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Jammu set to witness interesting contests

By Luv Puri

JAMMU SEPT. 21. The three prestigious seats of Jammu City — Jammu East, Jammu West and Jammu Cantonment are all set to witness interesting electoral battles.

In the 1996 Assembly elections, the seats were bagged by the BJP. But in the February by-election to the Jammu Lok Sabha constituency, the party performed poorly in all the three Assembly segments. According to senior party leaders, the poor performance in the city mainly contributed to the loss of the Lok Sabha seat the BJP held in two consecutive elections.

In public, the leaders attribute the poor response to its campaign to the emergence of the recently-formed Jammu State Morcha. But in private, they admit that much before the morcha was formed, people started losing faith in the party. For instance, the Jammu East Assembly segment, where the BJP used to be an undisputed winner is witnessing a triangular contest among the sitting BJP MLA, Ashok Khajuria, the Jammu State Morcha's Tilak Raj and the Congress leader, Yogesh Sawhney.

It will be a keenly contested election in Jammu West, where the size of the electorate is 1.63 lakhs. The Morcha candidate, Prof. Veirender Gupta, takes on the Congress vice-president and former MP, Mangat Ram Sharma. The Assembly segment has a substantial refugee vote with most of the migrants from the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir areas of Kotli, Mirpur and Muzaffarabad who have voted for the BJP in the past. The big question will be whether the votes for the BJP will get transferred to the Morcha candidate.

Jammu Cantonment, one of the most prosperous areas of the region, is also set to witness a good contest: a four-cornered fight among the National Conference, the Congress, the BJP and the Jammu State Morcha. The segment has a sizeable strength of Sikhs who migrated in 1947 from the Poonch belt, which went to Pakistan.

The National Conference and the BJP have both given ticket to Sikh candidates. The Congress has chosen a youth leader, Raman Bhalla, and the Morcha's candidate is Onkar Seth.

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