‘The time has come…’: Farooq Abdullah’s message for Kashmiri Pandits | India News – Times of India

National Conference (NC) chief Farooq Abdullah appealed on Saturday to the Kashmiri Pandits to “come back home”. The Kashmiri Hindu community faced a mass exodus then in the early nineties armed uprising and terrorism reached a peak in the Valley, forcing them to flee Kashmir.
In an assurance to Kashmiri Pandits, Abdullah, who is also the former CM of J&K, said they should “feel that the National Conference government is not their enemy”.
“I hope that our brothers and sisters who left here will come back home. Now that the time has come, they must return to their homes. We are not just thinking about Kashmiri Pandits, but we are also thinking about the people of Jammu, we are also thinking about the people of Jammu. We must treat them well, they must also feel that the National Conference government is not their enemy. We are Indians and we want to bring everyone,” said Farooq Abdullah.
Abdullah’s NC party, in alliance with the Congress party, swept the recently concluded J&K elections, winning 42 seats in the 90-member House, while the Congress won six seats.
At the polls, over 35,000 displaced Kashmiri Pandits from across the country were eligible to vote at 24 polling stations in the first phase of the three-phase elections. Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir.
In the second phase, nearly 40 percent of eligible Kashmiri Pandits cast their votes through polling stations in Jammu, Delhi and Udhampur.
The Kashmiri Pandits recorded one voter turnout of over 30 percent in the third and final phase of the elections in Jammu and Kashmir. Spread across 16 assembly segments in three districts of north Kashmir, out of 18,357 registered displaced Pandit voters, 5,545 turned up to cast their votes at 24 specially designated polling booths in Jammu, Udhampur and Delhi-NCR.

How many Kashmiri Pandits were forced to leave?

Migration figures have changed a lot over time, even in official documents, presumably because they are constantly updated.
In the years immediately after the Kashmiri Pandits began leaving, the government estimated that 50,000 families had left Kashmir due to militancy.
The estimate for 2022 is actually lower: 44,684. According to the Union Home Ministry, the number of migrants will be just over 1.5 lakh in 2022.