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| Congress working against the Jammu cause | | Office of CM | |
Rustam
Early Times Report
JAMMU, Jan 4: The "secular" Congress party has, it seems, not learned any lesson from its humiliating defeat in Jammu province. How else should one view its rabid opposition to the reasonable and democratic demand in Jammu for the coveted office of Chief Minister? None from Jammu till date has become the Chief Minister in J&K. Those who say that Ghulam Nabi Azad, who led the state between November 2005 and July 2008, was from Jammu are wrong. Azad is ethnically Kashmiri. Immediately after becoming Chief Minister, Azad had tried his level best to counter the campaign against him in Kashmir by telling the Kashmiri people that he originally hailed from Kashmir.
The Congress, which in 2002 and 2008 had won 17 and 13 seats, respectively, in Jammu province won only five seats in the just-held assembly elections. All of its ministers, barring one, and including Tara Chand, Sham Lal Sharma, Raman Bhalla, Abdul Majid Wani and Manohar Lal Sharma lost their election to the BJP. Not only this, the Congress failed to open its account in any of the 24 Hindu-majority constituencies in the Jammu province. All the five Congress candidates who won the assembly elections in Jammu province belonged to the majority community (in this case the Muslim community).
The people of Jammu province, who never got their due share in the state's polity and economy, had hoped that the ignominious defeat would surely make the Congress leadership adopt a positive attitude towards the people of Jammu province with whose support its party enjoyed loaves and fishes of office for decades. Sadly, however, it has not happened. What has happened is to the contrary. The Congress has openly and in a brazen manner rejected outrightly the demand in Jammu for the office of Chief Minister. Not one but many senior Congress leaders have come forward to oppose the Jammu's demand.
Congress spokesperson Sanjay Nirupam, for example, has rejected the demand, saying J&K is a special case and the office of the Chief Minister must go to Kashmir. "J&K is unlike other states of the Union. It has to be dealt with differently. It will not be in the interest of the country if the office of Chief Minister is denied to Kashmir," he has said. Azad, too, has urged the Kashmiri parties to forge a grand alliance. So much so, he has gone to the extent of outraging the sensitivities of the people of Jammu province by telling the Kashmiri parties that if they sincerely wish to respect the Kashmiri sentiments, the only option they have is to forge a grand alliance.
The Congress leadership is, it appears, not realizing that they are further damaging their party in Jammu province, which used to be its core constituency till very recently and tilted towards the BJP because of the bungling instinct of the Congress think-tanks. This approach would not do. The sooner the Congress leadership realizes it the better failing which it would lose whatever the support-base it still has in Jammu province. |
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