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| Significance of Slathia’s spectacular victory | | BAJ Election — I | | RUSTAM
EARLY TIMES REPORT
JAMMU, Dec 20: Advocate Bhupinder Singh Slathia won the Bar Association Jammu’s presidential election hands down yesterday evening. He got no less than 600 votes out of total of 971 votes polled. It was a massive mandate. His victory could be legitimately described as an outstanding victory. There were three candidates in the fray for the prestigious post – Slathia, Ved Raj Wazir and A K Sawhney, all former BAJ presidents and outstanding advocates and activists. The lawyers had to make a choice between these three sophisticated and well-known advocates and they exercised their choice in favour of Slathia. His victory should not be considered as a defeat of the other two candidates, whose contribution to the legal profession and society is recognized by everyone. His victory should be construed as a victory of everyone who stand for certain values and who could go to any extent to defend and promote further those values. His victory is a victory of those who are men of commitment and conviction.
It is easy to win parliamentary election. It is also not difficult to win assembly election. But it is very difficult to win the BAJ election. Why because it is a very limited constituency, as also because it is a constituency that consists of highly educated persons belonging to different social groups and subscribing to different ideologies. It is not that easy to convince any of the advocates or lawyers. Everyone knows everything and everyone exercises his/her choice after weighing all pros and cons. Each one of them is a political person. And, hence, to get as many as 600 votes out of a total of 971 votes is not a joke. It’s great feat and achievement. In fact, it’s recognition of the role Slathia has been consistently playing since years not only for the cause of the profession he is in but also for the larger national cause and the noble cause of the people Jammu province, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs included.
It would not be out of place to mention here that Slathia has been playing an important role since his college days. However, it was in June 2008 that he shot into prominence by taking the plunge and siding with those who had unleashed a historical movement in Jammu against the regressive, intolerant and anti-Jammu and anti-national forces in Kashmir – forces which had outraged the nationalist, secular and democratic sentiment of the people of Jammu province by opposing the official and legal decision under which a small piece of land at Baltal (Kashmir) had been transferred to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB) on a temporary basis for creating facilities for the Shri Amarnathji pilgrims.
Slathia’s was a very bold decision in the sense that that time he was Additional Advocate General. He was also a prominent Congressman. He jumped into the Jammu’s nationalist, secular and democratic arena after resigning from this prestigious position. He didn’t care for the consequences that would follow his full-scale participation in the landmark movement in Jammu that attracted enormous publicity and attention from the whole of the country and even on world scale and told the world for the first time that there also existed Jammu province in the State of Jammu and Kashmir and that the people of Jammu province could sustain their movement for any number of month braving all odds, including government oppression. Suffice it to say that the 2008 movement in Jammu in which Slathia played a very significant role was a curtain-raiser in this regard.
It may be recalled that the BAJ under the effective and skillful leadership of Slathia had taken recourse to several activities in order to put pressure on the authorities and establish that it, unlike the Kashmir High Court Bar Association, stood for national unity and integrity and secular and democratic ethos. Some of the activities it indulged in during the days of agitation – apart from taking part in the SAYSS-sponsored programmes — included long marches, dharnas, protests and black flag demonstrations, suspension of work and free legal aid to protestors. They used to raise such slogans as Bharat Mata Ki Jai”, “Stop discrimination with Jammu” and “Return land to SASB.” (To be continued) |
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