All-party team meets Shabir Shah, Kashmiri Pandits

JAMMU - Members of the all-party delegation visiting Jammu and Kashmir Tuesday met arrested separatist leader Shabir Ahmad Shah at a government hospital here and also visited a Kashmiri Pandits migrant camp.

A three-member group led by DMK MP T.R. Baalu went to the Col. Chopra nursing home of the Government Medical College Hospital here where Shah 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.

The delegation exchanged views with him and wished him speedy recovery.

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.

A 39-member 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.