Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, Nov 12: Asian-Eurasian Human Rights Forum (AEHRF) has approached the Minority Forum to impress upon the Government of India to recognize Kashmiri Pandits of the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir as a religious minority entitled to all privileges that accrue to a minority by virtue of the Indian Constitution as well as the Minority Rights stipulated in the UN Charter for Human Rights.
In a statement, Kashinath Pandita, Secretary General of Asian-Eurasian Human Rights Forum said that working group on minorities has tried to accommodate as many definitions of a minority as it knows of. There could be more definitions as and when facets of minorities become known.
He added that the Hindu minority in the Indian part of Kashmir was about 7 per cent in 1947 when partition of India took place. Under Indian dispensation, the number of this minority group came down to barely 2 per cent in 1990.
“Then happened the rise of fundamentalist-terrorist uprising in Kashmir in which the entire minority community of Kashmiri Hindus, called Pandits, was forced out of their native land after nearly 1500 of their innocent members were gunned down brutally in homes, office and public places”, he stated.
The population of this minority community in the Indian part of the Kashmir valley has now dwindled to 0.5 per cent. It happened because of their ethnic cleansing in Kashmir, he said.
He informed that the Constitution of the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir (to which the Pandit community originally belonged) does not recognize any group as minority group on any count religion, ethnicity, language, culture or region. Non-recognition of minority deprives them of the privileges which are universally extended to any minority group, he stated.
He said that on the other hand, the majority group in Kashmir valley enjoys all the privileges, which a minority group gets because according to the Constitution of India, the majority community in Kashmir (of Indian Union) is part of the national minority.
The majority community of Kashmir valley enjoys the privileges of majority on local plain and minority on national plain. Whereas the Hindu minority of Pandits are deprived every privilege as they are considered part of the Indian majority group.
“Some years back, we at the AEHRF raised this issue before the Minority Working Group. It responded by adding one more definition to the corpus of definitions as “reverse minority” meaning a group, which is part of majority on national level but minority on local level”, Pandita added.
Kashmiri Pandits are Hindus and Hindus are a majority in Indian Union. However, the State of Jammu and Kashmir (of Indian Union) has special status under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which gives it something of autonomous status in a number of areas, he maintained.
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