Valley Parties Alone In Call For Article 370 Return, All Others Wanted It Gone, Says Ram Madhav
NEW DELHI — No political party outside Jammu and Kashmir has protested against the revocation of Article 370, even two years after the decision, because of a broader national consensus on the issue, said Ram Madhav, member of the RSS national executive.
In an interview to ThePrint’s Contributing Editor Jyoti Malhotra, Madhav, a former BJP general secretary, said, “No major political party in India was in support of Article 370, they were all doing it out of a certain political compulsion.”
Article 370, which granted the erstwhile state special status, was scrapped by the Modi government on 5 August 2019. Another measure taken at the same time saw the state bifurcated into two Union territories — Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh.
Madhav said the parties from the Valley are isolated in their cause to restore Article 370. The whole country, he said, believes it should have been removed earlier but nobody had the political will to do so except Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“Has any political party taken it up as a big issue, has the Congress taken it up? Has the Communist Party of India taken it up? Even in Kashmir, nobody is there to stand up for the Valley parties. Even if they stand up, they will only show sympathies, other than that nobody is in favor of restoration of Article 370. This realisation should better dawn upon the Valley leadership,” said Madhav.
He added: “It’s a unanimous feeling of the entire country across the political spectrum that Article 370 should have been done away with.”
Madhav also said the “major complaint” of political parties in J&K is not Article 370 but statehood, adding that it will be restored at an appropriate time by Home Minister Amit Shah. “Ladakh will remain a Union territory and statehood will be restored to Jammu and Kashmir.”
The former BJP national general secretary also spoke about the historic but ill-fated alliance between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in J&K in 2016, noting that there was no other option but for the two parties to come together.
Madhav had played a key role in stitching together the alliance after the 2014 assembly election threw up a fractured verdict. While the BJP received overwhelming support in the Jammu region, the PDP won the majority of seats in the Kashmir Valley.
“We also thought that by bringing the PDP into alliance we would be able to control soft separatism in the Valley and we [would] probably be able to bring it more into the mainstream, and I think we have succeeded,” he said.
Commenting on the PDP’s present status, the RSS leader said very few politicians are with the party today. Most leaders, he said, are with People’s Conference President Sajad Lone and Altaf Bukhari, chief of the Apni Party. — (THE PRINT)
