NEW DELHI – India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will revive a plan to build secured camps to resettle scores of Hindus in the Muslim-dominated Kashmir Valley, a senior leader said.
The proposal would certainly heighten tensions in the restive region but Ram Madhav, who is the national general secretary responsible for Kashmir, said his Hindu nationalist party was committed to helping bring back some of the estimated 200,000-300,000 Hindus who fled the Kashmir Valley in the aftermath of an armed revolt that started in 1989.
“Their fundamental rights of returning to the valley have to be respected. At the same time, we have to provide them proper security,” Madhav said in an interview, referring to the Kashmiri Hindus, also known as Pandits.
The scenic Kashmir valley is home to nearly 7 million people out of which 97 per cent are Muslims who are surrounded by Indian troops and armed police to quash any uprising against New Delhi’s rule.
Official figures say about 50,000 people have been killed in the conflict in the last three decades.
Madhav elaborated that a previous BJP-backed government in Jammu and Kashmir state had considered building either separate or mixed resettlement townships, but had been unable to execute the plan.
“No consensus could be built around any one view,” he shared and said BJP is confident that it will win the upcoming state poll and the resettlement plan would be back in play.
“I am sure when we come back to power, we will again take it up and try and see if a solution can be found,” he said.
The BJP is confident that it will win the upcoming state poll, Madhav said, adding that the resettlement plan would be back in play.
The issue of Hindu resettlement in Kashmir has long been on the agenda of the BJP, but party’s successive victory in general elections seems to have given fresh impetus to the plan.
Though Madhav represents Modi-led BJP, India’s federal home ministry, which would be involved in any such building activity in the Kashmir Valley, has not commented on the issue.
Nonetheless, there is widespread opposition to any push for separate townships for returning Hindus in the Kashmir Valley as even Sanjay Tickoo, a Pandit community leader who has continued to live in Kashmir, said the idea was an unrealistic solution that would invite a backlash.
“Is it possible to live in a caged manner, in a caged zone, with security?” he said.
Moreover, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference met some Kashmiri Pandits last month and found that there was a consensus against separate settlements, its chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq said.
“If you put them in separate colonies, in settlements and under barbed wire, that kills the whole purpose of trying to build, again, a community, which is based on mutual trust and respect,” Farooq, also considered the regions spiritual leader by many Kashmiri Muslims, said in an interview.
Meanwhile, leaders from the National Conference and Peoples Democratic Party, the two main regional parties in Kashmir, said they supported the return of Hindus but opposed separate townships.
