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Can the Pandits go home finally? The new PM’s package on Kashmiri Pandits has again brought their rehab issue in focus. The 2008 package barely yielded results. Unless incentives are de-linked with their return to the Valley and political empowerment offered, the proposed package won’t work any wonders. by Aditi Tandon
Chilling accounts of murders and rapes return to haunt 55-year-old Romesh Raina the moment he mentions his homeland Kashmir. “I can never forget that night… I can still feel the jitters,” says the physician who fled from his Srinagar home on the intervening night of January 19 and 20, 1990. Long settled in New Delhi as a migrant, Raina recalls with despair the events that led to his escape. “My wife was four-month pregnant and I had just bought a Fiat. Outside on the streets, mayhem was playing out. Loudspeakers were constantly blaring out one warning — ‘Kaafiron bhaag jao.’ We were scared to death after the killing of our tallest leader Tikalal Taploo and the gruesome murder of another Pandit DN Choudhary whose eyes the militants gouged out. Terrorists’ policy was to kill one and scare 1,000. We escaped in my Fiat and never returned,” he recalls, wondering if the conditions that drove them out of the Valley had ceased to exist. This question hurts the exiled community that totals 59,442 every time the government talks of rehabilitating them. The earlier Prime Minister’s package of 2008 offered by the Congress-led UPA government failed to produce the desired results. The Centre’s own records show that only one migrant family returned to Kashmir under the housing assistance made in the package. It remains to be seen whether the renewed promise of rehabilitation by the BJP government recently — made through the President’s address to the joint session of Parliament — will work. Beyond money Displaced Pandits believe that past attempts of the government to rehabilitate the community failed because it saw a complex issue from the prism of economic resettlement alone. “The government is again treating rehabilitation as a simplistic issue of money, which it is not,” says MK Kaw, former Secretary, HRD Ministry, and an activist. Kaw was the brain behind various educational concessions the government offered to the wards of Kashmiri migrants for admission to schools and higher educational institutions. Having closely followed various resettlement policies, he says, “There are preconditions the government must address before we even talk of the Pandits’ return to the Valley.” Among six representatives of the community the Ministry of Home invited last week for comments on the rehabilitation plan, Kaw submitted a detailed action plan calling for political empowerment of the Pandits and implementation of certain difficult, but necessary confidence-building measures before any plan can roll out. The draft sets the following preconditions for return — reiteration of the existing Parliament resolution that says Kashmir is an integral part of India, besides vowing to reclaim portions of Kashmir in control of Pakistan and China; serious attempts to dismantle the existing terror infrastructure in Pakistan which runs a proxy war in Kashmir; setting up of a commission of inquiry headed by a Supreme Court judge to record reasons behind the exodus and fixing responsibility; constitution of a Special Investigation Team to probe the murders of Pandits; and special courts to bring the perpetrators of violence to justice. Most Pandits agree on returning but cite security as the topmost concern around the move. They say the atmosphere of radicalisation in the Valley needs to be addressed. Panun Kashmir advocates a separate homeland with UT status. Political empowerment Longing for their homeland, displaced Pandits are keen for political empowerment and minority status in J&K so that they get a voice. For long there has been no MLA of the Pandit community in the state legislature. “Our last representative in the Assembly was Raman Matoo during the Mufti Sayeed-led government. In the absence of any political space, we would be reduced to second-class citizens. The time has come to offer Pandits legitimate political space at all conceivable levels, from the Assembly and Cabinet to elected bodies and government structures,” says Vijay Aima, vice-president of All India Kashmiri Sabha (AIKS), currently engaged with the government on the resettlement plan. Aima left the Valley in the late 1980s seeing “a straw in the wind”. The community is also looking at the J&K Government for the passage of the long pending Bill to grant Pandits minority status. Wajahat Habibullah, former chairman of the National Commission for Minorities and a strong votary of the Bill, admits, “I repeatedly urged the state to pass this Bill because the National Act on Minorities does not extend to J&K which enjoys special status in our Constitution. The state has not responded