Stranded Pakistani Women in Kashmir Asking for Citizenship of India
New Delhi: Pakistani women, stranded in Kashmir(India) for over decades, demanded the government of India to grant them citizenship of India or let them go back to Pakistan.
Pakistani women on Monday held a protest, saying they should be either granted citizenship or allowed to return to their country.
Holding placards reading “we want justice,” the women assembled at the Lal Chowk city center to press the J&K administration for their return to Pakistan.
In 2004, the 43-year-old from Karachi married a Kashmiri, Javaid Ahmad Dar of Kupwara’s Lolab, in Pakistan. Like Javaid, over 350 Pakistani women along with their children – are stuck in Kashmir since 2010.
Several Kashmiri men had gone to Pakistan for arms training against India and eventually gave up arms and returned to Kashmir under New Delhi’s ‘muddled’ rehabilitation policy.
In 2010, New Delhi, as a confidence-building measure, proposed a militant rehabilitation policy and projected it as granting amnesty to Kashmiri youth who “had crossed over to Pakistan for arms training but have given up insurgent activities and willing to return to the state.”
The policy appealed to all men, who had gone to Pakistan between January 1989 and December 2009, to return.
(_Vinayak)
