Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, Sept 28: Pradesh Congress Committee has urged upon the State Administration led by Governor Satya Pal Malik to create conducive atmosphere for the free and fair conduct of Block Development Council (BDC) elections in the State.
A meeting of senior leaders of Congress was held here today to take stock of the political and security scenario in the State in view the repeated assertions of the Govt to go ahead with BDC elections in the State, while keeping all opposition leaders either detained or under restrictions.
The meeting expressed serious concern over continued detention and restrictions on the political movement and all sorts of genuine political activities of Congress and mainstream pro-India political parties and groups except BJP in the state, since August 4.
All kinds of political activities are banned as most of Congress leaders including State president GA Mir are either detained or restrained from any sort of political activities throughout State including in Jammu region, with a view to give free field to the BJP to consolidate its position. Even there are restrictions to effectively raise the day to day problems and issues faced by the people.
In this kind of political and security atmosphere, the Govt unilaterally and in a most arbitrary manner, ignoring all democratic and constitutional norms, has conducted the entire preparatory exercise without feeling the necessity of taking on board other parties so far and repeatedly claims to go ahead with BDC polls, that too on party basis. It clearly indicates the intentions of the ruling party and amounts to disrespecting the basic spirit of the democracy.
The meeting viewed that in this kind of prevailing political and security scenario and the politics of vendetta, being persued by the ruling class against political rivals, the mainstream parties find it difficult to make this electoral exercise meaningful, unless appropriate and conducive atmosphere is created by removing all sorts of restrictions on the political activities and creating adequate security environment including parity in the matter of security to the leaders of opposition parties and restoring the security measures withdrawn from them, in order to facilitate them to reach out to the grass root workers and the common people, for any kind of political process, to be successful, meaningful, fair and credible. The Government must create appropriate congenial atmosphere for the smooth and successful conduct of any electoral exercise, they said.
Prominent among those present in the meeting were Madan Lal Sharma, Tara Chand, Mula Ram, Jugal Kishore, Prakash Sharma, Ravinder Sharma, Yogesh Sawhney, Dr Manohar Lal, Vikar Rasool, Shabir Ahmed Khan, Shah Mohammad, Manjit Singh and others.
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