Art 35A row: Mehbooba calls on Rajnath Singh
CM likely to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi today
NEW DELHI: Jammu and Kashmir CM Mehbooba Mufti on Thursday met Union home minister Rajnath Singh amid reports that she had come to the national capital to drum up support for preventing attempts to remove special status to the state under the Constitution. The meeting lasted for nearly 45 mins.
NEW DELHI: Jammu & Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti on Thursday met Union home minister Rajnath Singh amid reports that she had come to the national capital to drum up support for preventing attempts to remove special status to the state under the Constitution.
The meeting lasted for nearly 45 minutes, officials said without elaborating about the topics that were discussed. The meeting comes in the backdrop of growing pressure on Mehbooba, who is caught in a catch-22 situation over the ongoing matter in the Supreme Court on revoking Article 35A of the Constitution that grants special status to the state.
The chief minister is likely to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday afternoon, which is to be followed by a courtesy call on to the newly appointed President Ram Nath Kovind, they said.
It was not immediately clear whether Mehbooba will be meeting leaders of other political parties including that from the Congress, Janata Dal(U) and Left parties.
Mehbooba is keen to build consensus against scrapping the Constitutional provision, which empowers the Jammu and Kashmir legislature to define the state’s “permanent residents” and their special rights and privileges, they said.
Mehbooba had met opposition National Conference (NC) president Farooq Abdullah this week to seek the support of his party on the issue. Abdullah had told her that she should meet the prime minister, important central ministers and also BJP leadership to convince the Sangh Parivar against striking down the constitutional provision.
Sources in Mehbooba’s PDP said striking down Article 35A will be “a catastrophe for all mainstream political parties in the Kashmir valley”.
It will be nothing short of a “tsunami” for mainstream politicians as protection of the special status of the state within the Indian Constitution is the “cornerstone of their politics”, they said. “That is the crux of her dilemma - run with the hare & hunt with the hounds. She wants to govern with the BJP and oppose their politics with us,” the party’s working president, Omar Abdullah tweeted.
The controversy erupted in 2014 after an NGO ‘We the Citizens’ filed a PIL in the Supreme Court seeking Article 35A be struck down.
The J&K government, under the guise of Articles 35A and 370, which grant special autonomous status to the state, has been discriminating against non-residents, who are debarred from buying properties, getting government jobs or voting in local elections, the PIL said. Article 35A was added to the Constitution by a presidential order in 1954, it said.
While the state government contested the petition, saying the president had the power to incorporate a new provision in the Constitution, the Centre, recently, expressed its reservations.
MEHBOOBA MEETS GUV
CM Mehbooba Mufti also called on governor N N Vohra here and discussed legal challenges to Article 35A of the Constitution and several other issues, an official said.
She met the governor at the Raj Bhavan and briefed him about her party’s views and the discussions she had had with leaders of various political parties regarding the challenge to Article 35A, an official spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said Mehbooba and Vohra also discussed other issues including the ongoing anti-militancy operations, maintenance of law and order, establishing capacity and outreach for effective implementation of the GST, the pace of tourist arrivals in the Valley, implementation of important development schemes and projects and functioning of the universities. Both discussed the rapidly declining visual aspect of the Dal Lake also.