Minister of State (MoS) in the Prime Minister’s Office Jitendra Singh said on Sunday that the issue of Kashmir is “the accumulative outcome of the mistakes committed by the Congress” and the Bharatiya Janata Party is “clearing the mess”.
Speaking to media persons at the sidelines of the BJP executive meet at SKICC here, Singh made these remarks a day after Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said that the Kashmir problem was the result of Congress’s “flawed policy”.
“We are trying to clear the mess created by Congress in its 60 years of rule – the mess that was created by successive governments of Congress, right from the dawn of Independence with the infamous Nehruvian blunders,” Singh said.
Referring to the statement of Congress leader P Chidambaram that when people in Kashmir demand ‘Azadi’ they actually mean “greater autonomy”, Singh said that the BJP doesn’t need lectures from leaders like Chidambaram.
President of BJP’s J&K unit, Sat Sharma, said that the NIA raids have “broken the backbone of Hurriyat” and by 2022, “we should have a Hurriyat-free J&K”.
“After the killing of Burhan Wani, things had changed drastically in Kashmir, but we restored the peace with greater efforts from the central as well as the state government. We have come out of that turmoil now,” Sharma said, asking party workers to start preparing the ground for the upcoming Panchayat polls.
“We are yet to open an account in Kashmir valley, but we are hopeful of a good start in the next polls. The enthusiasm I see in the BJP workers of Kashmir is worth appreciating,” he said.
Appealing to members and workers of the BJP’s coalition partner PDP to provide help, Sharma said that the dream of both the late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the same: to bring peace to the valley.