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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Cong: BJP-PDP handling Kashmir threat to unity

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NEW DELHI: The Congress on Monday slammed both the Centre and the PDP-BJP government in Jammu and Kashmir, and said their handling of the situation in Kashmir is detrimental to the national unity and security.


At least 15 policemen, including three senior officers, were injured in clashes between protesting students and security forces. Refusing to join classes, the students came out on the roads to block traffic on the busy road.


Asserting that the central government lacks a policy on how to handle the situation in Kashmir, the Congress asked it to “articulate its policy towards the Kashmir situation in clear-cut terms”.


“The manner in which the BJP-led government at the Centre and the state’s coalition government of the BJP and PDP have handled the Kashmir situation is completely detrimental to both national security and integration,” Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said.


“One can see the manifestations of this fallacious policy play itself out in other parts of India too,” he added.


“Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday. After the meeting, we heard from her but nothing from either Modi or the PMO.”


“We held discussions on various issues...the agenda of alliance between the PDP-BJP,” Mehbooba told reporters after the meeting at the Prime Minister’s 7, Lok Kalyan Marg residence.


She said her father, late Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed “had given a roadmap” for lasting peace in the state.


“We need a dialogue. We can’t be confronting our own people for too long. We cannot hold talks when on one side stones are being thrown and bullets fired from the other side,” she said.


She said she also stressed on the prime minister to compensate people of the state for the losses they have suffered due to the Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan.


Mehbooba said she was confident of finding a solution to the festering trouble in the Kashmir Valley.


“I have (called) a Unified Command meeting,” she said of the security grid she heads in the state.


“We will find a line of action. There are people who are disillusioned and there are others who are being provoked.”


Tewari said that there could not be more damning statement than her ‘we are where Vajpayee (then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee) left us’ about a complete lack of policy of the prime minister and his government on the situation in the state.


“Nothing proves this more than the extremely poor turnout in the Srinagar-Budgam Lok Sabha seat bypoll and postponement of voting in Anantnag, continuing tension on India-Pakistan border, the fragile internal security in the valley, and ever-increasing and deepening contradictions between the Bharatiya Janata Party and Peoples Democratic Party,” the Congress leader said.


— Agencies


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