Reiterating the stand of his party–National Conference (NC) on full statehood to Jammu and Kashmir, the deputy chief minister Surinder Choudhary, on Saturday, said panchayat elections without statehood would serve no real purpose.
If panchayati raj institutions (PRIs) are elected, we want them to be respected in a real sense. We had DDC chairmen, municipal mayors and deputy mayors, and municipal committee chairmen, but none in the bureaucracy, including deputy magistrates, bothered about them. Were they really respected? We don’t have any control over police, IAS and IPS cadre officers. What kind of government (administrative model) is this? The way injustice is done to us, we would not like representatives of PRIs, who are also humiliated and officials refuse to obey them. Choudhary’s remarks come amid discussion over holding panchayat elections in Jammu and Kashmir. “My brother fought terrorism during peak militancy. He is the one who braved bullets of the terrorists. We are sons of a soldier. There are certain officers ‘who implicated him’. The time will come when they will be taken care of. What the anti-corruption bureau has achieved in the past six months. I would not like to go into it and leave it to agencies and the judiciary.
Ask the BJP what they did during their rule of 10 to 12 years. Omar government has been repeatedly demanding full restoration of statehood to J&K, which was reduced to a Union territory with the legislature on August 5, 2019. Because when you have state status, panchayats are empowered in reality, responding to media queries on a visit to Gandhinagar Government Hospital, Choudhary said, “We demanded statehood, but they (the BJP government) tell us that it would be given at an appropriate time. “Therefore, such elections don’t serve any purpose…for instance Omar Abdullah’s government.
We don’t want such hoax elections,” he said. We have full faith in our judiciary,” he said.
