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Journalism of Courage
Devender Singh Rana, whose supporters often hailed him as the “voice of Jammu”, was the first politician in the UT of J&K to initiate a process of having a political narrative emanate from the plains.
So, with all the Kashmir Valley-dominated parties united under the banner of People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration (PAGD) to protest against the abrogation of Article 370, Rana resigned from the NC in 2021 and wrote to more than 200 people, including prominent citizens and leaders of all major parties, proposing a Jammu Declaration.
The 59-year-old Nagrota MLA died at a hospital in Faridabad in the NCR Thursday night. He had joined BJP in 2021. According to Rana, the Jammu Declaration was an evolving concept that the region, which has decades-long pent-up feelings of being discriminated against by successive governments in Srinagar, must have a voice for if J&K had to truly become “inclusive”.
Rana, the younger brother of Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh, was born in the village of Malhiri in Doda district in 1965. Like his father and another brother, both engineers, Rana studied civil engineering at the Regional Engineering College (now NIT) Kurukshetra, graduating in 1986.
Rana became a general secretary of the Jammu Consumer Council in 1989, with prominent journalist and Kashmir Times founder Ved Bhasin appointed its chairman. Rana joined active politics in 2000, becoming associated with the NC. A year later, he was appointed media advisor to the then party chief Omar Abdullah. In 2006, Rana became a member of the now-defunct state Legislative Council and remained a legislator till 2018. Appointed political advisor to then CM Omar from 2009-11, he was elected to the Assembly from Nagrota, a Hindu-dominated constituency, in 2014.
Amid the churn caused by the events of 2019, Rana finally ended over two decades of ties with the NC in 2021 and moved to the BJP, a natural home for his politics of rights for Jammu. After joining the BJP, he organised the first-ever BJP rally in the Muslim-dominated Bathindi area of Jammu, where many NC leaders, including former CMs Dr Farooq Abdullah and Omar, lived.
Rana decided to float the idea of the Jammu Declaration to evolve a consensus among the people of the region to have their own political narrative as he felt that certain voices wanted the division of Jammu region based on religion and geography since the abrogation of Article 370. These forces, he believed, needed to be defeated by creating a narrative representing the “pluralistic ethos of Jammu”.
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