Former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley who had showered praise on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah for piloting the government’s huge Kashmir move on Tuesday turned to critique the response of the opposition parties. His sharpest barbs were reserved for the Congress that he said, was consolidating its alienation from the people of the country by opposing the move.
The former minister also referred to the large number of Congress leaders who have spoken out against the party line and in favour of scrapping Article 370, pointing that this was in line with the public mood which had compelled many opposition parties to support the move.
“But the National Party, as a ‘headless chicken’, is further consolidating its alienation from the people of India. The New India has changed. Only the Congress does not realise this. The Congress leadership is determined to succeed in its race to the bottom,” the senior BJP leader wrote in a blog ‘PM Narendra Modi and HM Amit Shah achieve the impossible’.
Jaitley, who was part of the top team that backed the idea of doing away with Article 370 via a presidential order if the state was under the Governor, also criticised Kashmir’s regional parties for speaking a different language in Delhi and Srinagar.
The leaders of the two regional parties speak in two voices. Their statements in New Delhi at times are re-assuring. But in Srinagar they speak a different language. Their stand is influenced by the separatist environment.
“It is a hard reality that both of them have lost support on the ground,” he said, a reference to Omar Abdullah’s National Conference and Mehbooba Mufti’s Peoples’ Democratic Party. On the other hand, several national parties had allowed themselves to be misguided and translated an issue of national integration into an issue of secularism.
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