‘Little said about 4L displaced Kashmiri Pandits because they not big electorate’

NEW DELHI: Very little was said about the 4.5 lakh Kashmiri Pandits who got displaced from the Valley with the advent of separatist militancy, possibly because they were not “such a big electorate” as to invite “political intervention”, former Supreme Court judge Sanjay Kishan Kaul has said.

Justice Kaul, who was part of the bench which upheld the abrogation of Article 370 in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, and recommended setting up an “impartial truth and reconciliation commission” to probe and report on human rights violations by both state and non-state actors since the 1980s, said people of different communities lived in unity before insurgency shattered the peace and he was at a loss to comprehend how the situation “slowly degenerated”.

A Kashmiri Pandit himself, Kaul feels, it is time now for the people to move forward, after more than 30 years of unbridled violence. He spoke about the unanimous verdict of the five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud which upheld the Centre’s decision to abrogate Article 370 of the Constitution that bestowed special status on J&K.

“It was a unanimous verdict which means all of us must have thought that this is the correct path to follow. Of course, every judgement, especially every important judgement, will generate debates. There will be people who will have a counter view to it,” he said. He lamented the silence around the displacement of the minority Kashmiri Pandit community in the Muslim majority state.