Kashmiri Pandits are upset that the Himachal Pradesh government has drastically reduced the number of seats in government medical colleges for students from the community.
Ashok Raina, a social activist, told UNI that after the Pandits fled the Kashmir Valley in the last 1980s, Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray reserved seats for the community in every engineering and medical colleges of Maharashtra besides other institutions.
Later, similar reservation was announced in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh too.
In Himachal Pradesh, two medical seats were reserved for NEET-cleared Kashmiri Pandit migrant students in the Indira Gandhi Medical College in Shimla and the Dr. Rajendra Prasad Government Medical College at Kangra.
This number was later reduced to one seat each. Later, only one seat remained — in the Kangra college.
Raina said the government was, however, reserving seats as usual for children of Tibetan refugees as well as weaker sections of the society, and added that the reservations should be restored as in the past for the Kashmiri Pandit community. UNI