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| Elections divide Jammu Chamber of Commerce & Industry | | Politicizing Trade | | Rustam
JAMMU, Apr 9: The election process is on. Political parties are taking on each other and trying their level best to woo voters through their respective manifestos, public rallies, speeches, statements, press conferences and social media. It's natural.
It is also not surprising that the political parties are tearing into each other in their bid to garner votes. Most of the parties, which present themselves to the people as secular outfits, have been actually vitiating the election scene by converting the electoral exercise into secularism versus communalism debate.
So much so, the "secular" parties have been seeking support of religious leadership so that they could win the election. Sonia Gandhi, for example, met with Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid and urged him to ask his community to vote for her party. She and Shahi Imam termed the minority community vote as "secular vote". A minister in the Manmohan Singh government Shashi Throore on Tuesday described the Christian votes as "secular" and urged the community to vote en-block for his Congress party. The BSP of Mayawati, the SP of Mulayam Singh Yadav, to mention only two organizations, also on the same day approached the Muslim religious leadership to seek its support.
The point is that the ongoing electoral exercise has created bitterness between the parties, especially between the "secular" Congress and similar other parties, including the NC, and the BJP and its allies, including Akali Dal, the Shiv Sena, the Lok Janshakti Party and so on. Not only bitterness between political parties, the ongoing electoral exercise has also divided the business community with one section supporting the Congress-led UPA candidates seeking and re-seeking election to the Lok Sabha, another section supporting the BJP-led NDA candidates and some maintaining distance from both the formations. This has happened in Jammu as well.
Only on Tuesday, for example, senior vice president of Jammu Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI) Sham Lal Langar and secretary general Arun Gupta dissociated themselves from the statements made by the CCI president Y V Sharma. Sharma had at least twice appealed people to vote for the Congress-NC coalition candidates seeking election from Jammu province. Langar and Gupta issued a joint statement and clarified that the CCI members "have nothing to do with the view expressed by Y V Sharma in a section of media on April 7, 2014". They said the "CCI is the forum of traders and have no affiliation with any political party. The Chamber members disassociate themselves from the view expressed by the CCI president, terming this as his personal opinion," they said. Not just this, they also claimed that "every individual in the CCI is associated with different political parties and they may have their different opinions". "The Chamber is an organization working for the welfare of business community and is not directly associated with any political party". They even went to the extent of saying that the "working committee meet of CCI will be held soon to take decision regarding Chamber elections". What does all this suggest? It suggests that the CCI president didn't take the chamber leadership and other members of the CCI into confidence before announcing support to a particular formation and, hence, the embarrassment. |
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