Dr. Syed Nazir Gilani
The launch of the book Healer in Exile: The Untold Story of Dr. Sushil Razdan in Jammu on 29 April 2026 and later in Srinagar on 2 May 2026 was far more than a literary event. It became a moment of reflection upon one of the deepest and longest continuing human tragedies in South Asia — the repeated displacement of the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
Written by Sachin Razdan, the son of renowned Kashmiri Pandit neurologist Dr. Sushil Razdan, the book narrates the life of a healer whose professional excellence and human compassion transcended religious and political divides. Yet the title itself — Healer in Exile— speaks to a larger truth: Kashmir remains a land where even healers became displaced from their own habitat.
The Srinagar launch at Radisson Collection Hotel & Spa brought together an extraordinary range of political, social, and intellectual voices, including Farooq Abdullah, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, and representatives of diverse political traditions. Their presence reflected an uncomfortable but necessary recognition: the suffering of Kashmir cannot be selectively remembered.
The exile of Kashmiri Pandits in the 1990s remains one of the most painful chapters in the
modern history of Kashmir. Thousands were uprooted from ancestral homes, dispersed across India and beyond, carrying with them memories of a homeland they could not safely return to. The pain of that displacement is real, historic, and deserving of recognition and justice.
But the tragedy of Kashmir did not begin in 1990.
The history of Kashmir is also a history of repeated uprootings and fractured habitats. During the Afghan and Sikh periods, famine and political disorder in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries forced waves of migration from the Valley. The partition of the subcontinent in 1947 violently divided Jammu and Kashmir, producing refugees, massacres, migrations, and permanent separation of families across what later became the Ceasefire Line and then the Line of Control.
The wars of 1965 and 1971 deepened this fragmentation. Entire populations living near the ceasefire zones experienced displacement, militarisation, uncertainty, and economic ruin.
Villages were emptied. Families were divided between territories administered by India and Pakistan. Refugee populations emerged on both sides without permanent settlement of their political future.
The armed struggle and militarisation of the 1990s then added another catastrophic layer. Kashmiri Pandits left the Valley in fear and trauma. Large numbers of Kashmiri Muslims simultaneously experienced killings, disappearances, custodial violence, migration, and destruction of social life. Tens of thousands of families across all communities became victims of conflict, suspicion, and prolonged insecurity.
Kashmir’s tragedy therefore cannot honestly be reduced to a single community, a single decade, or a single narrative. The wound is collective, though experienced differently by different peoples.
The continued division of Jammu and Kashmir remains one of the greatest humanitarian and political injustices in contemporary international affairs. A historic state and a historically interconnected people have remained partitioned for generations. Families remain separated by military frontiers. Cultural continuity has been interrupted. Economic integration has been shattered. Human geography has been subordinated to strategic rivalry.
This prolonged fracture has produced abnormal conditions that succeeding generations have been forced to inherit as though they were permanent.
Yet no people can permanently flourish in a condition of enforced separation.
India and Pakistan both bear historic and continuing responsibilities toward the people of Jammu and Kashmir. The international community, particularly the United Nations, also carries responsibility because Jammu and Kashmir remains an internationally acknowledged disputed territory with unfulfilled commitments regarding the political future and rights of its people.
The people of Jammu and Kashmir were never meant to become permanent subjects of division, militarisation, and competing sovereignties. The state was internationally recognized as disputed precisely because its final disposition was to be determined in accordance with the wishes of its people. Instead, decades have passed while borders hardened, mistrust deepened, and human suffering became normalised.
The moral urgency today is not merely to manage the conflict but to humanise the discourse around Kashmir. The suffering of Kashmiri Pandits must not be instrumentalised against Kashmiri Muslims, nor should the suffering of Muslims erase the trauma of Pandit exile. A civilised future for Kashmir requires recognition of all griefs and protection of all identities.
The launches of Healer in Exile in Jammu and Srinagar carried symbolic significance because they briefly recreated a shared civic space where memory, pain, dignity, and coexistence could be acknowledged together. That spirit deserves preservation.
The re-unification of the habitat and the people of Jammu and Kashmir — socially, culturally, economically, and humanly — remains an essential requirement for any just and lasting peace. Whether through open movement, cross-Line of Control interaction, demilitarisation, institutional guarantees, or a broader political settlement, the objective must remain the restoration of human continuity.
It is unlawful, unjust, and inhuman to indefinitely hold a people divided from one another and separated from the integrity of their historical homeland.
No durable peace can emerge from permanent fragmentation. Kashmir requires not the perpetuation of estrangement, but the restoration of humanity, dignity, and shared belonging.
Author is President of JKCHR – NGO in Special Consultative Status with the United Nations