After police and army now the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel have started collecting family details of house owners in different parts of Kashmir Valley.
The officials are tight-lipped over the new survey, however, the CRPF personnel who are collecting details from house owners claim that these details are being collected on the instructions of the Home ministry. “We have been doing this survey from the past one month on the instructions of the Home ministry,” said an officer, who was a part of this survey in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district.
The officer said they had been asked to gather details from four villages which come under their battalion. “We have formed different teams that visit every single house in these villages to gather these details.”
The CRPF personnel ask about the name of the house owner, total number of family members in the house, their names, qualification, profession and number of vehicles used by the family, even the numbers of vehicles are being documented. “Yes, the CRPF jawans came to our house and collected personnel details from all house owners in our village. It’s for the first time taht CRPF is collecting such details, earlier army used to collect details on various occasions,” said Manzoor Ahmad of Delina village in Baramulla.
Many people questioned the collection of details by the paramilitary forces. “Every detail of households is already with the government, still forces are doing this new type of survey. This is an indication that every house is under surveillance,” said a local resident, whose house was also visited by a CRPF team.
A CRPF spokesman said he had no knowledge about the surve and asked to contact the CRPF Kashmir operations. The Kashmir CRPF PRO operations didn’t respond to queries about this survey.
Earlier this year, Jammu and Kashmir Police have been distributing so called ‘census forms’ in summer capital Srinagar seeking personal details of people, their family members, phone numbers and occupations. Police had then acknowledged the conduct of the exercise but refused to cite the reasons for it. The economics and statistics department said the Centre has not started any census exercise in Kashmir.
Such data collection exercises by the police are not new in Kashmir. In 2012 when J&K was governed by an elected government, the police had issued such ‘census forms’ which had elicited harsh reactions from civil society terming it ‘political and racial profiling’. Police had defended such actions on the pretext of ‘modern policing’. By 2016, such forms had become more intrusive like residents had to file details like their affiliations to religious sects or maslaks. Even the army had been accused of conducting surveys in parts of south Kashmir in 2017.
