Going beyond 'The Kashmir Files' to gauge rehab work for state's migrants

A deep dive into why Kashmiri Pandits don't seem too happy with a slew of relief measures provided by the Centre and the states sheltering them

With The Kashmir Files having drawn extreme reactions, questions are being asked about what successive governments have done for Kashmiri migrants, especially after the bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir and the carving out of two union territories from a unified state in 2019.

According to the union home ministry site, some 62,000 registered families migrated from the Kashmir Valley following the onset of militancy and terrorism in the early 1990s. About 40,000 registered Kashmiri migrant families are living in Jammu, 20,000 in the national capital region and the remaining 2,000 in other parts of the country.

Various governments took steps to provide financial assistance and relief to the affected families within a broad policy framework based on the premise that those who have migrated will eventually return to the valley, says the site. However, Kashmiri Pandits are apparently not convinced about these 'stop-gap' arrangements.

The initiatives taken

Some of the steps included cash relief of Rs 250 per family and free ration in the year 1990 by the Jammu and Kashmir government. The amount has been raised from time to time. At present, the cash relief given is Rs 2,500 per head per month subject to a cap of Rs 10,000 per family. The ration given now is nine kg of rice, two kg of flour per person per month and one kg of sugar per family per month. The expenditure incurred by the state government is reimbursed by the union home ministry.

The Delhi government is also providing cash relief of Rs 2,500 per head per month, capped at Rs 10,000 per family. The expenditure incurred by the state government above Rs 1,000 per head is reimbursed by the union home ministry. Other states are providing relief fixed by them from their own budgets.

Besides, the Prime Minister's reconstruction programme, announced in 2004, involved the construction of 5,248 two-room sets with accompanied facilities. It had a budget outlay of Rs 24,000 crore. According to the union home ministry site, 5,242 such tenements have come up at Purkhoo, Muthi, Nagrota and Jagti of the Jammu region and have been alloted to migrants.

Besides, 200 flats have been built at Sheikhpora in Budgam district of the Valley and alloted to migrants, who have joined the state government service under the employment component of the PM package of 2008, on sharing basis. Within these flats, 31 have also been given to locals who migrated from their native places to other places within the Valley.

However, the moot question about rehabilitation of migrants in the Valley remains, as this was the broad policy framework cited above.

In this regard, a comprehensive package for the return and rehabilitation of migrants was announced by the government in 2008.

The Centre announced another Prime Minister's package in 2015 to provide additional 3,000 state government jobs to the migrants and build 6,000 transit homes in the valley. The package is being implemented by the state government.

After the splitting of the erstwhile state following the scrapping of the Article 370, the union government (since the domain is still under the governor's rule), has been making allocations for kashmiri migrants under the PM package.

In 2020-21, an allocation of Rs 679 crore was made for salary, cash assistance, food grains and civic action programmes for the migrants, which was Rs 319 crore more than the previous year. In 2021-22, an allocation of about Rs 846 crore was made for transit accommodation, employment and other components of the PM Package.

For 2022-23, an allocation is projected to increase to about Rs 1,188.15 crore for the PM package, union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in her budget speech for J&K.

Under the package, 1,025 transit homes have been already built or substantially completed, 1,488 are at different stages of completion and work on 2,744 units of has been initiated and is expected to be completed in 2022-23.

Besides, out of 6,000 posts created for the migrants under the PM Package, 4,678 posts have been already filled and remaining posts are being filled, Sitharman said.

According to a written reply by Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai, the land of 610 migrants has been restored during the past five years.

Why the Pandit is peeved

Have these measures gone down well with Kashmiri Pandits? They don't seem to have, as they do little to rehabilitate them to a safe place in the Valley. In fact the steps are being taken without recognising the core problems of the Pandits and delivering justice to them.

Sushil Pandit, an important voice of Kashmiri Pandits, said, "This kind of relief and rehabilitation is hypocricy as the core issue of Jihadi violence is not being addressed. It is not acknowledged that we are victims of genocide. You are throwing some jobs and rehabilitation packages at us and asking us to go back in the same milieu where our killers are roaming free. This is perversion."

Pandit said tthe promise jobs and the encouragement to return are a mockery of the stated objective of giving KPs justice, because the circumstances have, in fact, become worse than what they were at the time of migration.

"Those who had not migrated when we did are also fleeing the valley now because they are being killed," he pointed out.

He said the four-fold demand of KPs ought to be met if the government is serious about giving them justice.

First and foremost, acknowledge why KPs had to come out. "We were facing genocide. And nobody is willing to acknowledge that," he said.

"Secondly, after you have acknowledged that this was genocide, the natural corollary is to please punish the culprits. Unless there is justice, there is no normalcy. There is no relief and rehabilitation. All those are temporary measures," he asserts.

Thirdly, there is a big class of beneficiaries of the genocide in Kashmir who just walked into KPs' properties and homes, shops and businesses, land, orchards, homes and temples.

"So long as the beneficiaries of the genocide exist, there will always be incentives to commit genocide again in future. You have to take away these ill-gotten gains from those who have either simply usurped our properties or bought them dirt cheap in distress sales," Pandit said. "Fourthly, you have to recognise that you cannot throw us back to the valley to fend for ourselves any which way."

"We need a political division of the Kashmir valley where we need our own area, our own geography where we will live collectively as a community as victim of genocide. We cannot go back to the same neighbourhoods. The union territory of Jammu and Kashmir must carve out a territory in the valley of Kashmir. We call it Panun Kashmir. This demand was raised 30 years ago in a resolution collectively endorsed by a community in a global function," Pandit said.