No separate housing clusters for Kashmiri Pandits in J&K: Mufti Muhammad Sayeed

Facing flak from the opposition parties and separatists, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mufti Muhammad Sayeed on Thursday said that no separate housing clusters will be built for Kashmiri Pandits in the state.

While assuring communal harmony in the state, the J&K CM maintained that the resettlement of Kashmiri Pandits is a humanitarian issue and all stakeholders will be taken into confidence in the decision-making process.

“I have told Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh that Kashmiri Pandits cannot live separately in the Valley and they will have to live together in the society,” Sayeed said in the state Assembly.

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) patron appealed to the Opposition not to politicise the issue and affirmed to uphold secularism in the Valley.

He further said, “We don’t want to create an Israel, we want people of all communities to live together.”

Sayeed’s statement came a day after J&K government made a U-turn on the controversial plans for composite townships in the Valley for displaced Kashmiri Pandits, saying they would be settled at their native places and “not as an isolated community”.

Meanwhile, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) today said that J&K has an elected government and the Centre and the state would decide on the Kashmiri Pandits issue.

BJP national secretary Siddharth Nath Singh said that separatists, who chant pro-Pakistan slogans, have no say in the matter.

Congress leader PC Chacko said rehabilitation of Kashmiri Pandits is a promise made by both PDP and BJP, and if both the parties can’t fulfill their promise, they’ll have to answer.

Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front chairman Yasin Malik on Wednesday said that the government’s move to create a separate colony in the state for Kashmiri Pandits would only result in building walls of hatred, just like Israel.

“Since elections, the BJP via RSS has been talking about setting up a satellite colony for our Pandit brothers. The pandits have as much rights on Kashmir as I have. In India everyone talks about composite culture; that means people of different cultures should live together. But a separate colony on the basis of religion will only build walls of hate, like in Israel,” Malik told the media.

Former chief minister Omar Abdullah has criticised the Sayeed-led government’s move to create a separate colony in the state for Kashmiri Pandits, terming it the ‘ghettoisation’ of the community.

Omar expressed his opinion on the matter via a series of tweets, while insisting that he would do ‘everything possible’ to support the return of the Kashmiri Pandits.

The PDP-BJP government on Tuesday assured the Centre that it will soon acquire and provide land at the earliest for creating “composite townships” for displaced Kashmiri migrants in the Valley.

The assurance was given by Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed when he called on Home Minister Rajnath Singh in Delhi for the first time after taking oath on March 1.

The main opposition party National Conference (NC) and the Valley-based political leaders and separatist groups had flayed the state government and the Centre for the move.

Displaced Kashmiri Pandits have demanded the right to return to the Kashmir Valley that they call home after completing 25 years in exile.

They left their ancestral homes in 1989 in droves when a bloody rebellion broke out against New Delhi’s rule in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Sanskrit name ‘Pandit’ means learned person. The Pandits’ roots in the Himalayan region go back about 5,000 years.

From the 13th century, when Islam became a majority religion in Kashmir, and until 1989, Muslims lived side-by-side with Pandits.

But nearly 250,000 Kashmiri Pandits left for safer places in India because of a sharp rise in killings of Hindus and attacks on their homes at the start of a rebellion by Muslim militants in 1989.

It was the largest migration since the 1947 partition of the subcontinent into mainly Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan.