Kashmiri leaders fumed on Monday as the Delimitation Commission proposed 6 additional assembly seats for the Jammu region and one for Kashmir Valley. They have rejected the draft proposals.
This would increase the total seats in Jammu to 43 and in Kashmir Valley to 47. Nine seats have been proposed for ST and 7 for SC. STs in J&K had no reservation in the assembly so far.
The Delimitation Commission is headed by former Supreme Court judge Ranjana Prakash Desai. Chief Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra is an ex-officio member of the panel.
Hitting out at the draft recommendations of the panel, former Chief Minister and National Conference (NC) leader Omar Abdullah said; “The draft recommendation of the J&K delimitation commission is unacceptable. The distribution of newly created assembly constituencies with 6 going to Jammu & only 1 to Kashmir is not justified by the data of the 2011 census”.
“It is deeply disappointing that the commission appears to have allowed the political agenda of the BJP to dictate its recommendations rather than the data which should have been its only consideration. Contrary to the promised “scientific approach” it’s a political approach”, Omar added.
PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti tweeted “My apprehensions about the Delimitation Commission weren’t misplaced. They want to pitch people against each other by ignoring the population census & proposing 6 seats for one region & only one for Kashmir”.
Sajad Lone, J&K Peoples Conference, reacted; “The recommendations of the delimitation commission are totally unacceptable. They reek of bias. What a shock for those who believe in democracy”.
J&K Apni Party of Altaf Bukhari “rejected the proposal of the commission. This is outrightly unacceptable to us. Apni Party demands a fair delimitation exercise without any bias, taking population and districts as the base. We strongly demand the government intervene”.
It is worth mentioning that the J&K assembly so far had a strength of 87 seats that was reduced to 83 after the separation of Ladakh as a union territory that had 4 seats. The Kashmir valley region had 46 seats and the Jammu region had 37 seats.
It was a long-standing grouse of people of Jammu that despite being bigger than Kashmir, the Jammu region was politically disempowered with a lesser number of seats. Moreover, some of the assembly constituencies had a lesser number of the electorate as compared to that in the Jammu division.
Sitting Srinagar MP Farooq Abdullah and two other MPs of the party are associate members of the commission.