Azad's 3-pointer: J&K statehood, land and job rights, return of Kashmiri Pandits

JAMMU: Restoration of statehood for J&K, protection of land and jobs of its residents, and return and rehabilitation of displaced Kashmiri Pandits are on top of his newly launched and still unnamed party’s to-do list, senior politician Ghulam Nabi Azad said Sunday at his first public rally after severing his five-decade association with Congress on August 26.
As he set out to chart a new political course, 73-year-old Azad sought support from all sections of society: “We have not yet decided the name of the new party and its flag ... The people and leaders of both Kashmir and Jammu will be taken on board to finalise the name and the flag.” He said it should be an “easy” name. “It will be in neither Maulana’s Urdu nor Pandit’s Sanskrit ... It should be a Hindustani name that everyone can understand.”
Wearing a Dogra turban and praising J&K’s last king Maharaja Hari Singh for introducing land and job safeguards for its people in 1925-30, Azad spelled out his party’s agenda in front of more than 20,000 of his supporters gathered at Sainik Farms in Jammu for the rally.
“Restoration of full statehood for J&K, and right to ownership of land and right to employment for the domiciles would be the main agenda of our party. Another key agenda would be to facilitate the return of Kashmir Pandits without any compulsion,” the former Union minister said.
“Outsiders should not buy land, either in Jammu or Kashmir, and jobs should not be given to them... How many jobs are available in Jammu and Kashmir? It is a trickle of water in a sea and if the jobs are advertised at the national level, we will lose that trickle of water as well.”
Azad was referencing the situation after the Centre abrogated Article 370 and 35A that accorded special status to J&K, and bifurcated the state into Union territories in August 2019.
Appealing to Kashmiri Pandits, an estimated 200,000 of whom fled Kashmir during the peak of separatist terrorism in the 1990s, Azad said: “I am happy that children of our Kashmiri Pandit brothers have done well in America, Europe, Calcutta and Mumbai. Those who want to return must be given places to live in Kashmir.”
“The killings must immediately stop,” the ex-CM of J&K said, referring to the recent spurt in terrorists targeting people from the community working in the Valley. “Under my chief ministership (2005-2008), I requested the then prime minister Manmohan Singh and provided residential quarters to 20,000 Kashmiri Pandits at Jagti township in Jammu besides several other places,” he said.
Fresh from a bitter parting, Azad took a swipe at Congress and its current lot of functionaries. “We formed Congress with our blood. They are busy with Twitter and Facebook. People are trying to defame us, but their reach is limited to computers and tweets. That is the reason Congress is nowhere to be seen on the ground,” Azad said.
Azad said Congress has been comprehensively destroyed. “People from Congress now go to jail in buses, they call DGP, commissioners, get their name written and leave within an hour. That is the reason Congress has been unable to grow,” he said, bringing up Congress’s nationwide protests against price rise as a reference.
He thanked those who quit Congress to join him such as former J&K deputy CM Tara Chand, deputy speaker G H Malik, former ministers Taj Mohiuddin, Abdul Majid Wani, Manohar Lal Sharma, G M Saroori, R S Chib, Jugal Kishore, Peerzada Mohd Sayeed and former MLA Balwan Singh. Former PDP legislator Syed Bashir and ex-MLA Shoaib Nabi Lone from Apni Party shared the dais with Azad.
(With agency inputs)