Pandits demand minority status

The delegation was led by Panun Kashmir convenor Dr Agnishekhar and Panun Kashmir coordinator Ramesh Manvati. Panun Kashmir is an organisation representing 3,00,000 Kashmiri Pandits who migrated from the Valley.

According to Minorities Commission officials, Mahmood assured the delegation of his support and reminded them of the statutory recommendations made by the Commission to the government in this regard. In a statement the chairman also condemned the killings of Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley and demandedextension of the Commission’s jurisdiction to cover them.

He suggested that the delegation raise its voice, in a gesture of reciprocity, against the injustices meted out to other minorities elsewhere in the country.

The officials said the Commission chairman had also prepared a special report on state-level Hindu minorities in J&K, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Punjab and Lakshadweep to be submitted to the government shortly. Drawing the Commission’s attention to the continued “exile” and subsequent hardships faced by the Kashmiri Pandits since 1990, the delegation apprised the Commission chairman that the Kashmiri Pandit community had been denied the formation of an effective religious shrine board/trust to protect, preserve and renovate its places of worship and those of socio-cultural importance. It said that nearly 32,000 houses belonging to Pandits had been burnt in the Valley since 1991. Property worth thousands of crores of rupees had been looted, burnt or damaged.

It also said that for thelast 50 years the status of Kashmiri Pandits as an ethno-religious minority had not been defined. The census figures had been “manipulated and underplayed to suit the vote bank politics,” it observed.