New Delhi, Aug. 13: The BJP today called for redrawing boundaries of Assembly and parliamentary seats in Jammu and Kashmir, an exercise the party said was long due to end years of discrimination against the state’s Hindu-majority part.

“The delimitation exercise was meant for the entire country and why should Jammu and Kashmir be left out?” said senior leader M. Venkaiah Naidu, though he added that his party wouldn’t like the state polls, scheduled later this year, to be put off.

The Congress slammed the BJP’s demand and said it was trying to “fish in troubled waters” and showed its “utter callousness”.

Naidu cited statistics to back up his demand for delimitation, which observers said would change profiles of constituencies to the BJP’s advantage in Hindu-dominated Jammu.

He said the Jammu region had 28,92,290 voters while Kashmir had 25,46,913. But Jammu had 37 Assembly seats to the Muslim-majority Valley’s 46. “Jammu has two Lok Sabha constituencies and the Valley has three,” he added.

The BJP’s problem is that even in Jammu, Muslims are in a majority in 12 of the 37 seats. So delimitation, sources said, could work to the party’s benefit in the region, which has a strong RSS network.

Naidu also talked about “discrimination and neglect” of the Jammu region for long and argued that steps should be taken to address these concerns.

Even in the allocation of central funds and welfare schemes, he said, Jammu loses out though its area (26,000sqkm) is bigger than the Valley’s (15,000sqkm).

The BJP’s demand for delimitation — which the party said was a “constitutionally approved process long due in the state — has come six years after the Kuldip Singh Commission started the exercise in 2002. But Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s BJP-led government, which appointed the commission, had then agreed with other parties that Jammu and Kashmir should be kept out of the exercise.