The panel, headed by retired Supreme Court Justice Ranjana Desai and Chief Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra, recommended that at least one nominee from the Pandit community should be a woman. It states that the nominated members can be given voting rights in the House in the same way as the members of the Legislative Assembly in Puducherry.
“The displaced persons from POJK also requested the commission to reserve some seats for them in the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly,” the panel said in a news release in New Delhi on Thursday. The previous J&K Assembly had allowed nomination of two women MLAs. Until the Modi government got rid of this provision in 2019, two members of the Anglo-Indian community were also nominated to the Lok Sabha.
The panel does not have the power to reserve seats for Pandits or displaced persons as it was tasked with redrawing the constituency map of the Union Territory including increasing seats on the basis of demographics. However, the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act, 2019 gave it the power to make reserved seats for Scheduled Tribes.
However, the recommendations are likely to open doors for designated representation for Kashmiri Pandits. The community had taken the matter to the Home Ministry and the PMO and demanded an amendment to the Reorganization Act to allow reservation of seats for Pandits. In discussions with the panel, it first introduced the union’s model of ‘temporary’ constituency in Sikkim. However, this reservation was included in the Constitution when Sikkim merged with the Indian Union, which was not the case with Pandits.
BJP’s Kashmiri Pandit leader Ashwini Chungu termed the recommendation as historic and demanded nominations for Kashmiri Sikhs as well. “We will put pressure on the government to make provision for nominations for five seats in the assembly and one in the parliament,” Chungu told ET.
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