Kr Swarn Kishore Singh
There is a couplet in Urdu which exactly depicts the way Jammu has been ignored and it still sustained;
Idhar aa sitamgar hunar aazmayein,
Tu teer aazma hum jigar aazmayein.
Last year on the last day of February Arun Jaitley had said in Lok Sabha that an AIIMS has been proposed for State of Jammu & Kashmir. Being a Jammuite I was also elated that such a top notch hospital is going to be established in our vicinity. And merely with the announcement it was inferred that the Institute is going to be installed in Jammu and some of the politicos of Jammu even celebrated it as a triumph. Alas it was short lived!
In my earlier column I had written that nobody is ready to give us anything unless we are ready to fight for it. This is proven right by this issue of AIIMS. We fought for the land for Shri Amarnath Yatra Shrine Board. The then Chief Minister GNA (Ghulam Nabi Azad was referred as GNA in Nira Radia tapes) shamelessly revoked the land transfer succumbing to the pressure of Kashmiris. When the people of Jammu protested the move, he prioritised resigning over heeding to the voice of Jammu. We even fought for central university with vigour and only then we got it.
The only thing we lack and valley people are having; is that they do not exhibit unconditional allegiance to anyone; they have kept New Delhi & Jammu, both at ransom since independence. The funds and packages leave New Delhi with an address of J&K but as soon as it reaches the boundaries of J&K, Jammu gets deleted and therefore reaches Kashmir only. Hence Jammu has to suffice only with the leftover of Kashmir. Earlier it was because the formation of govt was decided by Kashmir and Jammu was nothing but a stepni. The interests of Jammu have been perpetually undermined just because of passiveness of the Jammuites themselves.
Not digging too far, let me take you back to 2002 assembly elections, since then the politics of Jammu & Kashmir is not at all Kashmir centric. In 2002, the Government was formed by a coalition of two parties, one which was completely a Kashmir based party and other which was predominately a choice in Jammu province. In this tenure, for the first time in the history of Jammu & Kashmir a guy from Jammu province was anointed as chief minister of J&K i.e. GNA. The result is best known to all, that after he left the State in shambles by resigning and dumping the people of Jammu, the whole state went through the worst phase the state went through in the last decade. But Jammu people kept on raising their voice by voting a party which was not Kashmir centric, so in 2008 they again voted Congress to power. A Government was formed again by a coalition of two parties, one of them being purely a Kashmir based party and the identity of other was a bit too blurred. The representatives of Jammu in the Government were busy in fixing the posting and transfers than to address the issue of discrimination with this region.
Then in December last year a strange sort of mandate was given by the people of Jammu & Kashmir. That mandate can be clearly analysed in a way that Kashmir voted to keep BJP away from power and Jammu did every possible thing to put BJP in power. The so-called mission44+ was hampered by the massive voting in Kashmir and PDP was discarded by Jammu people. But the Government was formed by collating of parties which has paradoxical vote banks. This is also a fact that after the elections of 1996, no Government had this much of majority in the house as this Government is enjoying. So if we will go by the figures on the paper this is the most popular Government, Jammu & Kashmir has had in last two decades.
Jammu had voted for a party who was since long crying for the discrimination done to it and the change was very much visible in the way, the swearing-in ceremony of the members of Legislative Assembly took place. For the first time, the chanting of “Bharat Ki Jai” was witnessed in the J&K assembly and a lot of youth also entered the Assembly as MLAs. A lot of hope was attached with the fresh batch of BJP legislators but to the dismay of Jammuites there was no paradigm shift in the way J&K Government when compared with the earlier records. The perpetual ignorance of the interests of Jammu achieved eternity by virtue of this new Government. In less than six months of its formation, this Government has snatched two projects from Jammu people i.e. AIIMS & the Tawi artificial lake project.
As Edward Ebby has popularly said that “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his Government.” So the only reliance now rests on the civil society which has the responsibility of waking the people of Jammu from the slumber and to come out of this criminal inertia. The latent energy which rests there in the society needs to be put in action. So for that purpose the AIIMS coordination committee, an amalgamation of a lot of social workers and professionals has taken birth. Few days ago while talking to the chairman of AIIMS coordination Committee, Abhinav Sharma has assured me that he has no political alignments and this movement has nothing to do with politics as it is only to awake the Government of J&K that the interests of Jammu cannot be sacrificed to appease Kashmiris. Along with that he said that virtually this movement is heading towards a 2008 sort of agitation. But one thing should be kept in mind that anti-Government movement should not go too far to become an anti-national movement which happens very oftenly in Kashmir.
While the Government is downplaying the movement, and opposition is too reluctant to afford a stand on this issue, the civil society and the people should make it clear that they need to fight very enthusiastically for this cause and in case they do not; the movement would not survive for long and its survival is directly linked with a solution of the perpetual discrimination Jammu is facing. And it’s not only about AIIMS or artificial lake project; this movement highlights the manner in which Jammu is given a cold shoulder every time. The people of Jammu are not at fault because they have given a decisive mandate every time they have voted since 2002; be it Congress in 2002 & 2008 or BJP in 2014. But whosoever they have voted has betrayed them big time. This thing can be summed up in a couplet which is as:
Main ishq ka mufti to nahi, magar ye fatwa hai,
Jo rah main chhodh jaaye wo kafir se bhi badtar hai
(The author is an advocate in Supreme Court of India & a political observer)
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