The Union Minister G Kishan Reddy on Monday declared that a committee has been set up by the government to survey the number of closed schools in the Kashmir valley which will be reopened. Reddy also stated that around 50,000 temples in the Kashmir Valley have closed down over the years. Of these, some were destroyed while the idols in some temples were defiled. The government has ordered a survey of such temples, he said.
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The decision to survey abandoned and desecrated temples, defunct schools in the Valley comes after the state of Jammu and Kashmir was stripped of its separate status following the abrogation of Article 370 and bifurcated into two union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh by the Modi-led government on August 5, 2019.
For almost 3 decades now, Jammu and Kashmir has been in the throes of Islamic extremism as schools and temples in the state bore the brunt of rising radicalism in the state. The indigenous Kashmiri Pandit community was driven out of the state in 1989 after Islamic radicals unleashed terror in the Valley, triggering Pandits’ exodus from the state.
With reviving schools and temples in the state, the government aims to prune down the extremism in the state and proceed in the direction of repatriation of Kashmiri Pandit community back in Jammu and Kashmir and amend a historical wrong.
Yesterday, the Union Minister of State for Home Affairs G Kishan Reddy threatened Pakistan saying that if they fight a war with India, it will be wiped out from the face of the earth. Pakistan has been desperately trying to raise the issue of abrogation of Article 370 on international forums but it has not been taken seriously by the western countries as they rally behind India and declared India’s move to rescind Article 370 as its internal matter.