With six rebel MLAs not attending her first public function in Srinagar on Saturday, Mehbooba Mufti claimed that she was never in favour of any alliance with the BJP and had opposed her late father when he was giving the PDP-BJP coalition a thought.
She said that she had been talking to the Centre for the release of Hurriyat leaders from NIA custody in order to establish peace in Kashmir. She claimed New Delhi did not listen to her.
In her first public appearance, after BJP withdrew support from her government, she said that it was like drinking a cup of poison to become the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir with the help of the BJP. She said that her late father Mufti Muhammad Sayeed believed that Narendra Modi with a brute majority in the Lok Sabha will end the sufferings of the people of Kashmir and he overruled all her apprehensions about the BJP dispensation, driven by his urge to resolve the Kashmir dispute.
Reacting to her “cup of poison” remark, Omar Abdullah took to Twitter and questioned Mehbooba Mufti that if the alliance with BJP was so poisonous, then why she waited so long to be finally sacked by the same party. Omar claimed in another tweet that she was happy to poison the people of Kashmir with her toxic opportunism.
She was speaking to her party workers on the foundation day of her party, PDP, which was founded in 1999. In order to cater to the soft separatist image of her party in Kashmir, she claimed that she did not allow the BJP to tinker with Article 370 and also did not allow the NIA to arrest people without any proof. She said that she had told Prime Minister Narendra Modi many times that development and the financial packages alone will not solve the problem of Kashmir, but dialogue will.
Making her rhetoric shriller in Srinagar, she said that Article 35(A) was a challenge for all Kashmir political parties and she appealed to them to be united on this issue and to come forward and defend the Article. She claimed that although there was a lot of pressure from the BJP on her, she did not compromise on any core issue of Kashmir like Article 35(A).
While Mehbooba Mufti was trying to rebuild her image as a soft separatist in Srinagar, in South Kashmir at Kulgam, her rebel MLA Abdul Majeed Paddar organised a separate function in connection with the foundation day of PDP and claimed that their faction was the real PDP. Six rebel MLAs were absent in today’s event of Mehbooba Mufti including the main face Moulana Imran Raza Ansari, Abid Ansari, (uncle of Imran), Dr Haseeb Drabu, Muhammad Abass Wani and Javeed Beigh (Muzaffar Hussain Beigh’s nephew).