Kashmiri pandits meet L-G, insist on leaving Valley
As fear and despair continue to writ large on their faces following the murder of a colleague by suspected militants, the government employees recruited under the Prime Minister’s special job package for displaced Kashmiri Pandits on Friday reiterated their demand that they be relocated to Jammu or any other part of the country.
After meeting J&K lieutenant-governor Manoj Sinha here to share their concerns with him, the pandit employees said that only one-fifth of them live in secure areas and that their security fears only augmented following the murder of Rahul Bhat, an employee of the J&K revenue department. 33-year-old Bhat was shot dead by two unidentified assailants inside his office at Chadoora near here on May 12.
Under the job package announced in 2008 by then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as many as 6,000 posts were created for Pandit migrants in the governor’s effort to encourage the minority community to serve in the Kashmir Valley as a prelude to their eventual return and rehabilitation here.
A spokesman of the employees said that a 25member Kashmiri Pandit delegation met Sinha to convey that as nothing is worth a life they want to
be taken out of the Valley and posted either in Jammu or any other part of the country on a fasttrack basis. “The Lt. Governor and top bureaucrats who were present heard us patiently. We submitted our memorandum and told Mr. Sinha that we have only one main demand which is to relocate us from Kashmir to Jammu or some other place,” said the spokesman, Avinash Bhat. He added, “We got a positive response from the LG and the officers who assured us all possible support and help.”
Bhat who was part of the delegation said that the Lt. Governor assured it the government will provide a secure environment and safe accommodations and safe places of postings to the Pandit employees “but we told him that we don’t want to stay put in Kashmir and that we should be posted either in Jammu or some other place.” He added, “We also urged him to allow us to reunite with our families in Jammu and he told us that he and his team of officers will think it over.”