Property Dealers Prefer To Keep Pandits Out Of Valley

These brokers have had a booming business for the last seven years, buying and selling properties of Kashmiri Pundits. In a majority of the cases the properties were bought at throwaway prices and sold to locals at a premium.

In certain cases, the same property has been sold to two different buyers. The racket is so paying that most of these property dealers have taken permanent rooms in hotels in the winter capital Jammu, were desperate migrants throng to them to have their properties disposed off.

The migrants also seem to have made up their mind that they are not returning to the Valley. This is evident from the fact that without exception, every member of the Kashmiri Pundit community is interested in somehow selling of their assets in the Valley. Their usual line being: Normalcy might not be that easily achievable as the State government wants us to believe.

Besides, except for those who actually live in migrant camps outside the Valley, most of the migrants have started treating a return to their roots as both impractical and risky.

As Vijay Langer, a migrant bank employee, who came here to meet his friends recently, said: I am only welcome now as a tourist and not if I want to resume my duties and live normally. The fear generally expressed by the working class among migrants is that since their positions in the Valley are now manned by locals, their return would usually be seen as dislodging the local brother.

Another factor which keeps them from returning is that the salaried among them continue to draw wages and other benefits from the state while most of them have stared doing jobs for the private and public sector outside.

In order to lure the migrants back to the Valley, the state government proposes to do through an ordinance what the pro-Pak Hizbul Mujahideen did through a diktat