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| ‘Politics of pre-1953 position has no place in Jammu, Ladakh’ | | | Neha
JAMMU, May 19: The message from Jammu and Ladakh was loud and clear. The message was that people of both the regions are religiously committed to India and that they will not endorse any line that drives the state away from New Delhi and dilutes the age-old Indian stand on Jammu & Kashmir. Jammu and Ladakh, which witnessed the destruction of the ruling coalition consisting of the pro-autonomy NC and votary of the 1975 Indira Gandhi-Sheikh Abdullah divisive and Valley-centric power-sharing accord, the Congress, and the pro-self-rule PDP, rejected outrightly and with contempt the autonomy demand as put forth by the NC and the self-rule formula as advocated by the PDP as a solution to the so-called Kashmir issue. They people of these two provinces, as was expected, voted overwhelmingly for the BJP and in favour of the mainstream politicions. The BJP repeated its 1998 and 1999 performance in Jammu and 1996, 1998 and 1999 performance in Kathua-Udhampur-Doda constituency 2014. It snatched both the Lok Sabha seats in Jammu province with huge margin defeating heavy weights like Ghulam Nabi Azad, Union Minister and Madan Lal Sharma, two-time Lok Sabha member and former Cabinet Minister and the lone Ladakh seat in the trans-Himalayan region.
The BJP won the Ladakh seat for the first time defeating the Congress and two very prominent Shia candidates, who had the full backing of some well-known clerics. Of course, the victory margin was not very impressive; it was only a 36-vote victory. But it doesn't matter. After all, a number of many senior leaders lost or won the election by one vote in the past in different parts of the country, including Rajasthan. It is important to note that nearly 10,00o Buddhist students studying in different parts of the country wanted to exercise their franchise. They not only approached the concerned election authorities to set up "special polling booths in Jammu", but also held a number of protest demonstrations raising pro-Modi slogans to persuade the authorities to concede their democratic demand, but with no result. Had their demand been conceded, 10,000 out of 10,000 votes would have gone to the BJP candidate Thupstan Chhewang, who had also represented Ladakh in the past between 2004 and 2009. The small victory margin of his should be viewed in this context. It's important to note that the BJP in Ladakh contested the election on two main planks - full integration with India and Union Territory status.
It is pertinent to mention here that the BJP polled the highest number of votes. It got 32.4 per cent votes (11,54,220), the Congress 22.9 per cent (8,15,510), PDP 20.5 per cent and the NC 11.1 per cent (3,96,713). The BJP increased its vote share by whopping 14 per cent. In 2009, it had got 18.4 per cent of the total votes polled. The fact is that the BJP is the only party in the State which increased its vote share. The voting percentage should clear all the cobwebs of confusion and send a clear message to the Kashmiri leadership that the people of Jammu and Ladakh hate and despise the politics of autonomy, self-rule and separatism. This should also make the biased and non-secular opinion leaders recognise the fact that Kashmir doesn't mean the State of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh and that fulfilling the communal and separatist urges of the Kashmiri leadership is not the same as meeting the nationalist and democratic urges of the people of Jammu and Ladakh, who constitute half of the State's population and inhabit over 88 per cent of its land area.
The people of Jammu and Ladakh do hope that the new BJP-led NDA dispensation, unlike the Congress-led UPA, will look all these facts in the face and evolve and implement policies that end the Kashmiri domination over these two regions, which have suffered immensely during the past more than 65 years. It is also hoped that the Kashmiri leadership would appreciate the 2014 mandate and not advocate pernicious break-India solutions to the so-called Kashmir problem. |
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