It won’t be a very fair conclusion if, after reading what follows, you impute motives to me or simply brush the whole thing aside with a “Aah, come off it, we have heard that one before”. It would be equally unfair if you were to accuse the writer of having a personal axe to grind. True, yet far from being a simple personal grouse.
What follows actually startled me out of my wits if you please. What I heard as a response to a question posed by me continues to rankle. It amuses me as well, because the answer was so patently absurd. It defied both reason and logic. Yes, it amused him as well, my interlocutor interjected, but it is the harsh reality.
And the reality as spelt out for me is that I am a Kashmiri, born, brought up and schooled in Srinagar, but do not qualify to be a candidate for resettlement in the valley. The reason : to qualify for resettlement – in short to get the benefit of finding my moorings in the land of my birth, I should for starters be a migrant. Then, and then alone, would I qualify to claim my birth right to settle down in the time left to me in my home State, my city in fact.
I know I was never a migrant; I had as a young lad moved to Delhi in search of further education and possibly a job with a newspaper, something I had craved for as a boy in my early teens, thanks to the access to my home of Lahore’s Civil and Military Gazette and The Tribune, the latter, too, published from Lahore then.
In the decades that followed I have pursued my journalistic career which took me almost to all parts of the world and importantly for me to Kashmir at least once, if not twice or more, in my later years; the annual, biannual visits have become a part of life ever since.
All these years it had never occurred to me that I had migrated, my brother and some other family members continued to live in our ancestral house, even after our agricultural lands in Sirno in Pulwama were given to the tillers by Sheikh Abdullah as part of his Naya Kashmir programme, when he came to power the first time.
Actually my brother and his family had never imagined of leaving Kashmir and it was only when things had “become too hot” that he moved to Delhi in 1992. So, my brother technically became a migrant that year and it was a good ten years or so later that I got miserly one lakh rupees as my share of the property which someone known to my brother had chosen to buy, along with the nine marlas of open land that went with it.
The market rate for complex then should have been around Rs. 40 lakhs but my brother got a bare Rs. 6 lakhs. Recently an artist friend, a Srinagar neighbour, showed me the picture of an impressive building with a number of roadside shops, adding that this was what my home looked like now. His own home had an even more impressive array of shops to show, opening up on the main road.
So that’s how my brother became a migrant and I an intruder who, thanks to my friend Parvez, has since found an alternative ‘home’, a place I have learnt to call home.
Yet I continue to wonder, why should I be disqualified, not entitled to settlement in Srinagar. I am as good a Kashmiri as anyone else. I am what the people from the State once proudly proclaimed : I am a first class State subject, perhaps better qualified to be resettled than, say, the young Kashmiris who were misled into taking to arms and join the Pak-sponsored terrorists, and are now welcomed back to the State along with their newly acquired families.
Mind you, I don’t grudge them this opportunity to be rehabilitated in the State; indeed, they should be helped to find their place in the mainstream and allowed to make useful citizens of themselves. But, please, do simultaneously let me know why I, or someone else like me, should not be helped to return to the valley, if he wishes to, in the hope of rebuilding what my innards tell me has always been home.
I can’t go back to my ancestral home since it was disposed of by my brother in extremely challenging circumstances. The money he got was, if you ask me, just peanuts, a complex of three three-storeyed houses with a massive ‘bagh’ (direct access to Dal thanks to the “nallah maar” which I am told has since been filled by land sharks).
I know there will be a lot jeers and not one cheer for the thought I have put across. But do spare a thought for people of my vintage and background who in the autumn of their lives would wish to spend a lot more time in what was home rather than what I call home, a nice little place with picture perfect looks, yet located in what essentially remains a dust bowl bordering the great Rajasthan desert.
I am, of course, speaking of my acquired home in Gurgaon, the much touted millennium city which I am asked to love as my own but one which in spite of it sky-licking towers, its cyber cities et al, still remains a dust bowl, ill-served by man and authority alike.
Someone reminds me of the poll-time promises that are routinely made of Gurgaon transforming itself into one of those new cities the Chinese have built in their land – it will be better than Shanghai, someone has boasted – but sadly for me with a burgeoning population it just doesn’t have a good system of service roads, lacks power and water both, and worse still, is slowly becoming a safe haven for the crooked.
I know of many Kashmiri Hindus and many Kashmiri Muslims among them, who own property in Gurgaon; best of luck to them and welcome to all other aspiring wannabes.
I would be a happier old man if someone in Kashmir were to say “Come back. Welcome home”. I am not seeking alms or charity. Just let me resettle in the land that was and will continue to be home. No migrant, non migrant tags for me; it ill behoves a government to invoke the power of such tags when it comes to offering a helping hand to anyone with a genuine claim to be resettled where he belongs or belonged. Make sure he or she is a State subject; they insist on it in some other States and in fact some go out of their way to attract people back home. Lucky them!
Trending Now
E-Paper
Follow our WhatsApp channel