Disputed state: BJP denies any shift in stance on Kashmir

Party wouldn’t resile from its demand of seeking changes in Article 370 of Constitution.

NEW DELHI:

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has denied a claim of Kashmiri leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani that its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi had sent emissaries to meet Geelani on the Kashmir issue.

The denial suggests the party is in no mood to reconsider its position on the festering disputed state, which has been a bone of contention between Pakistan and India since the 1947 partition.

While campaigning in the disputed Himalayan state, Modi had said that his party would not resile from its demand of seeking changes in Article 370 of the Indian Constitution which provides constitutional protection to Kashmir.

This means several laws that apply in the rest of India regarding ownership of property, etc, do not apply to Kashmir. A caveat was added by past BJP president Nitin Gadkari who said this was the BJP’s position, but other parties in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) should not feel compelled to subscribe to it.

Creating a political flutter, Geelani said Modi had sent two emissaries to him to discuss the Kashmir issue while he was getting medical treatment in Delhi. Geelani said he refused to meet the emissaries on a matter of principle — as Modi had collaborated in a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat. However, today BJP denied Geelani’s statement and said no one had met Geelani.



From the BJP’s point of view, it was important to loudly contest such a claim as such a meeting would have meant that the BJP may have been softening its stand on the status of disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir and taking a more benign view of the role of the local Kashmiri leaders in the whole discourse.

Rejecting Geelani’s claims as ‘baseless and mischievous’, BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said no representative of the Gujarat chief minister has ever met the Kashmiri leader. “We would like to demand from Geelani that he must apologise for making this false and unfounded statement,” said Prasad.

“The BJP is committed to development of Jammu and Kashmir where good governance is the biggest casualty and where corruption has led to loss of development and progress.”

Interestingly, newspapers in Kashmir reported that Jamaat-e-Islami, one of the biggest groups in the All Parties Hurriyat Conference of which Geelani is chairman, said no one sent by Modi had met them.

Jamaat chief Mohammad Abdullah Wani said, “No one from Modi or BJP met me. They may have met Geelani because he is a big leader but as far as I am concerned, nobody met me.”

Controversial remarks

In remarks that are bound to create a big political storm, a BJP leader from Bihar suggested at a rally on Saturday that those who oppose his party’s prime ministerial candidate Modi will have to leave India and move to Pakistan after the results of the general election are announced.

“Those who want to stop Modi (from becoming prime minister) are looking towards Pakistan. In the coming days, they will have no place in India. They will only have place in Pakistan,” Giriraj Singh said while addressing a gathering in Godda district of Jharkhand.

Singh made the remarks in the presence of senior party leader and former president Nitin Gadkari. He is the party’s candidate from Bihar.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 20^th, 2014.