J&K polls: Looking for a govt that will understand pain of living on Pak border

Arnia: Early on Saturday, Jaspal Singh, 68, left his home in Arnia sector, a frontier area in Jammu along the International Border with Pakistan, to cast his vote. Singh’s right leg was amputated after a shell fired by Pakistani troopers exploded few meters in a farm where he was working but he was among the first voters to queue outside a polling station in Pindi Khattar village. Most of the residents in Pindi Khattar, like most of those living in border areas of Arnia, are dependent on agriculture for their living and people till their land for rice right up to the International Border. [caption id=“attachment_1936349” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Jaspal Singh’s right leg was amputated after a shell fired by Pakistani troopers exploded few meters in a farm where he was working. Sameer Yasir[/caption] Singh lives with his wife in a single storied house. Sitting on a cot, he said he wanted a strong government to in Jammu and Kashmir which would be able to stop the frequent ceasefire violations in his village. “I lost my leg like dozens of others, but I don’t want this to happen to anyone here in the future. This is the reason whenever firing happens here, we just abandon our houses and leave for the plains in Jammu, like in the recent firing,” he said. Pindi Khattar is a tiny hamlet, 43 km south of Jammu city, where Pakistani militants occupied an abandoned bunker and fired at the Indian Army soldiers on 27 November. The encounter happened close to the India-Pakistan border and it ended after 12 people were killed, including five civilians and three army personnel. All four militants who had entered India from across the border were hiding behind a culvert when Territorial Army personnel spotted them. A fierce gun battle ensued and the terrorists, who were in combat fatigues, entered two abandoned bunkers. The attack happened as Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a polling rally in Udhampur, some 100 km from Arnia. Most of the times the villagers here are awakened in the dead of night by loud explosions and gunfire. It was the worst affected village in Jammu in the cycle of violence that erupted in October early this year in one of the heaviest fighting reported in over a decade. But Singh says the successive governments in Jammu and Kashmir have failed to push for a strong peace initiative that would insure peace and prosperity in their lives. “All the governments have been Kashmir-centric. They never understood the pain of people living along the borders in Jammu. We want a government that is capable of stopping this. BJP is the only party which has made such promises to us,” Singh says, as his son, a soldier in the BSF posted in Kashmir, looks on. Much of the Jammu’s border districts went to polls on Saturday. These constituencies are eyed by the BJP for achieving its Mission 44+, a highly ambitious program to form the government on its own in the state. For that to happen, the RSS pracharaks worked in the remote corners of Jammu borders from many years. Whenever the incidents of firing happened from across the border, the RSS activists descended in these areas and set up camps to provide financial help to the affected residents which would help the party. Despite cold weather, long lines of people were marching towards the polling stations in Jammu on Saturday to exercise their franchise. Security arrangements along the India-Pakistan border have been strengthened in the three border districts with troops put on alert for polls. As many as 18,28,904 eligible voters comprising of 959,011 men and 869,891 women are expected to exercise their franchise at 2,366 polling stations set up across the three border districts. By 2 pm, over 50 percent votes were polled in 20 constituencies. In the 2008 assembly elections, the BJP got most of the seats from these three border districts. But just hours before Jammu went to polls, two BJP candidates attacked in Nowshera and Billawar areas of Rajouri Friday evening, allegedly by the opposition, leaving Nowshera’s BJP candidate, Ravinder Raina wounded. Ahead of the polls, a village-head associated with the Congress party was also killed in Bomai village near Sopore by unknown gunmen on Saturday morning.