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| Politics of walkout will not help Congress | | Too little, too late | | Rustam
JAMMU, July 17: The already at-the-receiving-end Congress party yet again lost the opportunity to win back the trust of the alienated refugees Pakistan-occupied-Jammu & Kashmir. The case in point is the canny walkout by three Congress ministers - all from Jammu - from the cabinet meeting on Wednesday after the Omar Abdullah cabinet did not accept their suggestion that a compensation package for the refugees be worked out on the pattern of internally-displaced Kashmiri Hindus. The cabinet deferred the proposal concerning the PoJK refugees. The number of these refugees, according to one estimate, is nearly 10 lakh and they influence the poll outcome in at least 20 assembly constituencies in Jammu province.
Those who walked out from the cabinet meeting included Deputy Chief Minister Tara Chand, PHE Minister Sham Lal Sharma and Housing Minister Raman Bhalla. (In the just-concluded Lok Sabha elections, the people of the constituencies these ministers represent in the assembly, voted overwhelmingly for the BJP candidate Jugal Kishore Sharma, who won with a huge margin of over 2.5 lakh votes.) They reportedly protested over the issue and stayed away from the meeting for nearly half an hour and rejoined the meeting after they were persuaded by Higher Education Minister, Akbar Lone of the ruling NC, and Tourism Minister G A Mir of the Congress said that the issue of refugees will be taken up and "given a serious consideration". "The ministers were miffed as the government is pursuing the policy to rehabilitate the Kashmiri Pundits at the cities in Kashmir while leaving out the (PoJK) refugees," a report from Srinagar said.
What exactly did the Jammu-based Congress ministers demand? They demanded that a proposal be sent to the Union Government demanding Rs 1000 crore for compensating and rehabilitating the refugees from PoJK. Their grouse against the state government was that it was discriminating between the refugees from PoJK and displaced Kashmiri Hindus. One of the Congress ministers even reportedly asked: "If the state government can give all sorts of facilities to the KPs, it should ensure the same for the PoJK refugees also". As for Raman Bhalla, he reportedly said: "They have only been pressing for meeting the genuine and long demands of PoJK refugees. They shouldn't be discriminated. We protested only to put forth their demands".
Their one threat is that the Congress ministers would resign en-masse in case their suggestion was not accepted would have left Omar Abdullah with no other option but to concede the demand. That they didn't do so and, instead, took recourse to the politics of walkout left none in any doubt that they were not serious about the issue. The Congress will pay a very heavy price for what the Congress ministers did on Wednesday. |
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