Centre reduced Mehbooba to titular CM, says Omar Addullah

Jammu and Kashmir’s main Opposition party National Conference (NC) has alleged that the Centre has reduced Mehbooba Mufti into a nominal chief minister, thereby subverting the Constitution and damaging the sanctity of the elected head of the government in the state.

“When she is excluded from the J&K review meeting chaired by the Union home minister all she can do is these speeches,” NC working president and former chief minister Omar Addullah wrote on Twitter. He was responding to a tweet from a journalist wondering that Ms Mufti spoke about world order, ISIS, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and Muslim world on a simple local train flagging-off event.

On Thursday, when Ms Mufti flagged off four new DEMU (diesel engine mobile unit) passenger trains between Banihal-Baramulla and Baramulla-Budgam in Jammu and Kashmir, a high-level meeting was held in Delhi to discuss various issues pertaining to the state, including rehabilitation of displaced Kashmiri Pandits, return of civilian land by the Army and the situation along the Line of Control and in the hinterland in the backdrop of recent incidents in Handwara and Kupwara areas. The meeting chaired by Union home minister Rajnath Singh was attended among others by defence minister Manohar Parikar, J&K governor N.N. Vohra and NSA Ajit K. Doval.

NC has taken a serious note of the State being represented in the meeting by the Governor instead of Chief Minister and, while expressing “shock” over the “bypassing” of Ms. Mufti, it said on Friday, “Instead of the elected Chief Minister, New Delhi invited the J&K Governor for the high-level meeting to discuss various key issues pertaining to the State. This is yet another sign of how Mehbooba Mufti has bartered the constitutional mandate and sanctity of the Chief Minister’s office to remain in her chair”. It added, “This brazen disempowerment of the State’s Chief Minister is an alarming development”. NC chief spokesperson Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi said in a statement here that the fact that the Central government has sidelined the elected Chief Minister of J&K in dealing with vital issues of the State and the subsequent conspicuous silence of the Chief Minister doesn’t auger well for the State. He alleged that Ms. Mufti has now been officially relegated to the status of an ad hoc Chief Minister who had been placed in the Chief Minister’s office by the BJP for specific and limited purposes of furthering BJP’s agenda in the State. “If the State’s Chief Minister has no say in these issues that pertain to the State, one wonders why she has been placed in the Chief Minister’s chair in the first place. It is evident that the State is being run from New Delhi and the State government has been divested of all its rights and roles”. Mr. Mehdi said, “Even law and order, which is a State subject in exclusivity, is now being supervised directly by New Delhi as was proven in the NIT Srinagar issue and more recently the Handwara incident where the Chief Minister didn’t return to the State while things went from bad to worse”. He alleged, “Mehbooba Mufti’s omission from these meetings indicates a continued erosion of the State’s democratic institutions under the PDP-BJP Alliance and these developments have created widespread disillusionment and resentment in the State”.