Of the former residents of the erstwhile state, who or whose ancestors moved out from the erstwhile state years ago, and were registered with the Relief and Rehabilitation Commissioner (Migrants) at Jammu, only a few seem to be interested in the Jammu Kashmir administration’s offer of domicile certificates, The Indian Express reported.
The Jammu Kashmir administration has extended the scheme, which was announced on May 16, 2020, with a deadline of one year, i.e., upto May 15, 2022.
The Indian Express report says that “the office of the Relief and Rehabilitation Commissioner has also decided to hold special camps to accept applications at places where a minimum of 50 such families are residing.” A similar camp was organized in Delhi, some two weeks ago, it claims.
An order by the Jammu Kashmir Administration’s Department of Disaster Management, Relief, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction, announced the extension and said that “No further extension will be granted,” thereafter.
The administration had hoped that the Kashmiri Pandit community would avail the offer, which would make it easier for them to acquire land, get employment and educational opportunities in Jammu Kashmir.
However, even at the Delhi camp, the response wasn’t very enthusiastic, the report says. Officials have said that of almost 25,000 unregistered Kashmiri Pandit families estimated to have settled in Delhi prior to 1989, only 3,000 showed up for the application forms, and only 806 of them were registered and issued domicile certificates on the spot, the report says.
Meanwhile, the applications of the remaining 2,200 families along with other documents, such as proof of their residence in the UT, were brought to Jammu for further action, the Relief Commissioner (Migrants) Ashok Pandita said.
And of the families who settled elsewhere in India after migrating from areas of Jammu Kashmir, administered by Pakistan in 1947, nearly 3,300 had approached the Relief and Rehabilitation Commissioner for application forms for registering as migrants. However, only 100 of those 3,300 have applied, so far.
As per the official estimates, while nearly 45,000 Kashmiri Pandit families, who left the valley after the onset of militancy (thus, already figure as the permanent residents of Jammu Kashmir), have been registered with the Relief and Rehabilitation Commissioner (Migrants), an equal number who migrated much earlier have been missing from the records.
Similarly, 41,119 Hindu and Sikh families are believed to have migrated from the Jammu Kashmir areas administered by Pakistan in the year 1947. Of those, 31,619, including 5,300 settled elsewhere in the country, are registered with the Provincial Rehabilitation Officer, who doubles as Custodian Evacuee Department. Of them, 26,319 families are already counted as permanent Jammu Kashmir residents.
Officials have said that around 9,500 families had been denied registration by the then government in the late 1950s on the grounds that they either did not stay at camps set up by it, or did not come to the Indian side between 1947-54, or came to the Indian side unaccompanied by the head of the family, or the annual income of the head of the displaced family at the time of migration was more than Rs 300, the report says.
It states that the officials estimate that the number of such migrants and displaced people might now be together more than 50,000 families. And that, the administration understood that since these families were permanently settled elsewhere, they might not want to return, and hence the administration wants them to get registered for the purposes of “domicile only”.
The problem was more complex when it came to those who have migrated from areas now in Pakistan administered Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK), it adds. And that the online option sought their original place of residence, which for most of them were districts such as Mirpur, Muzaffarabad, Bhimber, Kotli, Rawalakot, etc.
But Relief Commissioner Pandita has said that when they try to get them registered online, their computers do not accept the names of their native places. He also added that it wasn’t just a software issue that they could correct from their end. “We have taken up the matter with the Home Department,” The Indian Express quoted Pandita.
The report says that the members of a ‘PoJK Visthapit Seva Samiti,’ including BJP leaders were sending delegations under the banner to the states and UTs where the families from the other Kashmir were settled, in order to persuade them to apply for domicile.
A similar delegation was led by Ashok Khajuria, the Convenor of the Jammu Kashmir BJP’s Refugee Cell and a member of the RSS. He said that the Samiti consisted of members from different organisations working for the cause of the displaced. He added that the Samiti’s members were also headed to Uttarakhand, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi.
Khajuria said that at the Delhi camp, many of these families were issued domicile certificates on the spot offline. However, he said that their numbers were very less.
The issue comes at the time when a Delimitation process is underway in the U.T. and the parties in the Valley have expressed concerns that the practice was to boost the seats in Hindu-dominated Jammu.
The report quoted Khajuria saying, “We have 24 seats reserved for PoJK areas in the J&K’s Legislative Assembly and we can request the government to defreeze one-third of them as one-third of their population is residing here.”