Jammu & Kashmir is not personal property of one family

Arun Jaitley on Kishtwar

JAMMU, Aug 13: Senior BJP leader and Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley, who was detained at Jammu Airport for hours on August 11 and sent back to Delhi from the airport itself, on Monday, tore into the Omar Abdullah-led coalition government and the Congress-led UPA Government. Arun Jaitley had come to Jammu to proceed towards Kishtwar, which on August 9 witnessed riots on an unprecedented scale with members of the minority community being the targets of the motivated and fully armed rioters, to study the situation on ground zero and help defuse the situation in the district. The Omar Abdullah government, which is being accused by the affected people of the area and all the opposition parties of allowing the situation to deteriorate, had imposed curfew/section 144 and refused permission to Arun Jaitley to visit Kishtwar.

Tearing into the Omar Abdullah government in Rajya Sabha, Arun Jaitley said many things. He said the situation as it existed in Kishtwar was alarming and compared it with the situation in Kashmir as it prevailed there in early 1990, when the miniscule minority migrated to Jammu to save their lives, dignity, culture and religion. He warned the government that any laxity on their part to rein in anti-national elements might enable them to replicate Kashmir in Kishtwar and this was not acceptable. He said when the rioters were indulging in loot, arson and violence, the police and civil administration watched things as a mute spectator and added that the local administration behaved in a partisan manner by not allowing admission to the injured persons belonging to the minority community in the District Hospital Kishtwar.

But more than that, Arun Jaitley questioned the credentials of the Abdullah family without, of course, naming it. He said, "Jammu & Kashmir is not the personal property of one family" and "the State is an integral part of India". Obviously, he hinted at the Abdullah family. He also accused the Congress-led UPA Government of being callous and irresponsible. To make his point, he referred to the telephonic conversation between BJP national president Rajnath Singh and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which had taken place within minutes after the rioters unleashed their reign of brutalities holding Pakistani flags and guns, petrol bottles and lathis and shouting anti-India slogans.

The most significant aspect of the whole situation was that almost all the opposition parties virtually supported Arun Jaitley and condemned the Omar Abdullah government as just incompetent. Union Minister and Omar Abdullah's father, Farooq Abdullah, did raise a point of order, but no one took him seriously. He only cut a sorry figure. As expected, the Congress and the UPA Government defended the Omar Abdullah Government to the hilt. It must remain a matter of grave concern that the Congress and its allies like the NCP of Shard Pawar, instead of sharing the grief and sorrow of the affected persons, sided with the otherwise roundly condemned Omar Abdullah-led coalition government

Source: http://earlytimesnews.com/newsdet.aspx?q=111837