BJP trying to clear mess created by Congress: Minister of State Jitendra Singh

Union Minister Jitendra Singh. (PTI Photo)

Blaming the Congress for the crisis in Kashmir, Minister of State in PMO Jitendra Singh on Sunday said his party is trying to “clear the mess created by the Congress”. “The BJP has a clear stand on Kashmir, and there should be no doubt about it. Our approach is based on consistency, clarity and conviction,” Singh told the media on the sidelines of BJP’s first state-level working committee meeting in Srinagar. In Jammu, a BJP spokesperson said the Congress had opposed the autonomy resolution, brought by the then Farooq Abdullah government in the state Assembly on June 26, 2000, and called senior Congress leader P Chidambaram’s support for autonomy as “opportunistic, contradictory, misleading and motivated”.

Alleging that the Kashmir problem is an “accumulative outcome of mistakes committed by the Congress”, Jitendra Singh said. “We are trying to clear the mess created by Congress in its 60 years…. The mess was created by successive Congress governments — right from the dawn of independence, with infamous blunders of (Jawaharlal) Nehru.” On Chidambaram’s remarks, Singh said, “I think the nation doesn’t allow a former Home Minister the privilege to deliver sermons on his own acts of omission and commission.”

Read | Chidambaram seeks greater autonomy for Jammu-Kashmir, Congress distances itself from statement

Senior PDP leader and PWD Minister Naeem Akhtar and Peoples Conference chairman and Social Welfare Minister Sajad Gani Lone were present in the BJP meet.

Recalling the 2000 resolution, moved by then Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister P L Handoo, BJP spokesperson Brigadier Anil Gupta (retd) said it came “amid opposition from members of Congress, BJP and the Panthers Party”. He said, “The entire Opposition had staged a walkout, indicating that it was not the demand of the entire state but of a particular political party (NC)”.