Call it good news or a bonanza, as many as 5300 left out PoK refugee families are set to get one time resettlement package of Rs.5.5 lakh as decided by the Union Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi . This is a welcome step, much awaited and thus an inertia, allowed to remain undisturbed for all these 72 years of their displacement by all Central and State Governments, has finally been broken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The recipient families are the ones which had been thrown out of Pakistan occupied Kashmir during partition holocaust and had initially settled outside Jammu and Kashmir but later relocated to the State. Full credit goes to BJP led NDA Government headed by Modi to adopt humanitarian approach to the problem as old as the days of creation of Pakistan and by doing so, in the words of Union Minister Prakash Javadekar a “historical wrong” had been corrected by the Government. However, requirement of funds to be paid from, will be met out from the already sanctioned funds for the existing scheme.
In fact, resolution of problems cannot be of a particular standard, based on set parameters as nature of problems, duration thereof, circumstantial and associated factors, nature of impact and intensity thereof and the like condition the solutions . The quality of solutions , again , depends on various factors which in instant case, cannot be ignored. A problem of seven long decades cannot be considered having been fully resolved but the mitigating severity by providing ‘relief’ too cannot be brushed under the carpet. Compensation of getting uprooted from one’s hearths and homes can never be actually measured except in terms of cost of movable and immovable assets, perhaps, the word ‘relief’ denotes providing some balm or soothing only and nothing more, hence one time payment as a resettlement package.
In other words, these left out 5300 families have also duly been included in the resettlement package. This should be seen in the context of the year 2016 when the Prime Minister had announced the resettlement package for those families, initially residents of Pakistan occupied Kashmir who had settled in Jammu and Kashmir on different occasions after the partition of 1947 and two months thereafter, Pakistan attacking Jammu and Kashmir resulting in 31619 such affected non- Muslim families migrating from PoK to the State of Jammu and Kashmir and out of these, 26319 families settled in Jammu and Kashmir leaving behind 5300 families under reference who too are now brought under the ambit of the resettlement package.
There are circumstantial reasons for not nursing any sort of reservations about the limit of relief or find flaws of any hues in the overall package although the fact remains that no amount could fully compensate the travails and hardships these families had gone through but as is the truism that time is the greatest healer, things tend to settle gradually. This amount could be useful in many ways for sustenance and generating of small monthly incomes if invested prudentially. On the other hand, politico- constitutional changes for the better which Jammu and Kashmir is ushering in , political rights as citizens of sovereign democratic Republic and not under the statutorily regulated Permanent State Subject provisions , stand automatically extended to all the displaced people from PoK which had remotest chances to have been exercised by these displaced people under the conditions that existed prior to August 5, 2019 in Jammu and Kashmir.
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