Kashmir's Pandits face further exile or a return to ghettoes

From a time before the gunmen arrived, Pyare Lal Raina recalls enjoying the comforts of a large house and the shade of a garden full of walnut trees. It's clearly a painful memory for a man who has spent the past 15 years in exile, sweating out blistering Indian summers in a single-room hovel not more than 240km from his old home in the cool of the Kashmir valley.

Mr Raina is a Kashmiri Pandit, one of about 300,000 Hindus who fled their towns and villages across Indian Kashmir in January 1990, at a time of popular support among the majority Muslim community for a revolt against New Delhi's rule.

The killing of several high-profile Pandits - the name is derived from the Sanskrit for scholar and is a reference to their membership of the educated Brahmin caste - set off a chain reaction that devastated the community. Only 7,800 Pandits remain in the valley and a tradition of peaceful co-existence was shattered. Along with tens of thousands of others, Mr Raina ended up in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Jammu, the capital of the state's Hindu-dominated region, while others were accommodated in similar camps in Delhi.

While many among a traditionally well-educated society have built careers in a rapidly developing economy, 30,000 people still languish in hastily constructed shelters in Jammu alone, their leaders say. With few having meaningful employment, most live off government handouts of 3,000 rupees ($537) a month.

Among them are Mr Raina and his family, dreaming of a return but growing increasingly bitter over what he calls official indifference towards a politically marginal minority and mocking of the state government's attempts to bring the Pandits home.

'We want to go back, but we want to go back to our own homes, not the ghettoes the government is building,' he says angrily. 'It would be like living in a zoo.'