Geography is a legacy feature. That seems to be the operating logic for Erlam Ghulam Ali Khatana, a BJP Rajya Sabha member who supposedly represents the people of Jammu and Kashmir but treats his development budget like a venture capital fund for Uttar Pradesh.

It’s a glitch in the democratic interface. Khatana, nominated to the Upper House to give a voice to a region that’s been stuck in a political loading screen for years, decided the best way to serve his constituents in Srinagar or Jammu was to cut checks for projects over 500 miles away. Under the Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS), each MP gets ₹5 crore a year to fix what’s broken in their backyard. Small stuff. A community hall here, a tube well there. Basic hardware for the social OS.

But according to the latest data, Khatana isn’t interested in local maintenance. He’s looking for scale. Out of his allocated funds, a massive chunk didn't go to the freezing villages of the Pir Panjal range. It went to UP. Specifically, to places like Lucknow and Varanasi. It’s a bold move. It’s also a slap in the face to a region where "development" is usually just a buzzword used to justify another internet blackout.

The friction here isn’t just about the money. It’s the trade-off. J&K is a place where the infrastructure is held together by prayer and old copper wiring. Every rupee spent in UP is a school room not built in Kupwara. It’s a road not paved in Ganderbal. While J&K residents navigate erratic power grids and crumbling bridges, their representative is busy funding projects in the political heartland of the ruling party. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature of how "representation" works when you aren't actually elected by the people you’re supposed to represent.

Khatana’s defense is the usual PR fluff. He claims he’s helping "marginalized communities" in UP. It’s a touching sentiment if you ignore the fact that UP is already the most politically pampered state in the country. It’s the equivalent of a tech CEO taking a government subsidy meant for rural broadband and using it to upgrade the Wi-Fi in a San Francisco penthouse. It might technically be "infrastructure," but it’s not where the need is.

We love to talk about the "digitalization" of governance in India. There are dashboards for everything. You can track MPLAD spending with a few clicks. But data transparency doesn't mean accountability. The dashboard shows you exactly where the heist is happening, in high-resolution charts. It tells the people of J&K that their representative thinks their votes—or their lack thereof, given the stalled state of local elections—don’t carry the same ROI as a project in the Hindi heartland.

There’s a cynical brilliance to it. If you’re a nominated member, you don’t have to worry about a "deleted" account at the next ballot box. You aren't beholden to the local hardware. You serve the cloud—the central party leadership. And the cloud wants to keep UP happy. UP has 80 Lok Sabha seats. J&K has five and a whole lot of baggage. In the cold math of political survival, the choice to divert funds is an easy one.

The MPLADS guidelines are supposed to have guardrails. They say an MP "shall" focus on their constituency or state. But "shall" is one of those soft words in the legal dictionary. It’s a suggestion, not a hard-coded rule. Khatana found the loophole and drove a convoy of development funds right through it.

Meanwhile, back in J&K, the narrative of "Naya Kashmir" is being sold on billboards. It’s a glossy pitch about progress, connectivity, and local growth. But when the actual cash starts flowing, it seems to have a GPS error that reroutes it to the plains of the Ganges.

It’s a classic case of representative arbitrage. You take the title from one place and the influence from another, then you spend the capital where it buys you the most career security. It makes you wonder what the "J&K" prefix in his title actually stands for.

If a representative for a state spends the majority of his budget in a different state, who is he actually representing? Or is the "local" in Local Area Development Scheme just another term the system has successfully deprecated?