WELCOME IDEA
| Date :17-Jul-2019 |
THAT Kashmiri Pandits have sent to Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Mr. Amit Shah a phase-wise proposal for rehabilitation of the displaced members of the community, is good news indicating a strong possibility of return of the Pandit community to centrestage of public affairs in Kashmir. The proposed roadmap of three dimensions talks of physical and economic rehabilitation of the community as well as safety and securities of Pandit families in the State. Much will depend upon how the Centre responds to this proposal, but there are reasons to believe that Mr. Narendra Modi will favour something bold and innovative.
Going by these yardsticks, it can be said safely that some planned effort for rehabilitation of Kashmiri Pandit community may be put into action mode in the next sometime. The Government’s resolve to initiate an action plan for rehabilitation of the Kashmiri Pandit community was expressed clearly by the Government during the parliamentary debate on the issue of granting extension to President’s Rule in the troubled State. The Prime Minister, the Home Minister, and others on the Ruling benches brought to fore the gory details of how the Pandit community was literally driven out of its home and how the political elite of Kashmir dominated the Government and distorted public discourse beyond recognition.
All the speeches indicated that soon the Government will take major steps to rectify the situation in Jammu and Kashmir. The proposal from the Pandit community only adds much value to the thought-process of the Government on the issue. The rehabilitation process may take considerable time, but the very process will bring to fore some right elements to contribute to public affairs in the State. For, public discourse is incomplete when a community is barred from participation in it. In Kashmir, with the Pandit community having been kept out, public discourse had got twisted out of shape in the past thirty years. Once the process of rehabilitation gets going in due course of time, then the quality and direction of public discourse and affairs will change for the better. The course of developments in Kashmir in the past three decades indicates how the Government failed miserably to regulate the political process and stem the distortion being heaped on the State.
Much to the contrary, the people in the Government were found siding with fissiparous tendencies at the cost of safety and security of a major section of the larger society. And to say the least, whatever was happening in Kashmir was an anti-thesis of secularism in a planned, deliberate manner. The attacks on the Pandit community were part of a systematic socio-political purge of a community in order to promote the interest of another dominant community.
It was a brazen outrage of the dignity and security of a whole community and the ruling elite in Kashmir -- comprising only a handful of families -- masterminded it with a clear purpose of crushing aspiration of a major section of the population. Right since 2014 when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power under Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi, the Government started making systematic efforts to make strong inroads into the Kashmiri socio-political ecosystem. So concerted were those efforts that the BJP even entered a partnership in power with the People’s Democratic Party, thus slowly but surely achieving a firmer grip on Kashmiri affairs. The return of Mr. Modi as Prime for the second term has made things much easier for the process of rectification of public affairs in Kashmir. Puffs of hope are rising from the Kashmiri landscape that in the next sometime, a good deal of good work would be undertaken by the Government to lend credence and relevance to the damaged aspirations of the Pandit community.