NEW DELHI: A political row broke out between Congress and BJP on Friday after BJP claimed that Yasin Malik, associated with the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), was personally thanked by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh when he met Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) founder and 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed in Pakistan in 2006.
Malik is currently serving life sentence in a terror funding case. Sharing a copy of Malik’s alleged confession, Amit Malviya, head of BJP’s National IT department, questioned the Congress government’s handling of national security and back-channel diplomacy.
Malviya said, “Malik, in an affidavit filed in the Delhi HC on August 25, said that he met Hafiz Saeed in Pakistan in 2006.” Malviya also shared a part of the claim from Malik’s affidavit that the meeting was not his “independent initiative but was arranged at the request of senior Indian intelligence officials as part of a back-channel peace process” and that after the meeting, then PM Manmohan Singh “expressed gratitude to him”.
He added in the same post, “Yasin Malik is a hardened terrorist who is guilty of gunning down three air force personnel in uniform. This amounts to waging a war against the state, and he must be subjected to the full force of the law.”
BJP also claims that Malik had met a senior Intelligence Bureau (IB) official in Delhi prior to his departure to Pakistan. A claim, purportedly in the affidavit, says that Malik had agreed to meet leaders of the United Jihad Council in P zakistan, following requests from some officials as part of Kashmir’s peace process. Malik allegedly said, “When I returned to New Delhi from Pakistan, Special Director IB V K Joshi met me in the hotel as part of the debriefing exercise and requested me to immediately brief the Prime Minister.”
Hitting out at BJP, Congress said that BJP is selectively leaking parts of Malik’s affidavit to divert attention from Rahul Gandhi’s exposé on ‘vote theft’. In a post on X, Congress leader Pawan Khera accused BJP and RSS of holding talks with Malik while the saffron party was not even in power.
Khera shared a picture of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, meeting Kashmiri separatist leaders. “Since morning, BJP has been selectively leaking parts of Yasin Malik’s affidavit to malign the image of Manmohan Singh and the UPA. A Prime Minister - in this case, extending courtesy to someone claiming to pursue peace should not raise eyebrows,” he said. Khera sought explain ation of Vajpayee’s smiling photo-op with the Hurriyat leadership and Advani’s pilgrimage to Jinnah’s grave in Karachi.