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| BJP and the fate of its election manifestos | | Civic polls | | Early Times Report
Jammu, Oct 2: The J&K BJP on Sunday issued one more election manifesto to woo the electorate so that it could capture as many urban local bodies as possible. It was perhaps for the first time that BJP issued an election manifesto on the eve of or during the election campaign to win urban local bodies. It promised moon to the people in its manifesto.
Some of the promises the BJP held out included streamlining of the sanitation work, garbage collection in Jammu city, delegation of more powers to the civic bodies of the state, promotion of the smart city concept, easy license regime to promote small business, construction of community halls, maintenance of lanes and drains and proper street lighting.
A peep into the BJP's past history reveals that it has never ever done anything to fulfill the promises it held out in its election manifestos from time to time. In 2002, the BJP promised that it would work for the reorganization of the state to end Valley domination over Jammu and Ladakh, but did nothing. In 2002, it could win only 1 seat, Nagrota, that too with a slender margin.
Similarly, in 2008, the BJP again talked of reorganization of J&K, won 11 seats, but did nothing whatsoever to fulfill the promise. Instead, the BJP hobnobbed with the NC and many of its law-makers cross-voted to help the NC and defeat its own candidate for Rajya Sabha. The episode led to the suspension of many MLAs from the party, including BJP veteran Prof Chaman Lal Gupta.
In 2014, the BJP didn't release any election manifesto. Not that it had not got prepared and printed one. It had. But it didn't release after Bandook Wali Hina Bhat threatened that she would pick up gun in case the BJP sought to tinker with Article 370 of the Indian Constitution.
The BJP in 2014 issued a vision document, which held out many promises, including the promise that it would grant all citizenship rights to refugees from Pakistan. The BJP created history winning 25 of the 37 seats in Jammu province. The remarkable victory gave the people in Jammu to understand that the BJP will now surely fulfill the promises it had made, but the BJP dashed the people's hope to the ground.
Instead of making an optimum use of the historic mandate to mitigate the hardships of the people of Jammu and force state government to end discriminatory policies against them, the BJP took a huge U-turn and joined hands with the known anti-Jammu and anti-Ladakh PDP and subverted the mandate on a daily-basis in a brazen manner. So much so, it abandoned its age-old stand on Article 370 to fulfill its lust for power and pelf and please the pro-self-rule PDP.
Earlier in 2002, the BJP had ditched the people of Jammu province by giving support to the Farooq Abdullah's anti-democratic and anti-constitutional move to ban delimitation of assembly constituencies for decades through a constitutional amendment. The BJP support the amendment despite the fact that it had all along accused the Kashmiri leaders of denying Jammu province due share in the legislative assembly. Not just this, in 1998, the BJP had opposed the bill in the assembly that sought establishment of Mata Vaishno Devi University and Agricultural University in Jammu.
It's no wonder that the people of Jammu has no or little hope that the BJP would do anything to fulfill the promises after winning the urban local bodies polls. |
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