These villagers may soon become landowners

By Shujaat Bukhari

TURTUK (LoC), AUG. 8. After a history of sufferings, the Baltis, residents of Baltistan, may soon become the permanent owners of the land which had been under Army occupation. The land records concerning the region are being restructured after 20 years.

Baltistan is one of the five units of the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir which is torn apart like other areas of the State.

Some people chose to migrate before 1947 to Himachal Pradesh and parts of Uttar Pradesh which now constitute Uttaranchal and continue to live there for the last three generations.

One part is in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) and another in the Leh district on this side.

With hundreds of acres being cultivated or owned by the people in a cluster of five villages in the Turtuk area, legally they are landless.

There is no revenue record here unlike the other areas of the State. Since the five villages of Turtuk, Tyakshi, Chalunka, Thang and Bogdan were part of Pakistan till 1971, their record was maintained by the Pakistan administration in the tehsil headquarter of Skardu. When the Line of Control was redrawn, the people were in extreme distress and had no inkling about the care to be taken for the land.

But none among the civil and army administration bothered to look back at the history of sufferings. In the absence of revenue records, the people were the biggest sufferers.

Most of the land was occupied by the Army for strategic purposes, but the owners were not paid compensation. The State Government has now decided to restructure the records on the basis of witnesses to give a legal cover to a population of over 5,000 people.

The Revenue Minister, Mr. Abdul Qayoom, told The Hindu that his department had started the process of consolidation of records.

A senior officer had visited the area and directed juniors to demarcate the land. The permanent resident certificates, issued to Jammu and Kashmir citizens, are also being given to people on the basis of witnesses which otherwise should have the authenticated record of land owned by them.

Due to acute poverty and inaccessibility of the area, people migrated to Dehra Dun, Chakrota, Nainital and Almora which are now in Uttaranchal and in Shimla in Himachal Pradesh.

During Partition, they were asked by the British Army to move to Pakistan. ``They refused saying that they would like to go to Baltistan which was by then in Pakistan,'' said an elderly resident, adding that instead, they were kept in the Dehra Dun camp for six months and later asked to return to their newly settled homes.

None of them talked about their origin and even the redemarcation of boundaries in 1971 had no attraction for them. Only a few people returned and got jobs in the State Government. One of them, Mr. Ghulam Haider Khan, is now an inspector in the Jammu and Kashmir Police.

While around 50,000 Baltis have since moved to Hardas, Kargechu and Latu in Kargil, Srinagar and a village in Bandipore, the rest are permanently settled in other villages of Skardu, Partuk, Kharnag, Pari, Charbat, Shiger, Goan and Morole in the Skardu tehsil.

Gilgit and Baltistan are the areas ``illegally annexed'' by Pakistan to its territory. There are hundreds of families on either side of the LoC which have not met for decades together.

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