J K News Today Commentary
The ongoing Municipal Polls in Jammu and Kashmir have hit many roadblocks, and one of them is the boycott call given by the separatists backed by armed militants and duly supported by PDP and National Conference. Whether the boycott call is a democratic right or allowed under any charter of the human rights anywhere in the world is not known to anyone.
Assuming that the boycott callers have their own issues to justify to stay away from the polls or to test their support on the days of polling, but why should they be demonizing who are coming out to vote . It makes it clear that they want others to sacrifice their democratic rights for their anti-democratic attitude.
But do they have right to kill or threaten those who want to exercise their franchise to have the democratic institutions in place for the redressal of their grievances and the development needed for the improvement in their day to day life?
Certainly not. The frustration of all those sitting in the boycott camp because their attempts to subvert the system through guns , general strikes and all sorts of regressive means for the past 30 years cannot be allowed to deny the right to vote for the people who are determined to do so .
The first phase of the Municipal Polling on Monday (October 8) had shown that the boycott call had a little effect beyond the Kashmir Valley. And within the Valley , too, Kupwara and Budgam defied them by queuing up outside the polling booths . The story has been repeated in the second phase on Wednesday ( October 10) . Shouldn’t that serve as an eye opener to them that a vast majority of the people or not with them.
Separatists , militants and Kashmir Muslim centric parties should realise that their game is over . They have courted a disaster for themselves . If they have boycotted these elections to save Article 35 A of the Indian constitution, as they claimed, at the time of announcing the boycott of the polls for local bodies and panchayats , what happens when the case is yet to be taken up for formal hearing in the Supreme Court and the assembly elections are announced.
It was known for long that the separatists and militants would give poll boycott because they have to go by the script and agenda handed over to them by their masters across the border . That they had been doing for the past three decades – to be precise since 1989. But the compulsions of the PDP and NC were not known . The two parties were ambiguous .They are saying two things , one contradicting the other that the conditions were not conducive for the polls , and in the same breath they are saying that they are not participating because the Article 35 A has been linked to these polls . These sound more as excuses rather than as a genuine reason not to take part in the polls.
