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| BAJ for ending discrimination with Jammu Pradesh | | Meeting With Shinde | | Neha
JAMMU, Oct 13: Bar Association Jammu (BAJ) is one non-political organization in Jammu Pradesh which has consistently fought for the general political and economic rights and interests of its people. It, like the Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI), has seldom missed any opportunity that came its way to project the case of grossly ignored and politically marginalized people of Jammu Pradesh. It has been active particularly since the 1980s, when the then Chief Minister Faroooq Abdullah planned to end the age-old practice of Durbar move and establish the civil Secretariat in Srinagar on a permanent basis. Farooq Abdullah had to eschew the move under pressure from Jammu. Ever since then, the BAJ has been taking keen interest in Jammu-related issues, besides promoting the cause of the black coated community of lawyers.
Yesterday again, the BAJ leadership discussed the plight of Jammu with the visiting Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde and urged him to take steps aimed at ending discrimination with Jammu Pradesh. It demanded that a person from Jammu Pradesh be given a chance to head the State Government so that the nationalist urges of the people of this region are satisfied and scourge of discrimination ended once and for all. "We propose the rationalization of Lok Sabha, Vidhan Sabha and Panchayat seats in Jammu and Kashmir; we want a fair delimitation of the Assembly and Lok Sabha constituencies in the State so that the people of Jammu Pradesh get due share of representation in the law-making bodies in the State and at the Centre," it said, and added that intervention of the Union Home Minister has become imperative to remove regional disparities. "He must intervene to remove regional disparity and discrimination against Jammu region by laying down a fair criteria for political empowerment on equal basis, uniform growth in infrastructural development in distinct regions of the state and equal share to the people of the region at the grass root level of governance," it, in fact, said.
In other words, the BAJ leadership under presidentship of Bhupinder Singh Slathia accused the successive Kashmiri dominated Governments in the state of perpetrating injustice on the people of Jammu Pradesh and asserted that there is only one way in which the people of this region could be conciliated and that is by handing over the office of Chief Minister to anyone belonging to Jammu and redrawing the Assembly and Lok Sabha constituencies strictly as per the criteria laid down by the Representation of People's Act - land area, nature of terrain, accessibility and population/voters. It also drew the attention of the Union Home Minister to the conspicuous absence of word secularism in the preamble of the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution.
One needs to go through the detailed memorandum the BAJ submitted to the Home Minister to understand the nature of its commitment to the Jammu cause. The memorandum not only dealt with the problems facing the community of lawyers and litigants, but also with the Jammu problem. Now the question to be asked is: Will Shinde take cognizance of the Jammu problem and persuade the authorities in the state to adopt State-Centric policies? The answer cannot be in the affirmative. Shinde just can't afford to offend AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi, who doesn't want anybody to raise even his little finger against the Government that is being led by Omar Abdullah. However, to say this is not to undermine the importance of the BAJ's latest initiative. The BAJ did what was expected of it and it deserves appreciation for the pain it took in explaining the Jammu's ailment. |
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