yet.” Loss of cultural space There is a deep-rooted apprehension among the Pandits about attempts by certain forces to erase its pre-Islamic history. The Department Related Committee on Home Affairs, which has been reviewing the performance of PM’s past package, had, in its recent report, taken exception to complaints about the changing of names of cultural symbols which represent the plural traditions of Kashmir. The committee was told how the Shankaracharya Temple was now being called Takht-e-Sulaiman; Hari Parbat (a place of immense religious significance for the Pandits) was being called Kohe Maraan; and Srinagar, Sheher-e-Khaas. Though the state government said no official orders had been passed regarding such renaming, the Pandits say even the colloquial use of such terms undermined the pluralistic past of Kashmir. “The religious identity of the majority community has come to represent the Kashmiri identity and Pandits stand hyphenated. Basic anxieties around our identity are troubling us. We have lost our homes. We don’t want to lose our traditions. Our temples are being desecrated and cultural symbols being questioned,” says SS Toshkhani, a New Delhi-based Kashmiri litterateur, who mentions a recent controversy where some Muslim scholars challenged the existence of Aranimal, a revered Kashmiri poet saint. It took the community years to establish Aranimal’s existence, that she lived in Palhalan in Baramulla and penned songs which Kashmiris sing even today. A majority of Pandits, however, are for the creation of three satellite townships in the Valley for the return of the community. This is something the parliamentary committee welcomed in its reports on the grounds that the cluster resettlement would inspire a sense of security among displaced Pandits who can gradually get mainstreamed. But the separatists are opposed to it. KK Khosa, president of the Kashmiri Sabha, Jammu, says, “This opposition lends credence to the belief that separatists were active conspirators to our exodus.” Why Pandits feel betrayed The past package for migrant Kashmiris has failed to yield results, with the Home Affairs related parliamentary committee going to the extent of calling it a nonstarter. The 2008 package offered housing assistance to Kashmiri families who agreed to return to the Valley, but only one family applied for the loan. Though former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced a package worth Rs 1,618.40 crore in April 2008, only Rs 104.52 crore was extended as reimbursement by the Centre to the state government till May 2013. Since 2009, the apex committee set up by the state to review the progress of the package has met only four times. “Only four meetings are indicative of the state government’s sincerity behind the implementation of the package,” the committee headed by Venkaiah Naidu (BJP) said in its report tabled in Parliament on February 19 this year. The report reveals startling facts about the failure of the package which promised jobs for 15,000 youths. Under the component, 9,000 youths were to be incentivised for self-employment and the rest were to be given jobs in the ratio of 3,000 jobs in Central Government and 3,000 in state government. Of 3,000 Central jobs, only 1,446 have been filled. The state has not even created its part of the jobs. Under the self-employment component, not one claimant came forward. Worse, there has hardly been any utilisation of the corpus fund the state government created in 2007 to reimburse medical expenses of displaced families who are vulnerable to a range of diseases on account of poor living conditions in shanty-like migrant camps. Of the Rs 5 crore corpus, only Rs 57 lakh has been disbursed to 185 migrants in all these years. The parliamentary committee noted, “It is hard to believe that a community suffering so many diseases has not made enough reimbursement claims in all these years.” The main problem with the past package was that it linked incentives to the return of migrants to the Valley, often setting harsh conditions for jobs. “Migrants can claim housing assistance only if they return to the Valley. People who take up jobs offered under the package need to give affidavits that they will not seek transfers for some years. Women employees have to resultantly live away from their husbands. Such terms have harmed the success of packages,” says Raina. The parliamentary committee recently advised the government to de-link the return of migrants from such conditions. It said, “Most components of the package have not even taken off. So many years after the exodus, improvement on the ground has been scanty and just one family has returned since the package was announced. Clearly, either the package is not attractive or the environment is not safe in the Valley for migrants to return.” Will the BJP government pull off reverse migration of a fear-stricken community which is facing its seventh exodus in the past 700 years?
