J&K Peoples Conference President and MLA Handwara Sajad Lone on Saturday said that the recently published JKAS statistical results validated his party’s longstanding stance on reservations.
The findings, he noted, reaffirm almost precisely the arguments he has made both on the floor of the Assembly and through earlier data presentations on social media.
“The JKAS statistical results endorse almost every point I have raised on behalf of my party in the Assembly,” Lone said. “The projections nearly overlap with our claims.”
Lone, who has consistently framed the reservations debate in structural rather than procedural terms, said the core problem continues to be misdiagnosed.
“The single biggest problem in reservations still remains in not understanding the structural issues,” he said, identifying what he called a pattern of regional inequity hardwired into existing policy. “It is a problem of regional imbalance, perpetuated by an extremely unfair and biased reservation policy.”
He was unsparing in his assessment of what he sees as institutional reluctance to confront reality. “As long as we do not properly diagnose the disease and accept the disease as it exists, no remedy is possible,” Lone said.
PC chairman laid out three conditions he said were non-negotiable for any credible path forward. The first was political will, “a government with some spine.” The second was a commitment to evidence-based governance, arguing that authorities must use available resources to conduct rigorous, data-backed research.
Laying out a roadmap for meaningful reform, Lone outlined three non-negotiable conditions: political will
“Governments, especially in trying times like when we are a UT, can’t base their recommendations on gossip,” he said. The third condition, he argued, was intellectual honesty at the level of government and the broader polity, “the intellectual capability to understand the inherent structural imbalances, based on regionalism.”
Lone, over the last year, has been highlighting issues related to the underrepresentation of Kashmiris in government jobs and reservations.
