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| Bhim asks AICC president to wind up Congress in J&K | | Legislative Council Elections | | NEHA
EARLY TIMES REPORT
JAMMU, Apr 3: Panthers Party Chairman Bhim Singh has strongly urged the AICC president and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi to "wind up the Present Congress Unit in J&K and reconstitute a fresh one with fresh blood committed to the cause secularism, democracy and national integration." In fact, he has written a letter to the AICC president, notwithstanding the fact that his action amounts to a naked interference in the Congress affairs. But Bhim Singh has the audacity to do what others normally avoid to do.
What has provoked Bhim Singh to write such a letter to the AICC president is the seat-sharing arrangement reached between the National Conference and the Congress to capture five of the six seats in the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Council elections to which would take place on April 13, of course, if necessary. His main objection is that the Congress has entered into an alliance with the National Conference, which, according to him, is "secessionist."
"The Congress leadership has committed (yet) another blunder vis-a-vis J&K by surrendering to the interest of the secessionist National Conference in the selection of candidates for six seats of the Legislative Council…The Congress has surrendered to the communal division of Kashmir and Jammu which has been the agenda of the National Conference ever since it was created in 1931. All the four Seats in the Rajya Sabha have gone to the Kashmiri Muslim Members. Now the Congress leadership has sacrificed its own Kashmiri Nationalist Muslim candidates (so that none of them could) contest any of the three available seats in the Valley only to please (the) NC, the mother of terrorism, corruption and communalism in the Valley. The sitting MLC and foremost Congress leader Abdul Ghani Vakil too was crucified because he never dittoed the NC plan for the implementation of Dixon plan to separate Kashmir from the Indian Union. All the three seats in the Valley were surrendered to the NC, besides one out the two in Jammu," Bhim Singh has, in fact, written.
One may or may not endorse the decision of Bhim Singh to write a letter to the AICC president, but one cannot but agree with the arguments he has advanced while questioning the very rationale behind the seat-sharing arrangement between the NC and the Congress. The arrangement between the two does suggest that five seats have been divided between them on purely communal lines.
However, it is not for the first time that the NC and the Congress has reached such an agreement. Both the parties had worked out a similar arrangement during the last general elections: The NC had contested all the three Lok Sabha seats in the Valley and the Congress all the three seats in Jammu and Ladakh. It is obvious that the NC election strategists had reached a conclusion that to field any candidate in Jammu or in Ladakh would be a futile exercise or would be to invite a sure defeat considering the fact that an overwhelming majority of the people in these two provinces hated and abhorred, and continues to hate and abhor, the religio-political philosophy of the NC. However, what was surprising was the decision of the Congress party to go by the NC election strategists and not to field a single Congress candidate in Kashmir. This action of the Congress was mind-boggling in the sense that it gave unbridled freedom to the NC to play the shots in the manner it wanted and it wants. Had the Congress fielded its candidates in Kashmir, things would not have been that worse there and the Congress party would have surely expanded and consolidated its constituency there. It would have provided an alternative to the NC and helped the national cause in Kashmir. That the Congress didn't do that and instead decided to play the B-team role did suggest then that the Congress high command had finally decided to close down its political shop in Kashmir and concentrate its attention on Jammu and Ladakh, its two core constituencies in the state.
One cannot also disagree with Bhim Singh when he questions the decision of the Congress high command to make common cause with the NC and castigate it and the NC for nominating Muslim candidates for all the four Rajya Sabha seats - all the four from the Kashmir Valley. According to Bhim Singh, Ghulam Nabi Azad is also a Kashmiri. How else should one interpret the formulation of Singh on the Rajya Sabha members from J&K?
The fact of the matter is that Bhim Singh has talked sense. It appears something has gone fundamentally wrong with the Congress party. That's the reason it is becoming more and more unpopular with each passing day in Jammu province.
The manner in which the Congress and the NC have been conducting themselves, particularly since January 20009 has other implications as well. For example, the alliance between the NC and the Congress is only widening further the already rather wide gulf between Kashmir and Jammu. If this trend continues for some more time, the result would be the division of the state on communal lines, an eventuality that has to be averted at any cost. Reorganization of the state on regional basis is the need of the time and steps should be taken in this direction at the earliest, but it would be dangerous if the communal forces or the protagonists of Dixon Plan or votaries of Greater Kashmir are allowed to divide the state on communal lines. |
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