Avinash Azad
Jammu, June 28 : The insensitivity on part of a self claimed champion of Jammu, could be easily gauged from a protest demonstration held outside Rani Park, wherein the self styled leader employed two minor children for beating drum and rattle, to amplify impact of his protest on media persons. This self claimed champion of Jammu, is president of Shiv Sena and Dogra Front Ashok Gupta, the head of two organizations, elections for which are reportedly never held in Jammu, even since the beginning of the Organization.
Famous for organizing protests off and on, over varied issues and that too at his favorite place outside Rani Park near his residence, Ashok Gupta, is always hungry for gaining media coverage and remained restricted to newspapers. On Friday, once again he organized a protest demonstration against Traffic Police department, allegedly for looting the pilgrims. The children, a boy-beating drum and a small girl-holding rattle, in whose hands there should be books but the self claimed champion of Jammu, was violating their human rights and had instructed them to beat instruments, which was also violation of labour laws. Moreover, according to a press note sent by Gupta to media persons about his protest demonstration of Friday, it has been maintained that 32 vehicles were given green signal to proceed for Amarnath pilgrimage on Thursday via Pahalgam route, "but to utter surprise pilgrims were informed at Pahalgam that the route is not clear for Yatra and in alteration they were asked to proceed via Baltal.
From Jammu to Pahalgam not even a single traffic officers or administration informed them regarding the situation of Pahalgam. All the vehicles were stopped before the Baltal root on the pretext that they were not having permission to travel via Baltal", press note sent by Gupta on yesterday had claimed. But if one ask Ashok Gupta, already the schedule of pilgrimage was finalized and officially from Bhagwati Nagar base camp, it had started on Friday morning, then why some pilgrims, who were only in contact with Ashok Gupta, reached Pahalgam on June 26, when the pilgrimage to holy cave shrine is schedule to be started on June 28. Even on June 25, the state government had announced that pilgrimage from Pahalgam route would not be started due to excess snowfall, then, why the pilgrims and their patron, Ashok Gupta had not read the newspaper reports, it is a million dollar question ?. Self claimed or one can say, unelected president of Dogra Front and Shiv Sena, who was craving to get media attention by any mean, sometimes burnt refrigerator to show his anger against power curtailment and once, had also set an old scooter on fire, to show anger against hike in petrol prices. "Even the people who generally gathered in his protest are vendors and Rehriwalls, who have been doing business outside Rani Park, allegedly after taking permission of Ashok Gupta", a local of Rani Park said, adding that there was negligible number of locals in his protest demonstrations. He further said that even the utensils, electronic gadgets shown in the hands of protesters were taken from the shopkeepers by Ashok Gupta. "The problem of Jammu is that, we have good number of self style presidents of organizations but there is no worker and not any other executive member of these one man show type organizations. Even the elections to these Organizations are never held", sources said. When contacted, Ashok Gupta said that children were wards of Amarnath yatris, who gathered in the protest. He keeps on changing his statement on children and later said that the children are from nearby locality. When asked regarding elections of the Organizations, he said that the president of Organizations was nominated by Bombay based leadership. When asked that Dogra Front is a Bombay based organization, he keeps on saying that the question not pertained to the issue. Later he said that he could give phone number of Bombay, from where it could be ascertained. When asked, who the executive members of the organizations are, he said that replies could only be given if the correspondent would meet and snap the phone call, when asked who was the vice president of the organization, he said , "I am driving and cannot reply". |
