Srinagar: People’s Conference president and Handwara MLA Sajad Gani Lone on Wednesday criticised the reservation system in Jammu and Kashmir, describing it as “recruitment apartheid”.
His remarks came after the recently announced appointments to the Jammu and Kashmir Administrative Service (JKAS) and J&K Accounts (Gazetted) cadres, in which only 10 of the 55 selected officers are from the Kashmir Valley.
“Out of 55 JKAS and J&K Accounts (Gazetted) officers selected, only 10 are from Kashmir Valley. So against a population ratio of 56 per cent, inhabitants of Kashmir have got 18 per cent of the jobs,” Lone, also the PC chief, said in a post on X.
Lone said Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, who distributed the appointment orders, should have “ideally kept away”.
“This is recruitment apartheid. And persecution of the inhabitants of the Kashmir Valley. A strategy to disempower and marginalise the inhabitants of Kashmir Valley,” he said.
Lone said the reservation system was a “Jammu vs Kashmir issue”, alleging that it was aimed at “ethnically disempowering” people from the Valley.
“And this Kashmir region 56 per cent vs 18 per cent recruitment figure will not be changed if the so-called file sent by the elected government to the Union government is approved. At best it will increase to 19 per cent, against 56 per cent population,” he said.
The PC president said he would raise the issue in the Assembly through appropriate legislative devices and hoped political parties would highlight its severity.
“Call a spade a spade. Which would mean saying it explicitly and unambiguously that the present reservation system in place is a methodology to disempower and relegate to the margins, the inhabitants of Kashmir Valley,” he said.
