NEW DELHI: Home minister Amit Shah on Tuesday said that the country can’t have two flags, two heads and two constitutions and whoever allowed this arrangement had made a mistake. In an apparent reference to the abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, he said that the concept of ‘one flag, one prime minister, one Constitution’ was not a political slogan and the Government had ensured that the country has just one flag and Constitution and one prime minister.
He was responding to a remark by Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Saugata Roy in Lok Sabha during the discussion on the Jammu and Kashmir Reservation (Amendment) Bill and the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation (Amendment) Bill tabled in the House on the second day of the winter session for discussion and passage.
Roy said that he had taught in a college named after Syama Prasad Mukherjee and ‘ek nishan, ek pradhan, ek samvidhan’ was his slogan and it was a ‘political slogan’. Shah said that Roy’s remark was extremely ‘objectionable’. “Whosoever did it was wrong. Narendra Modi has corrected it. Your approval or disagreement does not matter. We had been saying since 1950 that a country should have one PM, one flag and one Constitution and not two and we have done it,” he said.
Union minister for information and broadcasting Anurag Singh Thakur also spoke during the debate. Hitting out at Ray, he stated that Jammu and Kashmir has undergone a lot of change in the past four
years since the removal of Article 370.
He said that there had been no cases of stone pelting and the Indian tricolour was now hoisted in every street in the Union Territory. But earlier, when the National Conference (NC) was in power, BJP leaders were arrested for trying to hoist the flag there, Thakur said, recalling his own experience of Tiranga Yatra.
Meanwhile, union minister of state in the prime minister’s office (PMO) Jitendra Singh said in the House that the government is ready to hold Assembly polls in Jammu and Kashmir whenever the Election Commission (EC) takes a final decision in the matter.
Intervening in the discussion on the Bills, he said, “Whenever the EC announces it (Assembly election in Jammu and Kashmir), we are ready.” His statement was in response to opposition parties demanding early Assembly polls in the Union Territory.