PDP betrayed Kashmiris, says Omar Abdullah

Jammu and Kashmir’s main Opposition party, the National Conference (NC), and its working president Omar Abdullah on Thursday made jibes at the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) after the latter publicly admitted that the “Agenda of the Alliance”, the common minimum programme reached between it and the BJP for government formation last year, has not made real headway.

“Effectively making our point that their government did absolutely nothing for 10 months,” wrote Mr Abdullah, a former J&K chief minister, on micro-blogging site Twitter.com. In another tweet, he said, “Why is BJP in a fix PDP needs to explain why it surrendered these issues for 10 months & still praised coalition.”

NC spokesman Junaid Azim Mattu “congratulated” the PDP for “officially admitting it deceived the people of J&K with their deeds brazenly contradicting the promises they had made in the Agenda of the Alliance”. He added, “PDP leader Naeem Akhtar deserves to be congratulated for the belated discovery of the remnants of a moral conscience which has compelled him to finally admit that PDP had deceived the people of J&K by forging an alliance with the BJP and then going against every single political promise that was marketed in the Agenda of the Alliance. PDP’s admission of treachery and deception under the cloak of a ‘review’ is a welcome development.”

Mr Akhtar had earlier said the PDP was “reviewing how much of the common vision of Prime Minister and Mufti Sahib regarding J&K had been taken forward” and how this would dictate a future course of action for the party. He also said, “Mufti Sahib had stature that he could absorb this. The dilemma in the PDP is that in the absence of such a towering leader can we actually just go and sit in the ministerial chairs and continue with the same thing ”

Mr Muttu said, “For an entire year Naeem Akhtar, besides other PDP leaders, kept singing psalms of glory about the PDP-BJP alliance... Now, suddenly, it seems Mufti Sahib’s demise is being used as a political opportunity to peddle a pretence of regret and guilt.”