Srinagar, August 30, 2023 (PPI-OT): People’s Democratic Party (PDP) President in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti, has said that the arguments by India’s Solicitor General in the Indian Supreme Court during the hearings on a batch of petitions challenging the abrogation of Article 370 vindicated her party’s stand that the situation in the territory was far from normal.

The Solicitor General, Tushar Mehta, on Tuesday informed a five-judge bench of the apex court, headed by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud, that the Union Territory status of occupied Jammu and Kashmir is not a “permanent thing”. He further submitted before the bench that Jammu and Kashmir would again be made a state when things resume to normalcy.

The bench was hearing Mehta’s submissions defending the Narendra Modi-led government’s decision to revoke the special status of IIOJK.

Mehbooba Mufti in a post on X, formerly Twitter, wrote that despite the Indian government’s tall claims, the Solicitor General’s statement before the apex court vindicates our stand that the situation is far from normal in Jammu and Kashmir. She added that even to achieve this abnormal normalcy, occupied territory has been turned into an open-air prison.

National Conference leader, Omar Abdullah, called Mehta’s argument a “diversion”. He said that the Solicitor General is trying to divert the focus of the arguments to the Indian government’s view of ‘normalcy’.

He pointed out that the apex court has not been petitioned to rule on the security situation or normalcy in occupied Jammu and Kashmir. He said the simple question for the bench is to decide whether the changes forced on IIOJK in 2019 were legal and constitutional or not. “Everything else is a diversion,” he added.

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