Panic stricken Kashmiri pandit employees Friday shifted their families from Kashmir valley to Jammu ignoring assurances given by the Union Territory administration to ensure their safety after their relocation to safer places within Kashmir valley.
Rough estimates suggested more than 100 families,the majority of whom were staying in rented accommodation, left the valley early in the morning. Few families living in transit camps also managed to reach Jammu despite facing many roadblocks.
As the day progressed the district authorities in Anantnag, Baramulla, Budgam and Srinagar locked down the main gates of various transit camps to prevent movement of employees. Despite these restrictions some of the employees, citing medical emergencies, managed to move towards Jammu to ensure safety of their families.
Senior police and district administration officers have been regularly visiting these camps to motivate these employees to stay put and not to encourage anti-national elements who are hell bent upon triggering a second round of migration of Kashmiri pandits from the Kashmir valley.
On reaching Jammu several employees interacted with the media on the road side near Jagti Migrant camp before heading to their homes in different directions. A Kashmir pandit employee who reached Jammu late Friday afternoon said , " all eyes were set on the high-level meeting between the Union Home Minister Amit Shah and LG Manoj Sinha in New Delhi.But the outcome of the meeting has disappointed us".
"We have learnt through media reports that the government has decided not to shift the employees deployed under the PM's package to safer places in Jammu. We are not going to accept this diktat. We will not go back to Kashmir valley because we fear for our lives". Despite assurances after the killing of Rahul Bhat the JUT administration has failed to prevent targeted killings.
"The administration is regularly sending a team of police/ civil officers to motivate us to stay back and not return to Jammu. He said despite restrictions around 70 percent of employees have vacated their accommodation in these camps and already shifted to Jammu".
A representative of the Kashmiri pandit employees camp committee claimed. "When we came here to work 12 years ago we considered ourselves ambassodors of the government".
"We always considered ourselves an integral part of Kashmir. But a series of targeted killings have exposed the ugly reality. We are not welcome here as employees.We are not safe here
anymore".
Another employee told the media persons in Jammu on Friday, "There is nothing new about this 'Naya Kashmir 'as projected by the UT administration through full page advertisements".
"The Kashmiri pandits suffered pangs of exodus in 1990 and 32 years after we are again at the receiving end".The future looks bleak.
"The communication between the employees and the local administration has totally failed. In the last 12 years whenever we raised issues of sustenance, job related grievances we were ill treated by the bureaucrats in the civil secretariat. Now if the UT administration is serious on bringing reforms and addressing our grievances they must also shunt such officers from the key positions as they had vested interests and instead of resolving our issues they were compounding our miseries".
Along with Kashmiri Pandit migrant employees a large number of SC/ST employees under reserved category were working in the valley and migrated to Jammu after Rajni Bala was killed in cold blood outside her school on May 31. She has been working in Kashmir since June 2009.
Her husband Raj Kumar has also appealed to the UT administration to transfer him to Jammu as he cannot return to Kulgam along with his daughter and survive there.
Several other women employees have been staging protest demonstrations in Jammu for the last three days in support of their demand to transfer them to their home districts.