Rustam
JAMMU, Oct 27: The fundamental factor that has enabled Kashmir and Kashmiri leadership to dominate and exploit Jammu province and Ladakh region, ride rough shod and (mis)rule the state is their excessive and preponderant share of representation in the Assembly that discusses and decides questions of supreme importance to the happiness and well-being of the people. Kashmir elects 46 members to the Assembly, while Jammu and Ladakh 37 and 4 members, respectively. It was the Congress that helped the canny and anti-Jammu and anti-Ladakh Kashmiri leadership in 1940s to grab more seats than it deserved and the objective of the Congress-dominated Delhi was to ensure that Kashmir got more than 50 per cent representation in the Assembly so that it remained at the help of affairs for all the times to come.
The figures, which were released by the Election Commission of India this month on October 15, once again vindicate the stand of the discriminated against and politically marginalized people of Jammu province that their complaint against the powers-that-be in the state and at the Centre was as genuine as it deserved a serious consideration and that they would not get their due in the state's political, social and economic processes unless they got proper representation in the Assembly. The people of Jammu province have little say in the governance of the state, as the Kashmiri leadership has established its stranglehold over everything and every department in the state.
According to the latest figures, the voter strength in the State of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh is 72,25,559. Kashmir has 37,53, 195 voters. As for Jammu province and Ladakh region, the former has 33,11,438 voters and the latter has 1,60,926 voters. In other words, the total number of voters in these two neglected regions is 34,713,66. If we add the number of voters belonging to the refugee community from West Pakistan to this figure, the number of voters in these two provinces could be around 36 lakh. In other words, the difference in the number of voters in Jammu-Ladakh and Kashmir valley would be around 1.5 lakh.
What does this show? This shows that Kashmir has five seats for 1.5 lakh voters. In other words, it has 5 seats more at the rate one per 30,000 voters. This is one aspect. The other aspect is that the land area of Jammu and Ladakh is almost 9 times more as compared with Kashmir. The Representation of People's Act says that the Assembly constituencies must be constituted taking into consideration three factors - land area, nature of terrain and accessibility and population/voter strength. But in our state these conditions are ignored only to ensure that the political power remains with Kashmir.
Now that we have a new non-Congress Government at the Centre, it is hoped that it would look into the complaint of the people of Jammu and Ladakh and undo the past wrongs. After all, Jammu and Ladakh have contributed to the success of the party in power. |
