CHENNAI, Tamilnadu (India)—Interacting with the media in Chennai on August 11, the former Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram strongly criticized the BJP government for ending the special status of J&K by scrapping the Article 370. He said that the BJP government won’t have ended Article 370, if it had been a state with Hindu majority.
Chidambaram said the situation in Jammu and Kashmir was unstable and only international news agencies were covering the unrest, while the Indian media houses were not.
“They (BJP) claim Kashmir is stable. Is it? Does it mean stable if Indian media houses don’t cover the unrest in J&K?” he said.
Taking on the seven regional parties namely AIADMK, YSRCP, TRS, BJD, AAP, TMC, JDU for not opposing the BJP government’s move, Chidambaram said that they did not cooperate against the BJP’s move out of fear.
“If these parties would have shown solidarity against the BJP government’s move in Rajya Sabha, the opposition had been in majority in Rajya Sabha,” he added.
Torpedoing the claims of BJP government that there was no protest in J&K, Chidambaram said that it is a truth that around 10,000 people protested in Soura in J&K and shootings happened during the stir.
“In the 70-year history of the nation, there has never been an example of a state being reduced to a Union Territory and it has always been the converse,” said Chidambaram.
“Today, Jammu and Kashmir has been turned into a municipality…There are special provisions for other states under Article 371, why only J and K…This is because of religious fanaticism. If J&K was a Hindu dominated state, BJP would not have done this. They did it only because the region is dominated by Muslims,” the former union minister stated.
“BJP is bragging of integrating Kashmir with muscle power,” he added.
Hitting out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for selectively talking about laws that do not apply for J&K on the day he addressed the nation after abrogation of Article 370, the Congress leader said, “I can list out 90 other laws that apply to J&K.”
Although the BJP leaders have accused P. Chidambaram of giving a communal color to the issue but CPI’s general secretary D Raja has backed Chidambaram by terming the scrapping of Article 370 as a forced narrative of Kashmir’s integration with India.
