Jammu: A Kashmiri Pandit group has submitted a study on demographic changes in Jammu and Kashmir to the government-appointed panel examining the issue as the committee concluded its three-day visit to Jammu on Wednesday, officials said.
Panel chairman Justice Prabhakar Navlekar (retd) also joined the team during the visit and paid obeisance at the revered Mata Vaishno Devi shrine atop the Trikuta Hills in Reasi district, while the remaining four members of the panel returned to Delhi on Wednesday morning, the officials said.
Panun Kashmir convener Agnishekhar and chairman Tito Ganju along with chief patron Jonaraja Institute of Genocide and Atrocities Studies (JIGAS) submitted a “comprehensive study” of 500 pages on demographic change in J&K to the high-level committee during a meeting at a hotel here this morning, a spokesman of the group representing the displaced community said.
Prepared by Panun Kashmir in association with the JIGAS, the study is the “outcome of an extensive interdisciplinary research exercise” examining demographic transformation in the Union Territory from historical, demographic, constitutional, legal and socio-political perspectives, he said.
He said the study examines demographic changes over an extended historical period and seeks to place population trends within the circumstances in which those changes occurred.
It analyses historical population patterns, migration, displacement, settlement, political representation, property ownership and the consequences of prolonged displacement, with particular attention to the demographic transformation of the Kashmir Valley, the spokesman said.
He said a substantial portion of the study deals with the displacement of Kashmiri Hindus from the Valley beginning in 1989-90 and examines its continuing demographic consequences.
It studies the community’s displacement not merely as a migration event but as a process involving the loss of physical presence, disruption of established settlements, property-related consequences, changes in political participation and the inability of a large section of the displaced population to return to its ancestral places of residence.
The researchers have also examined the distinction between ordinary demographic movement and demographic changes arising from extraordinary circumstances such as conflict, targeted violence, forced displacement, insecurity, dispossession and prolonged absence from one’s original habitat, the spokesman said.
He said the study draws upon historical sources, demographic material, government and institutional records, legal and constitutional material, community documentation and testimonies.
According to Agnishekhar and Ganju, the study has been submitted with the sole objective of placing the research and documentation available with Panun Kashmir and JIGAS before the Committee so that it may be considered as part of the Committee’s wider examination of demographic change.
Four members of the high-level committee reached Jammu on Monday and held consultations with senior government and police officials, including Chief Secretary Atal Dulloo and Director General of Police (DGP) Nalin Prabhat, before visiting Jagti township, the largest settlement of Kashmiri Pandits, and also inspected a slum housing Rohingya immigrants in the Narwal area of Jammu.
Dozens of individuals and delegations, including a team of the BJP’s J&K unit, representatives of refugees from Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK), West Pakistani refugees, Gorkha Samaj and Valmiki Samaj, who benefited from the abrogation of Article 370 granting special status to J&K in August 2019 also interacted with the visiting team.
In May, the central government constituted the Committee to study demographic changes in different parts of the country, arising from illegal immigration and other abnormal reasons, and to suggest measures to deal with these changes.