Although their numbers of dead and injured were low, the Pandits, who prided themselves on their Indian identity, experienced fear and panic set off by targeted killings of some members of their community—including high-profile officials among their ranks—and public calls for independence among the insurgents. The accompanying rumours and uncertainty together with the absence of guarantees for their safety by the state government might have been the latent causes of the exodus. The descriptions of the violence as "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" in some Hindu nationalist publications or among suspicions voiced by some exiled Pandits are widely considered inaccurate and aggressive by scholars.
