Jammu, August 31
Following stiff opposition to the government plan of carving out security zones for the Kashmir migrants from several Pandit organisations, the state authorities are said to have adopted a go-slow policy on the construction of one-room tenements at three places in the valley.
The government has already identified the areas where one to two-room clusters would be raised for the migrants. It has already submitted a Rs 3,800-crore plan for the rehabilitation of over 3.60 lakh Hindus who had migrated from the valley in 1990 in the wake of rise in militancy-related violence.
The plan envisaged an economic package for those migrants who wished to return to Kashmir. The package included government help for repair and renovation of their damaged houses, compensation for the loss of movable and immovable assets and financial assistance for those who were keen to restart their business and farming.
Since it was not feasible for the migrants to return to their ancestral villagers because of security reasons, the government had decided to settle them, temporarily, in the one-room tenements at three places in the valley.
Apart from the security considerations, a majority of migrants have sold their houses and land during the past 12 years. More than 10,000 houses have been partially or totally torched or damaged and some of them have been occupied by people who migrated from the border areas of the valley out of scare.
Though the state government enacted the Distress Sale Act in 1997 under which the Deputy Commissioners were to act as custodian of the immovable property of the migrants, yet the laws have not been strictly enforced. The law to evict house or land grabbers, too, has not been implemented. Those who applied for eviction were discouraged by making them to go through a cumbersome process.
The sale deeds have been prohibited under the law, but legal experts have found a way to sideline the law. The distress sale of several thousand houses and several thousand kanals of land belonging to the migrants were sold through an agreement “to sell” under power of attorney between the seller and the buyer.
Various Kashmiri Pandit organisations, including the All-State Kashmiri Pandit Conference and the State Pandit Solidarity Conference, headed by Mr A.N. Vaishnavi and Mr C. Trisal, respectively, have made it clear that all migrants are keen to go back, but the current security scenario is too disturbing to encourage “us” to return to the valley.
Mr Trisal said after the Agra summit the level of violence had escalated not only in the Kashmir valley, but in the Jammu region also. In this situation “even our Muslim brethren are not safe,” he said, adding that “When we were hounded out of the valley how was it possible for us to be acceptable there when the same organisations and outfits are active?”
Mr Vaishnavi said first of all the government should create a conducive atmosphere for “our return.” He explained that so long as guns and grenades kept on roaring and selective killings were carried out in various parts of the Jammu region, there was no guarantee for the safety and the security of the migrants if they were forced to return to Kashmir.
He said by announcing plan after plan for the return of the migrants to Kashmir, “we were being exposed to bigger risks.”
A senior leader of the Panun Kashmir, Dr Ajay Chrungoo, said the state government and the Centre had a wrong policy on the return of the migrants to the valley and had ignored the ground realities. He said it was not feasible, politically and economically, for the Hindus to be back in Kashmir when fundamentalists, fully supported by agencies across the border, were bent upon carrying out ethnic cleansing in various districts of the state.
Dr Chrungoo said the only solution to the problem was to carve out a homeland for the migrants within the valley. He said the Panun Kashmir had submitted a blueprint to the Centre regarding the homeland and if it accepted “our suggestion” it could resolve the problem of the internally displaced families.
He felt that forcible return of the displaced families would amount to “imprisonment” because they would not be able to move out of the security zones.
