Kharar village to boycott poll for fourth time running

MIRZAPUR KHARAR, AUG 31: Though the election scene is hotting up elsewhere, the residents of Mirzapur village, falling under Kharar sub...

MIRZAPUR KHARAR, AUG 31: Though the election scene is hotting up elsewhere, the residents of Mirzapur village, falling under Kharar sub-division and situated on the Punjab-Himachal border, remain impervious to the humdrum as they have decided to boycott the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections. Not a new decision for them; the 320 voters of this village have boycotted Lok Sabha polls in 1996, in protest against the non-development of the area.

A cross-section of the villagers told Newsline that the decision to boycott the ensuing parliamentary elections was taken early this month at a meeting chaired by village Sarpanch Lajja Ram and attended by all the village panchayat members, as well as residents.

Expressing resentment over the 8220;negligent8221; attitude of their elected representatives towards their day-to-day problems, Dila Ram, a former village sarpanch and Majri block Samiti member, said they were forced to take this decision following the 8220;falsepromises8221;made to them by the politicians during every election. He added that in the past 52 years, no politician had worked for the development of their villages. Dominated by Gujjars, the villagers eke out their livelihood by cutting elephant grass in the adjoining forest area as a major chunk of the cultivable land has come under a dam constructed here in 1994-95 to irrigate villages situated at a lower level than the village. The villagers complain that the state government has not, so far, declared the award for the cultivable land which has come under the dam.

The village sarpanch Lajja Ram says, 8220;Bahar duniya da sudhar ho gaya, sada sarkaran ne bera garak kar ditta.8221; He complains that with the coming up of the dam, the village remains cut-off from other areas during the rainy season and even during an emergency, patients cannot be shifted to a hospital.

Dev Singh, a village panch, said that the villagers had offered 200 acres to the Punjab government for the dam, which, at that site, would have been beneficial for the village. 8220;But the government did not accept the offer and now the villagers have to suffer floods every year,8221; he lamented. That is not the end of their complaints. 8220;There was a government ayurvedic dispensary in the village, but the lady doctor posted here has never visited the dispensary since its inception,8221; says Jaswant Kaur, a lady panch of the village. She adds that only one teacher is posted at the government primary school in the village, which has a strength of 70 students.

Baljit Singh, a village panch, said the Akali MLA from Morinda, Ravi Inder Singh, had assured to fulfill their long-pending demands in the 1997 Assembly elections, but nothing has been done even after more than two years. Highlighting the backwardness and lack of basic civic amenities in the village, Amar Singh, a village elder, said that at present there were about 70 unmarried youths here as nobody was ready to marry their girls in the village.

Moreover, till date, no candidate contesting elections from the Roopnagar reserve Lok Sabha constituency had bothered to visit the village, the villagers added.