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Filmstar-turned-politician Sunil Dutt visited the Purkhoo Kashmiri Pandit migrant camp in the Jammu region on Saturday to convey his message of harmony and national integration as part of his Sadbhavana Yatra, but ended up listening to the complaints of the camp inmates.
The migrant Pandits living in single-room tenements roofed with asbestos sheets and equipped with poor sanitation facilities poured out to meet the MP and narrate their tales of woe.
The migrants referred to non-implementation of the increase in their monthly relief of Rs 2,400 per family to Rs 3,000, as had been promised by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee during his recent Kashmir visit. They implored Dutt to take up the issue in Parliament.
"It has been three months," A K Pandita, a Purkhoo camp resident, said, "but there is no sign of increase in the relief. In fact we had demanded it to be raised to Rs 5,000 per family, but we have not even received the raise the prime minister announced."
The camps resemble shantytowns and a majority of the inhabitants, Pandits from rural Kashmir who lived in expansive houses before their migration, are now forced to live in cramped, inhuman conditions.
Gauri Raina, originally from Anantnag in south Kashmir, lived in a two-storeyed house before migration. Now the only space she shares with her husband, a grown-up son and a daughter is a 10x10 single room in the migrant camp.
"Living in this one-room house is like being in hell," a tearful Gauri Raina said, "especially during the summers. And when it rains, the asbestos roof leaks. When we migrated we thought it was for a couple of months, but this nightmare has been going on for 13 years now."
Thousands of the poorer Kashmiri Pandits living in these camps in Jammu share Raina's plight. They say the government has turned a deaf ear to their problems. They have been demanding allocation of a two-room house and a kitchen in the camp instead of the one-room hutment that has been provided.
"We told the government and all the political parties about our problems," said Bhushan Lal Bhushan, a freelance journalist living in the Purkhoo camp. "Ask any rational person how easy it is to live in a single-room house with a grown-up daughter and son. But nobody seems to be listening."
Moreover, the migrants referred to the rampant unemployment among the youth. Dutt listened to them patiently and promised to do whatever he could, before talking about his Sadbhavana mission and emphasizing communal harmony and national integration.
On an earlier visit, Dutt had donated 500 gas connections and an ambulance to the migrants, and he mentioned it in his speech. But the Pandits repeatedly asked him whether there would be any improvement in their lives or whether they would be able to return to Kashmir.
"The fact that no government, central or state, really bothers about us is because we are not a vote bank," Bhushan said. "We are about 300,000 strong, a scattered community that does not affect the electoral balances."
After his address to the gathering, Dutt visited the Jama Masjid in Jammu and the Shaheedi Chowk.
National Conference president Omar Abdullah had also invited the camp residents to talk about their grievances on Saturday. "Some of us went," said Pandita. "Pandits have been demanding at least representation on three seats in the state legislative assembly, but there is nothing. We came back empty-handed."
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