SRINAGAR: Veteran Indian jurist and former union Law Minister Ram Jethmalani has offered Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif a discussion on former President Pervez Musharraf’s Kashmir proposals that failed to reach a logical conclusion during Prime Ministership of BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee.
Apparently provoked by Mr Sharif’s recent outbursts, including his country’s unrealized dream of annexation of Jammu and Kashmir and his extolling Hizbul Mujahideen’s slain combatant Burhan Wani as “an influential Kashmiri leader whose sacrifice has given a new life to the freedom movement”, 93-year-old Jethmalani has claimed in an open letter to Sharif that Musharraf had sent his Kashmiri resolution proposal to him through the owner of a brewery after it was rejected by then head of the NDA Government Vajpayee.
Outspoken and often politically incorrect, Jethmalani developed differences with BJP in 2003 following which he contested Lok Sabha elections unsuccessfully against his former Prime Minister Vajpayee in Lukhnow. He had previously contested and won elections on BJP’s ticket for 6th and 7th Lok Sabha from Mumbai. Once Chairman of Bar Council of India, Jethmalani was elected as President of Supreme Court Bar Association in 2010. In the same year, he joined BJP back and was elected as a member of Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan. However, in May 2013, BJP expelled him for six years for an “anti-party statement” following which he filed a defamation suit against the party.
It is not clear whether his letter is his personal initiative in the backdrop of the month-long turbulence that has left 55 people dead and thousands injured in Kashmir after militant Burhan Wani’s death in an encounter on July 8 or he has any brief from BJP-led NDA government of Narendra Modi. Significantly, Jethmalani was head of Vajpayee’s ‘Kashmir Committee’ that had initiated an informal dialogue process with the Kashmiri separatist leaders including the hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani in 2000-2002.
In the open letter to Sharif, which Jethmalani has among others mailed to this correspondent, the veteran legal and constitutional expert has claimed that India in Congress rule had conceded obligations to Pakistan through Tashkent Treaty and Shimla Agreement.
He has claimed that a country, that had lost half of its area and population due to her Kashmir obsession, would never be able to separate Jammu and Kashmir from India and engineer its annexation particularly when, according to him, it was on the side of ISIS and international terrorism.
For full text of Jethmalani’s letter: log on our website www.statetimes.in