Political Correspondent
JAMMU: The BJP-led NDA Government and BJP high command has, it appears, thrown in the lot of the entire population of Jammu and Kashmir with the irrelevant and virtually non-existent Kashmir wing of the BJP.
The Kashmir wing of the BJP has been empowered by the high command to determine the fate of the state and the minorities in Jammu and Kashmir, including the Kashmiri Pandit community. It is not an exaggeration. It is a hard fact. It is not the Jammu and Kashmir chief spokesperson Sunil Sethi, who is supposed to put across the BJP viewpoint, nor it is spokesperson Nirmal Kamal or spokesperson Lalit Moza or other party spokesperson or the state BJP president Jugal Kishore Sharma or any of the state BJP vice-presidents or any of the state BJP general secretaries or state BJP secretaries who speak for and on behalf of the party and counter the opposition charges, including the charge that the BJP has sold out everything for the sake of just-in-name political power in the state.
None of them is authorised to represent the BJP in the national TV channels and explain what the party’s ideology is or what is its stand on the release of Pakistani mouthpiece Masarat Alam or what is the party’s stand on Syed Ali Shah Geelani or on the return of Kashmiri Pandits to the Valley or what is the Prime Minister’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Pakistan or what is his policy towards Kashmir or on the hoisting of Pakistani flags in Kashmir. They are debarred by the high command from opening their mouth. It is the defeated Hina Bhat, who threatened on the eve of election that she would turn a terrorist or pick up gun if the BJP abrogated or amended Article 370, and unknown Khalid Jahangir, who was admitted to the BJP at Hiranagar on the eve of Lok Sabha elections, who alone are asked by the high command to
appear on national TV channels to represent the BJP and tell the countrymen as to what is the party’s stand on the issues facing Jammu and Kashmir. Hina Bhat and Khalid Jahangir are the Kashmir-based spokespersons of the BJP.
That the Jammu-based spokespersons of the BJP do not appear on TV channels and that Hina Bhat and Khalid Jahangir appear almost every day on them should establish that the party high command has given the mandate to the Kashmir unit of the BJP to decide the fate of the state and the minorities. It is unfortunate.
