Chorus grows louder for statehood to Jammu

JAMMU: Amid speculations that the Centre is about to make some major decisions on J&K, Jammu-centric parties have again started raising the demand for separate statehood seeking “freedom from Kashmir’s hegemony”.

In the past couple of days, more paramilitary troops have been rushed to Kashmir stoking rumours that the central government was planning something big for the UT. However, Kashmir IGP Vijay Kumar has claimed that the troops were returning from West Bengal where they had been deployed for election duty.

“Conducting delimitation of constituencies on the basis of fudged Census 2011 is the surest way to once again sell out Jammu and keep it hostage to fundamentalist Kashmiri Islamic hegemony,” said Ankur Sharma, president of IkkJutt Jammu.

He demanded full statehood for Jammu and bifurcation of Kashmir into two UTs, with one exclusively for the victims of genocide.

Sharma said, “It is only because of the fudged Census 2011 that Kashmir’s population was falsely shown to have increased by 14,11,000 in 10 years from 2001 to 2011. While the fact is that in 2002, the number of voters in Jammu was more than Kashmir by 1.41 lakh.”

“Similarly, the average population growth of Jammu province, which was 31% between 1971 to 2001, dropped to 21% in 2011, and due to migration within and outside the state on account of Hindu and Sikh genocide in Kashmir, the percentage growth in Kashmir’s population should have been lower but it grew by 26% post 1991,” he said.

Sharma emphasised that delimitation at this stage and that too on the basis of an erroneous Census would consolidate subversives, Jihadists, Islamists and further perpetuate J&K as a non-secular, theocratic Muslim domain part from the rest of India.

Former minister and chairman of Dogra Sadar Sabha Gurchain Singh Charak said, “The Centre bifurcated this vast princely state into two UTs in August 2019. Our forefathers from all religions had toiled hard to make it such a vast state.”