BJP demands Omar’s removal for letting unrest fester

JAMMU - The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Tuesday accused Chief Minister Omar Abdullah of “deliberately creating a situation” in the Kashmir Valley to force the hands of New Delhi to give concessions like autonomy to the state and demanded his removal.

In a hard-hitting presentation before the all-party delegation led by union Home Minister P. Chidambaram, the state unit of the BJP led by its legislature party leader Chaman Lal Gupta said the chief minister had “by design” allowed the situation to come to such a pass that “Delhi is forced to give concessions like autonomy to Kashmir”.

It demanded the removal of this “most unpopular chief minister” without even a minute’s delay.

The situation, the party stated, could have been controlled and peace and order restored had the chief minister acted in time.

“But, he deliberately avoided doing so because he wanted such a situation to surface in which Delhi is seen as killers of Kashmiris and forced to grant autonomy to Kashmir.”

“We have told the delegation that in the given circumstances, in which separatism has received patronage by the chief minister, the immediate remedy is that he should resign,” Gupta told reporters after meeting the delegation.

The state BJP also dwelt on the highly “communal situation in the valley, where minorities have been made to flee and those living over there are being harassed”.

The BJP leaders expressed their anger over some members of the all-party delegation meeting separatist leaders at their homes in the Kashmir Valley Monday.

“This is shocking that the delegation constituted mini groups to meet separatists and allowed them to air their anti-India views in public,” Gupta told reporters.

Gupta said that delegation members like Sitaram Yechury, Gurudas Dasgupta and Ram Vilas Paswan by meeting the separatists had given a “respectability” to anti-India forces in Jammu and Kashmir. “This was a clear violation of the mandate of the delegation,” he said.

The BJP and other parties also wondered why Chief Minister Omar Abdullah was becoming an “interlocutor” for the separatists.

The all-party delegation arrived in Jammu Tuesday after meeting a cross-section of the people in Srinagar in an effort to find a way out of the violence that has gripped the valley, where more than 100 people have been killed in renewed unrest since June 11.