“There is no better moment than now to build a Naya Kashmir”

Vijay Dhar is clear he doesn’t want to be the last Kashmiri Pandit in the Valley. At 80, he has been as much a witness to Jammu and Kashmir’s turbulent history as he has been its victim. He lived through the horrific 1990s when around 40,000 Pandit families were driven out of the Valley. Dhar’s family was forced to move to Delhi. When his mother fell ill and wanted to return, the home ministry, after much convincing, finally said they could visit their house but under changed names. However, as soon as they landed, everyone recognised them and their Muslims friends ensured they felt safe.

Dhar returned to the Valley in 1997 to reoccupy his magnificent ancestral bungalow off Srinagar’s Gupkar Road.

He then set up a Delhi Public School in Srinagar in 2003 that now has 5,000 students. Sitting in his sprawling garden, Dhar, over high tea, says that a focus on education is key to J&K’s future. He is appalled that over 800 students from the Valley are studying medicine in Bangladesh because of the lack of educational facilities back home.

Any ruling dispensation, says Dhar, must focus on youth. “They don’t want more war or militancy and separatism—they want jobs,” he says. “They want to be entrepreneurs and we should make land and finance available to them. They are the Naya Kashmir. We should stop seeing them as resentful and wanting to engage in violence. The Centre must keep the development promises it has made to them.”

Dhar is not content with the Modi government’s efforts so far to rehabilitate them in the Valley. “What have we done for the 40,000 families forced to leave the Valley in the ’90s?” he asks. “If you want them to return, give them jobs. They need encouragement and a sense of security, not platitudes.” The home ministry, in a statement in Parliament in March 2021, acknowledged that 39,782 Hindu migrant families had registered with the government Relief Office in 1990. It said that some 3,800 migrants had found employment in the Valley after special jobs for Kashmiri migrants were announced under the PM’s packages for rehabilitation in 2008 and 2015; another 520 found employment after the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. Dhar is right— not much has been done for them.

He acknowledges that the Centre has been quick to complete roads and bridges since the state became a Union territory and that terrorism incidents had reduced, but adds that the efforts have fallen well short of the Centre’s promise to transform the state. “We need clarity on what is planned in the months ahead,” he says. “It is important to give back our statehood as quickly as possible.” It is a voice of sagacity the government will do well to heed.