Jammu, Oct 15: Seething with anger over the killing of a Kashmir Pandit in south Kashmir’s Shopian District, several Kashmiri Pandit employees today staged a demonstration here in Jammu.
Under the banner of All Migrant (Displaced) Employees Association Kashmir, the agitating employees, who were led by Satish Raina, blocked the ever-busy Canal Road for some time and raised slogans against the government for its alleged inefficiency to protect the minority community in the Valley.
The protesting employees claimed that time and again they have requested the government to shift all the Kashmiri Pandits to Jammu till situation improves in Valley “but our repeated requests fell on deaf ears”.
Pertinently, Kashmiri Pandit employees have been protesting outside the Relief Commissioner (Migrant) office Jammu for the past 153 days, seeking relocation to the winter capital, citing security concerns.
One of the agitating employees, Yogesh Pandita, told Rising Kashmir, “Till today, we were protesting silently outside the Relief Commissioner (Migrant) office. But yet another targeted killing of a Pandit in Shopian forced us to take to the roads”.
“We’ve been protesting in Kashmir as well as in Jammu since May 12 this year after one of our colleagues, Rahul Pandita, was shot dead by the terrorists, seeking relocation to Jammu. But the administration is adamant to post us in risky zones in the Valley,” Pandita said.
He said the government is using pressure tactics to get them back to work in Kashmir Valley, where targeting the religious minorities by the hybrid terrorists has become a new normal.
Pandita said, the government initially shot the Kashmiri Pandit employees with the show cause notices “and now, the salaries of our employees are withheld”.
“Some of the employees have not been paid their salaries for the past four months while most of us have been working without salary for the past two months,” he said, adding, “and a recent order asking displaced employees to use biometric attendance was completely unfair”.
“Until and unless the terror infrastructure in Kashmir is not dismantled completely, we’ll never go back to Valley,” he said.
Noteworthy to mention here that the protest of the Kashmiri Pandit employees was pacified by ADC Jammu, Harvinder Singh.
