The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Saturday set preconditions for joining the National Conference’s proposed protest at Jantar Mantar on July 20, saying it would participate only if the restoration of Article 370 and the release of political prisoners are central to the agenda.
PDP president Mehbooba Mufti said participating in a protest confined solely to the demand for statehood “would amount to putting the last nail in the coffin of our larger constitutional struggle for Article 370, thus legitimising the BJP’s illegal actions of August 5, 2019.”
“Our fight is for constitutional rights, not one-time symbolic gestures,” she said.
In a letter to National Conference president Farooq Abdullah, Mufti said that after careful consideration and consultations with her senior colleagues, she had concluded that “it would not be in the fitness of things for us to participate in a protest whose raison d’être is solely and exclusively the demand for statehood.”
“Not only does this half-hearted demand echo and legitimise the BJP’s odious narrative of relegating Article 370 to the back burner, but it also risks whitewashing the illegal and unconstitutional harakiri carried out in stealth on August 5, 2019,” she said.
Mufti said “the collective humiliation and dehumanisation inflicted upon the people of Jammu and Kashmir remains seared into our collective memory.”
She alleged that in the years since the abrogation of Article 370, “there has been a concerted institutional onslaught on the collective identity, rights, dignity, jobs, land and resources of the people of J&K.”
The PDP chief further said that “even after two years of forming the government, I have witnessed with deep concern how the NC has begun to normalise and whitewash the BJP’s agenda by reducing J&K’s larger political struggle to the narrow and diminishing narrative of statehood.”
“What is even more worrying is that your government has become not merely a mute spectator but, regrettably, equally complicit in disempowering policy decisions such as the summary dismissal of government employees, harassment of Jamaat and its affiliated schools, arbitrary detentions, the systematic purge of our rich literature, and the wanton destruction of J&K’s fragile environment, all under the guise of development,” Mufti said.
She said it would be “a grave injustice, a disservice and a sheer betrayal” to reduce the aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to the demand for statehood alone.
“We must rise above partisan politics and come together to fight for Article 370. Demanding anything shorn of it would amount to a shameful surrender of our rights and dignity—an unforgivable footnote that will condemn each one of us in the annals of J&K’s history,” Mufti said.