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| A City-State Concept | | Return of Kashmiri Pandits | | Dr. K L Chowdhury | 7/26/2019 11:46:14 PM |
| During the last two weeks we are witness to a spate of media reports about a newly floated group of Kashmir Pandits hobnobbing with the separatists for a return plan of the exiled community to Kashmir. What an irony that the very people who orchestrated and executed our genocide and ethnic cleansing from the Valley now project themselves as our saviors and have even announced the setting up of a committee in cohort with this self-styled group to work out a formula for the return of Pandits. This group has also met the Minister of State, Home, and submitted a proposal for the construction of six clusters in six districts of the Valley.
These events have engendered deep suspicions in the Pandits about the forces at work behind this exercise. Some serious questions need to be answered. Is it that the separatists under pressure on account of various cases against them want an escape route, a bailout, and now present a new face, a charade, of the so called Kashmiriyat? Are the State government (governor) and the Home Ministry at Delhi falling for this separatist bait? Is the Central Government in a hurry to dispose off the uncomfortable problem of exiled Kashmiri Pandits without even consulting their authentic representatives and, in the process, push this community from the Scylla of exile into the Charybdis of Islamic and Jihadi ambience in the valley? To any sane mind, any such unplanned, slipshod mechanism to transport a whole community like cattle and put them in pens as show pieces, might serve as a feather in the cap of current government, and project the perpetrators of crimes against us as saints, but in reality it will be a catastrophic blunder. How can a community of seven and a half lakh people survive in clusters amid the hostile conditions in what is de facto an exclusivist Islamic state where the cacophony of an extremist ideology is growing louder every day?
Unfortunately Pandits are wrongly perceived as a fractured, disunited, disgruntled, and angry community, at war with itself and therefore not able to present a coherent and unified voice to the rest of the world. But in reality it is not so. We have six to ten-decade-old duly elected organizations like ASPKC, Kashmiri Samiti Delhi, KP Sabha, Jammu, etc. We have Panun Kashmir in the vanguard of our struggle to reclaim our homeland, and we have the Global Kashmir Pandit Diaspora (GKPD) representing the whole scatter of the community across the globe to which nearly all the other organization are signatory. How can a bunch of five or six unidentified Pandits, working as proxies in cahoots with the separatists, be deemed as our representatives? Let us not forget that, in a memorandum to the Prime Minister of India on 14 September 2018, GKPD has submitted a return plan endorsed by no less than 30 Pandit organizations across the spectrum. Amongst other things, it exhorts the government to rehabilitate the whole community in a separate, single concentrated homeland in the valley.
What the Pandits seek in essence is a compact and secure rehabilitation of in what has been suggested more than a decade ago viz; a City-State Concept with full institutional and constitutional guarantees. It is the only tangible and realistic solution that is acceptable to all Kashmiri Pandits who are internally displaced people (IDP). It is in consonance with the recommendations of the UNHRC on IDP, viz; that of rehabilitating them in compact and secure environment back in their homeland where they enjoy full political and economic rights. This is very much possible and doable and it does not involve any constitutional amendments, but the will of the State and Central governments. In fact, it is no different from the smart cites that the Modi government has already ushered in different locations in the country.
The concept of a City-State model is one comprising a huge township in the valley, with a full infrastructure for residential and institutional requirements, with schools, colleges, university, Technology Park, industrial units, banking sectors, and tourist, cultural and religious centers and everything required for the growth and development of a community. We are ready to co-opt the services of teams comprising sociologists, demographers, health and education professionals, town planners and entrepreneurs, and experts in security related issues to lend our support to the State and Central Governments to start on this project rather than wasting effort, time and money with the ridiculous clusters of a few apartments here and there.
The development of a township needs to be followed by adopting contiguous areas for agriculture, horticulture and forest, in order to accommodate all sections of the exiled community of more than seven hundred thousand Kashmiri Pandits.
It is time for the governments at the state and centre to take notice and to reverse the most tragic exodus in modern times in India. |
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