SRI NAGAR: The Jammu & Kashmir National Conference (JKNC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), who are two main partners of the Gupkar alliance on Article 370 restoration, have traded barbs on their ‘past’. It all started after senior PDP leader and party youth president Waheed Para on PDP’s 24th Raising day on Monday accused NC of rigging the 1987 election, creating the Special Operations Group of J&K police and counter insurgent group Ikhwan and enforcing POTA in J&K.
“Those responsible for 1987 poll rigging, pushing youth to guns by dispossessing democratic setup are begging for elections and alliance in Delhi. They made SOG, Ikhwan and POTA for power. There are some parties that are after elections while some are after quarters and PSOs besides an alliance with BJP, but they must remember that power alone won’t lead them anywhere. If it were the case, there would have not been deaths and killings during the past regimes,” Para said in an apparent reference to JKNC.
Para, who was once projected as a youth icon in Kashmir by BJP leaders including Rajnath Singh when he was Union Home Minister for ensuring the presence of hundreds of youth at a function addressed by Singh in Srinagar in 2018, was arrested by NIA in November 2020 for alleged militant links and released on bail after 19 months of detention. It is now known what prompted Para, who won the DDC election from jail but has not taken oath as yet, to give a hard-hitting statement against JKNC.
JKNC spokesman and youth leader Imran Nabi Dar was the first to hit back at Para. “It seems Waheed Para’s intention was to sow confusion among the opposition ranks. If you feel suffocated within the alliance, simply walk away instead of resorting to fake narratives to justify your actions. While we are aware of your historical blunders, our priority was unity,” Imran tweeted.
JKNC’s youth president Salman Sagar said those responsible for post-1953 events (erosion of autonomy under Sadiq, Shams & Mir Qasim regimes), the murder of democracy in 1983, bringing infamous Governor to ensure mass exodus and massacres and finally getting BJP to rule J&K are looking for excuses to break unity efforts made by JKNC.
Taking aim at Para, he said, “the man who left nothing to chance to fight DDC elections from prison, he is levelling allegations of rigging, was begging the government to allow him to take oath as DDC member now says we are not for elections.”
1987 polls
The party has been blaming JKNC for rigging the 1987 Assembly polls, which led to the eruption of militancy in J&K, while PDP’s patron and former CM Late Mufti Sayeed is being accused of bringing Jagmohan as Governor during whose rule many massacres took place.