Katra is one of the major tourist destination of Jammu & Kashmir. Beginning with Navratras, a nine-day Navratra festival has also started there. Although Katra will observe heavy influx of tourists and pilgrims during this period, yet it has found no mention in any of J&K Tourism Department’s social media accounts.
As the posts on their facebook and twitter accounts are almost the same, here is a quick analysis of their twitter profile–
The twitter account, with @JandKTourism as their twitter handle, didn’t care to post a single post about the Navratra festival or anything which promotes Katra, even at least for this particular period of Navratras.
Here are all their tweets from yesterday:
(Please mind that above screenshot is showing a retweet, not a tweet!)
Visit to such high altitude lakes is a dream come true#Jammu #Kashmir #JKTourism
Photo/Alpine Adventures pic.twitter.com/8la7VRj9TS— JKTourism (Official) (@JandKTourism) September 21, 2017
Digging deeper in the twitter account and Facebook page gave further insight about the ignorance (or arrogance) of the team managing the account. In last 10 days, i.e. between September 11 and 21; there were 43 tweets about Kashmir or things related to Kashmir, 5 about Ladakh and only 4 about Jammu (out of which 3 were just retweets). The sole tweet by JKTourism promoting Jammu region was a picture of Bhaderwah.
There is no posting of the Navratra Festival on social media of JK Tourism till today except one RT on Inauguration of Navratra Festival.
State Tourism Department is doing praise worthy work in organizing Navratra Festival but step motherly treatment to Navratra Festival on social media cuts a sorry figure for the department.
Even the cover video on their facebook profile shows Kashmir alone. Here is a link to the video
https://www.facebook.com/JKTourismOfficial/videos/1504656549611405/
The biased attitude is nothing new and Jammu has always been neglected. Talking of Jammu & Kashmir Tourism Development Corporation, which is a corporation owned by the J&K state government, some disturbing evidences of their parochial attitude were found.
On landing at their website, one is welcomed with big banner slides promoting only Kashmir. And under the slideshow of these banner ads, could be seen another three thumbnails again promoting the same destination!
(Please mind that some dates mentioned in the slides could be misleading)
The article can not be closed yet as there are many questions unaswered.