2009 -- India Election -

[Guest]

<b>Majority of pandits stay away</b>

May 8th, 2009
By Our Correspondent

SRINAGAR

May 7: While Kashmiri separatists stayed away from voting in the belief that such exercises cannot become a substitute to the promised plebiscite and that New Delhi has always used them to legitimise its rule over what they insist is “disputed territory” of Jammu and Kashmir, the Valley’s Brahmin community — the pandits — were not any curious either, but for a different reason.

<b>Majority of the pandits decided not to vote as they were unhappy at being classified as “migrants”. </b> According to the Election Commission sources, it did not receive a single “M form” (migrant) which the displaced Kashmiri pandits had to fill up to be eligible to vote. Confirming this, Mr Ghulam Qadir Bawa, the assistant returning officer for pandit expatriates, said, “We’ve advertised in the newspapers asking the Kashmiri pandits to fill up the “M” form, but nobody has responded.

Though we had made arrangement for voting for Kashmiri pandits at four places in Delhi, but no one is voting.”

A vast majority of the Valley’s pandit families fled their hearth and homes with the separatist campaign becoming violent in 1989-90 and most of these now live in Delhi, Jammu and other places across India. The number of eligible voters in the community has dropped considerably from the voter list of Jammu and Kashmir for the past 12 years. In 1996, there were 147,000 voters but the figure went down to 117,000 in 2002 and further to 71,000 during 2008 Assembly polls.