A day after former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah urged displaced Kashmiri Pandits to take initiative for their return to Kashmir Valley, a senior legislator counselled the community to desist from painting majority community in Kashmir as communal.
Awami Ittihad Party (AIP) chief and second time legislator from langate, Engineer Rasheed said that apart from Pandits, thousands of people including religious and political workers and border residents also migrated from Kashmir in those heydays of militancy but their plight has not been highlighted.
Groups of Kashmiri Pandits held protests at various places on January 19 to commemorate the 27th anniversary of their exodus from the valley. The Pandits call it holocaust day. Officials say that 62,000 Kashmiri Pandit families are living outside the Valley since 1989, majority of them in Udhampur, Jammu and Delhi.
Dr Abdullah said that Kashmiri Pandits have to take their own initiative to return to valley as there was nobody to go to them with a begging bowl. He said the Pandits were well-settled outside the Valley and most of them were not eager to return.
But Rasheed accused the Pandits of playing in the hands of New Delhi to defame majority community and to work against the interests of their own State.
“By observing January19 as holocaust day and calling their migration as genocide and ethnic cleansing, the Pandits have proved that their one-point agenda is to defame and prove Kashmiri Muslims as communal”, Rasheed said at a press conference.
He said if killing of 209 Pandits is genocide, what name can be given to killing of a hundred thousand Muslims by the State forces.
“Kashmiri Pandits from Bollywood, universities and other prestigious places and political groups were all united to abuse Kashmiri Muslims. let world community know that Kashmiri Pandits were not the only ones who left the Valley,” said the legislator.
A section of Kashmiris belonging to religious and political organisations also migrated from their ancestral places and security agencies bulldozed their houses, orchards and other properties in broad day light, charged Rasheed.
“Thousands of families in border districts of Poonch, Baramulla and Kupwara were also forced by security agencies to migrate to Pakistan-administered Kashmir”, he said adding nobody speaks on their behalf.
“Kashmiri Pandits are entitled to huge packages, jobs and all other facilitie. Why the internally displaced Muslims and those forced to migrate across loC are not treated at par with Pandits. The Government of India wants to bury the Kashmir issue and the rights of Muslims in J&K by diverting the focus from real issues to Kashmiri Pandits, Pakistani refugees and other non-issues,” he said.