Nadimarg may be 300 km away, but for the Kashmiri Pandit migrants living in the Purkhoo, Muthi and Mishriwala camps in Jammu, this is their closest brush with fear in years.Many of them hail from Nadimarg itself; some have lost their family members in the latest carnage. Among them is Raj Nath, who lives in a one-room tenement at Purkhoo. ‘‘I lost my elder sister, her husband Bansi Lal, their two young daughters and a son in the carnage. My nephew Vijay survived only because he had come here with Shivratri prasad,’’ he weeps inconsolably. ‘‘I remember when I was planning to leave Nadimarg, they asked me not to migrate. For over 13 years, they were safe and I wondered if I had committed a mistake by leaving Kashmir. Today, except one, none of them are alive. I feel they committed a suicidal blunder by not migrating to Jammu with me.’’Nadimarg was the only 100 per cent Hindu village in Kashmir. A total of 52 Kashmiri Pandit families lived there until 1990. Raj Nath and 42 other families fled Kashmir on May 25, 1990, after militants shot dead his maternal uncle Daya Ram at Chitragam, 3 km from Nadimarg.It is the same story of fear and frustration in other camps.‘‘If militants can kill 24 Kashmiri Pandits near a police post at Nadimarg, what prevents them from striking at our camps where there isn’t a single police patrol party at night?’’ asks Chaman Lal, president of the Muthi Phase-1 Migrants’ Camp.Conditions here are similar to those at Purkhoo: Too few toilets, long queues, meagre livelihoods. The government pays a relief of Rs 2,400 per migrant with 9 kg rice and 1 kg sugar for each member; almost every migrant works elsewhere for small remunerations. ‘‘There are a total of 500 Kashmiri Pandit families at Muthi,’’ says Chaman. ‘‘Nearly 200 of them have lost either young sons or elderly family members.’’At each camp The Sunday Express visited, the questions were the same: ‘‘What options do we have? Whatever happened during Farooq’s regime continues during Mufti’s time. Why?’’Fear and frustration surfaces in hardened stands. All of them feel that India should give Pakistan the treatment the US has given Bin Laden and his Al-Qaida in Afghanistan. To end terrorism in J&K, India will have to smash the militants’ training camps in Pakistan, the migrants say.
