STATE TIMES NEWS
SRINAGAR: National Conference Working President, Omar Abdullah on Wednesday asked Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti to accept responsibility for the killing of nearly a hundred civilians and said she was majorly responsible for the present situation that has resulted in hundreds of young boys and girls losing complete or partial eyesight.
“The same Mehbooba Mufti blamed Ghulam Nabi Azad for the 2008 unrest and held me personally responsible for the 2010 agitation. By her own standards and logic, she is primarily responsible for the current situation in the Valley and should accept responsibility rather than deflecting it”, Omar Abdullah said while addressing a convention of the party’s delegates from Srinagar District at National Conference Headquarters in Srinagar.
The NC Working President said National Conference didn’t politicize the current unrest in Kashmir and did not seek the dismissal of the PDP-BJP Government despite a complete breakdown of the law and order and governance apparatus in the State.
“Unlike PDP, we didn’t politicize the heart-rending and extremely grave situation in the Valley. Unlike Mehbooba Mufti, I didn’t go and lock the Civil Secretariat at a time when the Valley was on fire. Nobody can point a finger towards National Conference for exploiting this situation and that is why our conscience is clean”, Omar said.
“Our initiatives were not partisan or power-seeking manoeuvres but genuine and constructive efforts to seek political engagement with various stakeholders in Kashmir and to highlight the pain and suffering that stands to discredit the dividends of relative peace over the past few years. Not once did we call for the dismissal of the State Government or lobbied for our own empowerment – even when people from within PDP were openly demanding that the PDP-BJP Government should resign. Had PDP not played a destructive, opportunistic and malicious role in 2010, it wouldn’t have found itself cornered between moralistic rhetoric, contradictions and U-turns today”, Omar Abdullah added.
Omar asked the party’s workers to leave no stone unturned to reach out to the people and play a positive and constructive role in the current situation. “Since PDP and BJP have united their efforts in their common resolve to divide, fragment and destroy this State – the duty falls on the shoulders of the brave workers of National Conference to protect this State’s legacy, political honour and ethos of secularism and brotherhood”, Omar added.
