Sanjay Puri
Jammu’s woes and its simmering though silent discontent continues to persist in as much as the same measure as it has persisted for the last several years. Regional discrimination continues to assume ever new cleverly innovated design of execution. There is an apparent calm on the surface everything terms to be normal, contended and at peace with itself. But this is only a thin veneer of illusion beneath which lies an under-current of simmering unrest coupled with helpless compromise with an unrequited fate. Jammu today is no better if not worse than before.
To add to the fuel the biased political class snatched from Jammu the sanctioned AIIMS for the region. The Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government had given an AIIMS to Jammu in 2003, and then health minister Sushma Swaraj had laid its foundation stone, but successive Congress Governments at the Centre and the state had converted it into a super-specialty hospital. The setting up of an AIIMS in Srinagar threatens to polarize Jammu and Kashmir in the same way as the 2002 Amarnath agitation. Residents of Jammu allege AIIMS was taken away to the Valley by the PDP, which, however, insists the institute came to the Valley with the Agenda for Alliance it signed with the BJP to form the Government. People across Jammu region are furious with anger and feel like a lesser citizen of the State. In the absence of any formal announcement by the Centre, the assurances of BJP leaders are not getting traction.
Advocate Abhinav Sharma Chairman of the AIIMS Coordination Committee (ACC) and President of Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association, Jammu threatened that there will be a revolt against the authorities if they failed to keep their June 18 promise in which Deputy Chief Minister, Dr Nirmal Kumar Singh and Minister for Social Welfare, Environment & Forest, Bali Bhagat in a formal written communication agreed that orders for establishment of AIIMS in Jammu will be obtained well before 20-07-2015.
The same discontent continues as issues ranging from delimitation of electoral constituencies, uneven distribution of Government jobs, disparity in admission to colleges and professional courses, safe returns of the Kashmiri Pandit community to the valley, plight of refugees from POK, West Pakistan and unequal distribution of funds remain unaddressed. The common man of Jammu today feels discriminated and alienated by the appeasing policy of state and centre towards Kashmir who visualize Jammu and Kashmir only through the prism of Kashmir. The common man is indeed victim of discrimination and injustice.
The politics of forgetting, or more specifically selective amnesia is a common trait amongst politicians in Jammu and Kashmir. It is no quite common to experience the practice of promises contradicting performance; and words means nothing more than rhetoric, especially in relation to Government and political parties in Jammu and Kashmir electoral politics. Ironically it is through the promises they make that political parties seek to win the confidence of people; and inevitably, it is the very same promise and assurances that gets broken time and time again by the many parties that have assumed political power. The degree to which political parties deviate from their promises betray a lack of will and commitment to truly serve the needs and aspiration of the people they claim to represent. What does the habit of promise contradicting performance truly represent and what are its implications to human society? Does it mean that once in power politicians take the people for granted? Or, politicians take the people so naïve and powerless that every time these politicians betray the promise made, they so ignorantly become indifferent to the abuse of trust and the arrogance of power or is the politics of promise as well as the politics of forgetting inherent within the electoral system? What perhaps is more important is that the lives of ordinary people are most affected by it. And therefore it certainly raises fundamental question of public trust, democratic governance and accountability to the people. It is ironic that the politics of promises as well as the politics of forgetting are so comfortably intertwined in the electoral system of Jammu and Kashmir context. This implies the presence of weak civil society that is unable to stand firmly on issues and demand greater accountability and good governance from successive Governments. And at the core it reveals a society that is so desperately dependent on the Government for its survival; and therefore made complacent by conditions of necessity that forces it to turn a blind eye to corruption and abuse of power. Jammu people must critically question whether the present situation has resulted because of the public’s indifferent attitude or because politicians have become too powerful to care for the public anymore? The appalling conditions of the present indicate that it is time for such politics to become a matter of the past. The public of Jammu can no longer remain a mute spectator. It needs to break out of its complacency and recognize that true power lies with the people.
It must therefore demand results, not words from their MLA’s and ensure that their representatives are held accountable to the ideals of democratic governance.
(The author is senior journalist. )
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