Excelsior Correspondent
LEH, Dec 15: Buddhist community under the aegis of Ladakh Buddhist Association (LBA) held a peaceful protest at Leh as well as all branch offices/headquarters throughout Ladakh against forcible conversion of a girl from the community to Muslim faith and failure of the UT administration to restore the girl to her parents even after a lapse of more than 3 weeks.
The LBA also wrote in this connection to Union Home Minister Amit Shah. In its letter to Amit Shah, the LBA alleged that a planned and sustained Love-jihad has been unleashed against the Buddhist Community of Ladakh. It said that from a meager 20% in 1947, the Muslim population increased to a whopping 60% in 2011. Kargil is mostly Muslim now and Leh and Zanskar are on the way to becoming Muslims very soon, at the current rate of conversion and multiplication.
“Ladakh, especially Leh District, has been made to suffer from neglect and administrative apathy ever since it was curved out into a Union Territory. It is difficult to understand the reasons but it is obvious that the apathy is deliberate and the ill treatment is calculated. The UT administration has even curtailed the authority of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council and has disempowered it significantly. It exists in name now with wings clipped. Ladakh has no popular system of governance and the insensitive bureaucrats have made our lives miserable through arrogance and irresponsibility,” the letter reads.
The LBA further stated in the letter that the recent incidence of love-jihad in Zanskar could have been handled sensibly after the girl was recovered but the UT Government allowed things to take an ugly turn by its biased attitude and gross mishandling of the case at the possible cost of vitiating the tranquil atmosphere of Ladakh.
“On behalf of the Buddhist community of Ladakh, we appeal you to intervene and get the forcibly converted Buddhist girl from Zanskar, restore to her parents in the larger interest of communal and social harmony in the region,” the LBA said in the letter addressed to Amit Shah and also demanded enactment of a proper anti-conversion law in Ladakh for protection of the miniscule Buddhist Community.
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