Kashmiri-origin Pakistani Man Dies While Being Repatriated

SRINAGAR: A Kashmir-born Pakistani national who was being taken to Punjab for his repatriation to the neighbouring country through the Integrated Check Post (ICP) at the Attari border has died due to a massive heart attack.

69-year-old Abdur Waheed Bhat who was suffering from multiple ailments for quite some time was “collected” by the Jammu and Kashmir police from his Srinagar home for his repatriation to Pakistan. But he suffered a cardiac arrest near Amritsar and died.

The sources said that Bhat, a bachelor, was born in Srinagar in a Kashmiri family. He went to Pakistan with his aunt (father’s sister), a Kashmiri-origin Pakistan, when she returned to her country from a visit to her place of birth (Srinagar) in the 1970s. Bhat obtained Pakistani citizenship but returned to India on a long-term visa in the late 1990s and chose to stay here for the rest of his life. The official sources said that he was found with an expired visa by the police.

Over the past one week, scores of Pakistanis, many of them the spouses of surrendered Kashmiri militants, and their children born in the neighbouring country have been repatriated through Attari border after they were collected by the police from various districts of J&K and taken in buses to Punjab. This has caused significant emotional and familial disruptions.

In response to the recent deadly terror attack in Baisaran meadow near Kashmir’s premier resort of Pahalgam that killed 26 Indian Hindu tourists and a local Muslim horse-handler, New Delhi suspended visa services for Pakistani nationals and after revoking most existing visas ordered almost all Pakistani citizens to leave the country.

Most of those detained by the J&K police for their repatriation had allegedly defied the official diktat even after being served notices to leave India by the Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), CID Special Branch (SB) Kashmir, who also holds the charge of Foreigners Registration Officer (FRO) in Kashmir,” the official sources here said. The Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs (Foreigners-I Division) had on April 25 directed all foreign nationals (Pakistani) staying illegally in India to leave the country positively by or before April 27.

“Despite the notices and the expiry of the deadline, many Pakistani nationals continued to stay in J&K. Acting on the lapse, the J&K police launched a coordinated operation to detain all those who failed to comply with the government order,” a local news agency had quoted an unnamed official as saying earlier this week.

Meanwhile, the High Court of J&K and Ladakh has restrained the authorities from forcing a family residing in the Union Territory’s frontier Poonch district to India, amid claims of them being Pakistani citizens.

The A single bench of the court at Jammu said that the petitioners have established prima facie evidence of long-standing residence and lawful presence in J&K and halted their ‘forced ouster’. In his order, Justice Rahul Bharti said they are not to be treated as intruders.

Iftikhar Ali and others, residents of Poonch’s Salwah (Mendhar) village had in their writ petition challenged their alleged detention and potential deportation on the grounds that they are being falsely labelled as Pakistani nationals. They asserted long-standing residency in J&K and submitted various documents in support of their Indian identity.

“The petitioners have come to be confronted with a situation bearing the prospect of going to be forced out of the Union Territory of J&K and India on the pretext of being Pakistani citizens,” the court noted, adding that this claim is “being seriously contested by the petitioners.”

Apart from the petitioners’ presenting the revenue record and other evidence to establish they were Indian citizens, one of them Iftikhar Ali told the court that he was a serving constable in the Indian Reserve Police (IRP).