Srinagar, September 19, 2022 (PPI-OT):The Congress has said that its former leader Ghulam Nabi Azad is changing his stand on the BJP government’s move to abrogate Article 370 after quitting the party and said his “lies” on the issue should be exposed.
Responding to a tweet by J and K Congress leader Ghulam Ahmad Mir asking if Azad had signed the Congress Working Committee resolution following the New Delhi’s move abrogating Article 370, Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh said, “Of course he did.” “I was sitting behind him in Parliament when he spoke the previous day against abolition of Article 370. His lies should be exposed,” Ramesh said in a tweet.
In an article in the Indian Express, senior Congress leader and former home minister P Chidambaram said that on August 5, 2019, the BJP government took the “extreme step” of abrogating the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, dismembered the State and created two Union Territories — Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.
On the next day, the Congress Working Committee convened an emergency meeting and adopted a resolution, he said. “All members of the CWC were convinced that the above steps were illegal and unconstitutional. Nothing that the government did on those two fateful days required a two-third majority of the members present and voting in either House,” Chidambaram said.
“These questionable steps have been challenged in the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court holds any or all of the steps to be unconstitutional, the step(s) will be reversed. Alternatively, if another government replaced the Modi government, it is possible that the new government may reverse some or all of the steps. Azad certainly knows all that,” he said.
Then, why did Azad say that a political party promising to restore Art 370 would be “telling lies” to the people, he asked.
The Congress Working Committee in a resolution in 2019, had deplored the “unilateral, brazen and totally undemocratic” manner in which provisions of Article 370 of the Constitution were abrogated and of Jammu and Kashmir was bifurcated by the Modi government into two Union Territories.
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