Several PDP activists detained as police scuttle protest rally in Jammu

PDP workers were detained outside their party headquarters here on Saturday, shortly after they tried to take out a protest rally on various issues, including alleged attempts to settle outsiders in Jammu and Kashmir.

The People's Democratic Party (PDP) activists, who were chanting slogans against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), also expressed their anger over the installation of smart electricity meters and unabated targeted attacks on Hindus in the valley.

Led by general secretary Amreek Singh Reen, dozens of PDP leaders and workers came out of the party headquarters at Gandhi Nagar and started marching towards the nearby Jammu-Airport road.

However, a strong police contingent stopped the protesters and took several of them into preventive custody, an official said.

The PDP staged the protest despite a recent clarification issued by the Jammu and Kashmir administration that no outsider is being allotted five marlas of land and there is no change in the law in this regard, after PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti alleged that the move to provide housing to homeless people is an attempt to change the demography of the Union Territory.

Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha said on July 3 that his administration has started providing plots measuring 150 square yards to landless families for the construction of their houses under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY).

Read | No outsider being given land under PMAY: J&K L-G

"The rural development department has identified 1.83 lakh families who do not have their own houses. We are working on it. It is a step that will not only provide a house to them, but transform their lives," Sinha said, adding that plots have already been allotted to 2,711 landless families across the Union Territory.

PDP Jammu provincial president (youth) Pervez Waffa, who was among those detained, condemned the police action and said his party would not stay silent when people from outside are being settled in Jammu and Kashmir.

"The land belongs to the people of Jammu and Kashmir. Let them provide land to migrant Kashmiri Pandits, nobody will have any objection," he said.

Waffa said the PDP had also planned the protest against the installation of smart electricity meters by replacing digital meters and continuous attacks on minority community members in the valley.

Three labourers from Bihar were shot at and injured by terrorists in Shopian district on Thursday.

"The selective and targeted attacks are going on for the last several years despite the BJP's tall claims of normalcy. What type of normalcy is this?" Waffa asked.