During the campaign for the District Development Council (DDC) elections, the PDP has faced arrest of its leaders and even its chief was not allowed several times to come out from her house.
Ahead of the counting of votes, senior PDP leaders, including maternal uncle of Mehbooba Mufti Sartaj Madni, and former ministers, including Nayeem Akhtar, have been detained and not been released even after election results are out.
The PAGD leadership, after the victory of the recently concluded DDC elections, has asked the Centre to respect the mandate and not provide administrative cushion to independent candidates into BJP fold.
Former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti made a sensational claim that the Central government was using the CBI, ED and other agencies to frame her in any case, as, according to her, they have failed to get any corruption charges proved against her.
She claimed that her close relatives, friends and party colleagues were being raided by the Central agencies and some of them were being coerced to relate to her in any case.
In a recent interview, Mehbooba Mufti had said, “For one month, the NIA kept Waheed Parra in custody and they had only purpose–to make him agree to say something so that they could lay their hands on me.” Mehbooba claimed that the Central government was keen to link her party with terror.
On the other hand, PAGD leaders, including Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah and Sajad Gani Lone, are playing cautiously and have said that their fight for the restoration of Article 370 would be peaceful, legal and within the Constitution. Asked recently to comment on Mehbooba Mufti’s utterances that she has little faith in the judiciary and will knock the doors of the international court on the Article 370 issue, Omar Abdullah said he has complete faith in the Supreme Court and distanced himself from Mehbooba Mufti and her statement.
Similarly, Farooq Abdullah demanded restoration of 4G services in Jammu and Kashmir so that students and traders can work without any hassles, after the conclusion of the DDC elections.
Sajad Gani Lone has been more cautious and said that people of Jammu and Kashmir have peacefully, through the ballot, endorsed the struggle launched by PAGD for restoration of Article 370. He said that it is now the turn of the Central government to respect this mandate from the people of Jammu and Kashmir at the earliest.
Central agencies have been very active in conducting raids on friends and close relatives of Mehbooba Mufti, including her sister Rubiya Syed, and former MLC of PDP Anjum Fazli.
PAGD spokesman Sajad Gani Lone after the victory meeting said that the Central government should not try to bring independents by police and administration into the fold of the BJP. He said that any such move in the past had seen disastrous consequences for the politics of Jammu and Kashmir and it amounts to mutilating the mandate of the people.
Asking the administration to release all PAGD leaders, especially from PDP, who were arrested ahead of the counting, Farooq Abdullah said there is no logic to keep them detained as the elections were most peaceful and incident free. Sajad Lone, PAGD spokesman, said: “What is the logic? To detain PDP leaders while the elections were over and they were peaceful. That it ends with the preventive detentions is something totally antithetical to the way elections have been held in terms of peace, in terms of lack of violence.” As the police and J&K administration is tight-lipped about the reasons behind the detentions of PDP leaders and the way Mehbooba Mufti is feeling that she would be arrested soon, it seems that the Central government has decided to put a hammer on the head of PDP. Mehbooba Mufti has already said that she is ready to get detained, but said that the BJP was trying to frame her on terror charges in order to silence her.