrorist, despite televised claims of responsibility, credible data, or open threats, has ever been prosecuted for these atrocities. In independent India, this community has lived with a wound that the legal and judicial system has refused to recognize.
And still, their response has been strikingly peaceful. What I witnessed was not anger spilling into violence but instead a community that chose education, resilience, and moral strength as their tools of resistance. Their refusal to let hatred define them stood as testimony to their grace, even in the face of betrayal by the very structures meant to protect them. Some families chose silence, suppressing the harsh roots of their predicament so their children, while enduring displacement, would not grow up defined by bitterness.
The intensity of these conversations stayed with me even after I left the camps. This was the week my nightmares began. They were filled with the very stories I had just listened to. Scenes of violent persecution, sudden flight, hunger, and survival replayed in my mind, while their quiet strength haunted me, echoing long into the night.