How can we go back to a state whose very existence is in question and where the 1990 conditions still prevail? The government must exhibit a serious resolve to resettle the community. That is possible only when tough measures are taken. It is now or
never. The attempts to reduce Kashmir to a Sunni stronghold are still rampant. How does the government expect us to return to the Valley where anti-India separatists continue to have a large
constituency?
2008 package failure
Registered migrant families Total
59,442 Jammu 38,119 New Delhi 19,338 Other states
1,985 Those who stayed put Families 600 People 3,000 Cash relief
What Pandits want
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Implementation not easy New Delhi’s assurance to announce a prime package for the displaced Kashmiri Pandits has already created a flutter among several quarters in the Valley. Even as the non-migrants, who stayed back in Kashmir after the eruption of militancy, are threatening an agitation if they are excluded from the proposed package, the separatists have also started reacting to the announcement. Some others have upped the ante over the demand for a CBI probe into cases of encroachments on temple and shrine properties. Around 630 non-migrant Pandit families — some internally displaced — have been seeking a proper rehabilitation and emploment package. All Parties Migrants Co-ordination Committee (APMCC) chairman Vinod Pandit, who shuttles between Kashmir and Jammu and is in touch with the Pandits of both regions, is hopeful that the Centre will incorporate their demands in the proposed rehabilitation programme. The main demands of the Pandits are one-time compensation for over-aged youth living outside the Valley and a special employment package for the non-migrants. They are also demanding a CBI probe into the cases of encroachments on religious properties. Several Pandit associations have also been seeking the passing of the Kashmir Temples and Shrines Bill in the J&K Legislative Assembly. “The government has dillydallied on passing the Bill that would have ensured transparency into the functioning of our properties. The government has also failed to provide the details of the status of the properties owned by trusts and individuals. Therefore, only a CBI probe will reveal how much area of our properties has been encroached upon,” claims Vinod Pandit. While the APMCC has been accusing the authorities of working hand in glove with the “land mafia”, Pandit says some people were even facing issues when approaching the government in case of encroachments on personal properties. Meanwhile, wondering how the government would rehabilitate the Pandits, the stakeholders warn that creating too much hype can backfire. Kashmir Pandit Sangharsh Samiti president Sanjay Tickoo says the announcement of packages was not going to ensure the return of Pandits. “Those who left have sold their properties. How will they be rehabilitated?” he asks, warning that creating separate colonies for them would harm “coexistence” in the Valley. Chunni Lal of the Hindu Welfare Society Kashmir says the government should spell out clearly how it intends to resettle the Pandits. “Big packages have been announced earlier too. It is not going to ensure their return. Setting separate colonies is not the answer. We want Pandits and Muslims to live together in peace just like pre-militancy days,” he says. “More important than bringing them back is the issue of employment. Even if they return, what will they do here? We stayed back and the government failed to implement employment packages for our youth. How will it provide employment opportunities to the ones who come back?” he asks. The state government is also waiting for the Centre’s announcement before taking further steps. Talking about the rehabilitation plans, Vinod Kaul, Commissioner-Secretary Revenue and Relief, says all issues facing the community were under the consideration of the Centre right now.
Srinagar The government is only concerned about migrants. Why are we neglected? We stayed back. We also want rehabilitation and employment packages. If we are excluded, we will not allow them to
return.
Kashmiri Muslims are not opposing their return. But by creating separate colonies, the government is harming our centuries-old brotherhood and giving our freedom struggle a communal colour. We will oppose it in every
way.
jammu Nothing should be done in haste. Displacement is not due to a natural calamity and economic doles can’t help. They are a victim of religio-ethnic cleansing and need guarantee to ensure their
safety.
In Kashmir we were confined to a ghetto and cesspool of nothingness. The process of resettling them should be implemented only with their consent as they have faced terrorist violence, else they will again face a similar situation in
future.
The 25-year exile has widened the gap between Muslims and Pandits. We can’t afford to put our progeny at risk. There is need for physical, financial and job security
measures. |
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‘It is now or never’
‘Valley not safe’
‘We want package too’
‘Why separate colonies?’ 
‘Don’t act in haste’
‘Consult the Pandits’
‘Can’t endanger our progeny’