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| KPs demand IDP status, submit memorandum to UNHRC | | | Early Times Report
JAMMU, Sept 6: Kashmiri Pandits have demanded that the Government of India formally declare the community as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in accordance with the proper definition scripted in the UNHRC documentation.
A memorandum in this regard was submitted to UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), Asian European Human Rights Council (AEHRC) an NGO stated that the UNHRC emphasizes upon the Government of India to rehabilitate the Kashmiri Pandit IDPS back in their homeland in concentration wherever and in whatever manner they feel satisfied without refoulment.
Dr K N Pandita a well known social scholar and secretary general of the organization submitted the memorandum on behalf of NGO. It said the Government of India failed to provide security of life and property to the religious minority of Kashmiri Pandits in the face of externally sponsored religion-based terrorism in 1990. This is tantamount to abuse of the Constitution of India which promises that Indian State will uphold the right to life of its citizens, the memorandum added.
It said the Government of India has knowingly refused to give these victims of ethnic cleansing their proper nomenclature of Internally Displaced Persons and, instead, calls them "Kashmiri Migrants" which is blatant distortion of history and denial of rights. The Government of India has failed to take a bold and humanistic step of concentrated rehabilitation of the displaced community in their homeland and it has succumbed to majority pressure because of vote bank politics and, in the process, has compromised with the violation of the rights of the Kashmiri Pandit IDPs, it added. The Prime Minister of India, on knowing the reaction of the majority community in Kashmir, has remained tight-lipped. Obviously, he is dragging his feet. Vote bank politics frustrates universal human rights, it added.
It said the oppressed and exiled community of Kashmiri Pandits is the indigenous population of the region with five thousand years of written history; it is the victim of ethnic cleansing, it is a miniscule religious minority living in exile for last two decades and half, and it is a totally defenseless community suffering innumerable hardships like discrimination, extirpation, exile and persecution. The majority community in the region of their origin considers the valley something like a private estate where the original inhabitants cannot enjoy the right of settlement and development.
The memorandum said 25 years ago, in 1990, more than four hundred thousand people of a religious minority, called Kashmiri Pandits, in the Indian part of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, were forced out of their millennia-old homeland of Kashmir Valley at gun point.
Externally sponsored and abetted religion-based terrorists forced them out of their homes and hearths. Mr. Chairman, it is a clear instance of the majority community rigorously perpetuating exclusiveness through ethnic cleansing of a region undertaken twenty-five years ago. The governments of the federating state and the Union of India are not disposed to take any action and fulfill their duty of upholding the rights of the internally displaced persons to return and restitute in their homeland in a manner they feel safe and secure.
It said this small religious minority community, documented as "reverse minority" in the definition of "minority" in UNHRC Working Group on Minorities, and in fact the indigenous people of the region, has braved many onslaughts of human aberration and vicissitudes of history till it was reduced to a bare seven per cent of one time hundred per cent population of Kashmir before their forced exoduses.
After wholesale ethnic cleansing in Kashmir, this miniscule community got widely dispersed in different parts of the Indian Union but did not cross the national borders. The hardships of enforced exile hardly need to be elucidated.
Notwithstanding the fact that this religious minority fulfills the criterion of Internally Displaced Persons in consonance with the definition of IDPs in the UN Human Rights Charter, the Government of India and the Government of the federating State declined to give them the proper nomenclature of IDPs thus depriving them of the rights accruing to them by the UNHRC definition. They are given the sobriquet of "Migrants" which is unrealistic as well as unjust. It is rather adding salt to their wounds.
During last twenty-five year period of their exile, the Government of India never made any serious effort of rehabilitating them back in their original homeland perhaps owing to insecure conditions in the region. |
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