Decision to sack Drabu right: Farooq
Srinagar, March 13: Opposition National Conference president Farooq Abdullah on Tuesday said chief minister Mehbooba Mufti’s decision to sack Haseeb Drabu from the council of ministers was right.
“It is an internal decision of the party, what can I say. Yes, we condemned the statement he ( Drabu) gave that this ( Kashmir) was not an ( political) issue. The party ( PDP) saw that this is an issue. All the parties here condemned the statement,” Mr Abdullah said. “See, he ( Drabu) had also implemented GST here, the party saw what happened with that. So, his party ( PDP) took the decision and I feel it is the right decision,” he added.
Mr Drabu, 57, one of the architects of the PDPBJP alliance in the state, was sacked on Monday. The Congress on Tuesday attacked the Centre for it’s “failure” to prevent Leftwing terrorism. The party was reacting to the killings of CRPF jawans by the Maoists in Sukma. While condemning the naxalite attack the Congress expressed solidarity with the faimlies of the victims. The party, however, kept it’s focus on the Centre and reminded of the last year’s attack in Sukma last year in which 26 CRPF personnel were killed.
Congress communications in- charge Mr Randeep Surjewala claimed that “collapse of the country’s internal security is a direct consequence of the Centre’s Modi aimless and inconsistent polices.”
In his statement Mr Surjewala said that the Modi government had “sold the national security plank hard” to attain power, but in the past four years, we have only witnessed a precarious security situation in the country. Shifting from insurgency to cross border firing and terrorism, Mr Surjewala said “ceasefire violations, cross- border infiltration, terror attacks on security installations and have increased under the BJP.” Lashing out he said that “drafting acronyms for propaganda and making hollow claims
cannot be a substitute to sound policy measures.” The Congress also targeted the government over demonetisation linking it to insurgency and terrorism. “Modi had made boastful” claims of ending terrorism and Naxalism,” he said.
Doling out statistics, Mr Surjewala said that after demonetisation there have been “23 major Maoist attacks in which 97 security personnel and 121 civilians were killed.” According to him, “postdemonetisation, 53 major terror incidents had taken place in Jammu and Kashmir alone, in which 99 security personnel and 64 civilians were killed.”
Mr Surjewala claimed that during the UPA regime “casualties in Naxalite attacks had reduced by more than half ”. Taking a dig at the BJP chief, Amit Shah, the Congress leader said that instead of trying to expand party’s base from Naxalbari, “the BJP should instead have planned how to tackle Maoist violence.”