All-party team meet Shabir Shah, Pandits in Jammu (Night Lead)

JAMMU - The all-party delegation visiting Jammu and Kashmir met a cross-section of people here Tuesday and heard the common complaint of a “government deficit” and demand that Chief Minister Omar abdullah resign. Members of the team visited arrested separatist leader Shabir Shah and a Kasmiri Pandits migrant camp as well.

Complaining that “governance deficit is an understatement”, the state unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) demanded that Abdullah step down.

“There is no government at all,” said BJP’s state legislature party leader Chaman Lal Gupta.

His views were echoed by many others, including some members of a Jammu traders body.

In a hard-hitting presentation before the 39-member delegation led by union Home Minister P. Chidambaram, the state unit of the BJP said the chief minister had “by design” allowed the situation to come to such a pass that “Delhi is forced to give concessions like autonomy to Kashmir”.

It demanded the removal of this “most unpopular chief minister” without even a minute’s delay.

The situation, the party stated, could have been controlled and peace and order restored had the chief minister acted in time.

“But, he deliberately avoided doing so because he wanted such a situation to surface in which Delhi is seen as killers of Kashmiris and forced to grant autonomy to Kashmir.”

The BJP leaders also expressed their anger over some members of the all-party delegation meeting separatist leaders at their homes in the Kashmir Valley Monday.

“This is shocking that the delegation constituted mini groups to meet separatists and allowed them to air their anti-India views in public,” Gupta told reporters.

Gupta said that delegation members like Sitaram Yechury, Gurudas Dasgupta and Ram Vilas Paswan by meeting the separatists had given a “respectability” to anti-India forces in Jammu and Kashmir. “This was a clear violation of the mandate of the delegation,” he said.

Before heading to Jammu, the political leaders visited some hospital in Srinagar and spoke to some of those wounded in firing by security forces in the Kashmir Valley to understand their agony.

Home Minister P. Chidambaram and other delegation members also visited Tangmarg town in the valley where six people were killed Sep 13.

Later in the day, a three-member group led by DMK MP T.R. Baalu met Shabir Shah at the Col. Chopra nursing home of the Government Medical College Hospital in Jammu where the separatist leader is undergoing treatment.

The chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Democratic Freedom Party has been arrested for over a year now under the Public Safety Act and is charged with instigating people and disrupting peace. He has been lodged in the Kot Bhalwal jail on the outskirts of Jammu.

He had not been keeping well lately and is being treated in hospital. Like separatist leaders in the Kashmir Valley, Shah too put forth the demand for right to self determination for Kashmiris to decide their future.

A separate five-member group led by Marxist leader Sitaram Yechury visited a Kashmiri Pandits migrant camp at Muthi on the edge of Jammu that houses over 5,000 Hindu migrants who fled the Valley when secessionist violence erupted there over 20 years ago.

The team visited the camp to have a first-hand account of the conditions of the Pandits and know their views as well.

Shibban Pandita, one of the migrants, told the delegates that Kashmiri Hindus had been “living in inhuman conditions” ever since they migrated to Jammu in 1990.

Kashmiri migrant women said that though the government had been holding promises of “giving us a life of dignity, that promise is honoured only in breach”.

“We had applied for jobs in the Valley but for that we would have to stay in the Valley only. That’s an unacceptable condition,” said a young woman, who identified herself as Pushpa.

Over 300,000 Kashmiri Pandits living in the Valley migrated when violence erupted there in 1990. Most of them came to Jammu and were housed by the government in various camps on the edges of city. They had to initially live in tents until the government later built one-room tenements for them.

Over 100 people have died in unending street protests in the Kashmir Valley since June 11 in retaliatory firing by security forces on stone-pelting mobs.

The all-party delegation led by Home Minister P. Chidambaram is visiting Jammu and Kashmir to get a sense of the ground situation before deciding on steps to defuse tensions.

However, Jammu saw some violence too. Over two dozen refugees from Pakistan-administered Kashmir were injured in a baton charge by police here as they held a protest sit-in against being denied permission to meet the all-party delegation

A group called Panun Kashmir, which also represents Kashmiri Hindus, were not given time to meet the team.

“I think many voices were heard and few might have not got time… but it’s a step forward,” said a government official here.