A letter of dissent from top Congress leader Gh Nabi Azad attracting allegation of his hobnobbing with the BJP and the cancellation of a meeting of top PDP leaders called by the Party Patron Muzaffar Hussain Beig have pushed both the former Chief Minister Azad and former Deputy Chief Minister Beig of erstwhile Jammu & Kashmir state in dock. Interestingly both Azad and Beig as Chief Minister and Deputy Chief Minister were heading the Congress and PDP parts of the erstwhile Congress-PDP coalition government in erstwhile Jammu & Kashmir state but both had to bow out of the highest offices over highly provocative political controversies. The land row triggered by a highly provocative decision over the allotment of several hundreds of acres of forest land to Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board (SASB) by the Government headed by Gh Nabi Azad and Muzafffar Hussain Beig was the cause of the beginning of a regional and religious polarization in erstwhile Jammu & Kashmir state. Interestingly from 2008 onwards the presence of Kashmir’s top regional mainstream parties National Conference and PDP was confined to muslim majority areas in Kashmir valley and parts of Jammu region but on the contrary the presence of national parties BJP and Congress was confined to hindu dominated pockets of Jammu region only in 2009 assembly elections and intensity of the trend saw Congress loosing to BJP in hindu dominated pockets of Jammu region in 2014 assembly elections . Consequently religious polarising tendencies triggered by 2008 land row agitation in Kashmir and Jammu regions witnessed an unprecedented rise in 2009 and 2014 assembly elections as a result of which two successive fractured mandates fueled the spirits of religious intolerance in both the Kashmir and Jammu regions.
The leaders who tend to carry out highly provocative actions against the top leaderships of their own parties by all standards of understandabilities can’t be trusted by the people at large in Jammu & Kashmir. Never forget that trust deficit has led to the fall of the previous PDP-BJP coalition government also and resulted in the downgrading of the erstwhile Jammu & Kashmir state to two union territories and withdrawal of special status to it on August 5 last year. So political wisdom demands that both Azad and Beig learns from their action and take care of their own political credentials before delivering sermons on political integrity.
Had the land row not erupted in 2008 under the Congress-PDP coalition Government headed by Azad and Beig respectively, the people of erstwhile Jammu & Kashmir state won’t have been pushed into a messy political situation faced by them since last three years of direct central rule in the divided territories of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladhak. The top leaderships of Congress and PDP taking serious note of the highly controversial actions of their very senior party leaders Azad and Beig respectively shows that they (Azad and Beig) are themselves becoming the casualties of trust deficit now. The leaders who tend to carry out highly provocative actions against the top leaderships of their own parties by all standards of understandabilities can’t be trusted by the people at large in Jammu & Kashmir. Never forget that trust deficit has led to the fall of the previous PDP-BJP coalition government also and resulted in the downgrading of the erstwhile Jammu & Kashmir state to two union territories and withdrawal of special status to it on August 5 last year. So political wisdom demands that both Azad and Beig learns from their action and take care of their own political credentials before delivering sermons on political integrity.
