Yash Khajuria
Jammu: The Government of India on Friday late evening amended its order on Domicile rights in the matter of employment for Jammu and Kashmir reserving all the government jobs of all levels exclusively for the residents of Jammu and Kashmir.
The addendum to its previous order was issued by the Ministry of home affairs after an uproar by all the political parties especially Jammu Kashmir Apni Party whose president Syed Mohammad Altaf Bukhari today had apprised the national security advisor Ajit Doval and the union home minister Amit Shah about the short comings in the order.
The developments that took place in Delhi on Friday with regard to the domicile law is said to be in continuation of meetings that took place between Bukhari led JKAP delegation and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah on March 14-15, 2020.
Pertinently, the Centre’s domicile policy had drawn flak from all quarters. Earlier, in the day MHA sources had indicated that it was soon going to amend the domicile order.
Even the Jammu unit of the BJP was worried and upset over the domicile order. The local unit had also lagged these concerns with the party’s national leadership and also with Union Home Minister Amit Shah. “According to what we gathered from the notification, only Group D jobs will be reserved for locals, while others are open for all. We have been told that the provincial services board will take care of some levels of hiring keeping locals in mind, but that is just oral assurance, the notification itself does not reassure us,” said a senior leader in Jammu BJP.
The notification, which came out on Wednesday in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, defines rules for claiming domicile and access to reserved government jobs for the people of the Union Territory. The reservation for domiciles will not apply to Group A and Group B posts and only to level 4 posts or posts that carry a payscale not more than level 4. “This means that all the higher level jobs are out of the purview of reservation for domiciles, also the 15-year threshold for claiming domicile means that anyone who comes in to work in J&K and stays on for 15 years, their children, if they stay here, will be considered for domicile,” said a source. No cut off date for calculating this 15- year period has, as yet, been notified.
“We are facing a popular backlash from our people on this issue and it will harm us as and when polls take place,” said a local leader who did not want to come on record.
Moreover, the BJP general secretary Ram Madhav, who has been handling Jammu and Kashmir for the party for a long time, today said that there were issues that the Jammu unit of the party had flagged, and that “their fears are valid.”
He also confirmed that Shah had been also been apprised of the concerns of the people of Jammu and he had assured that he would look into it. “There are some issues with regard to the domicile notification that have been flagged, especially with regards to reserving jobs for locals, and to an extent these fears are valid,” said Madhav.
The Ministry of Home Affairs’ reply to a parliamentary panel on February 18 stated that there were over 84,000 vacancies in J&K, of which 22,078 vacancies pertained to Class IV jobs, 54375 to non-gazetted and 7552 vacancies in gazetted posts.
(TEN)
