KL Desk
SRINAGAR
In a rare reference from Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) on, its Karnal MP Sunday said that Kashmiris do not intend to stay with India.
“People of Kashmir neither want to stay with India nor Pakistan but they only talk of Azad Kashmir (an autonomous Kashmir). I have travelled vastly in Jammu and Kashmir and understand it (the issue) better (than anyone else),” MP Ashwini Kumar Chopra said while talking to media personnel on the side lines of a religious function in Indri town in Karnal.
He said, “I am well aware of the popular sentiments of people of Kashmir.”
He was critical of his national leadership for forming alliance with Peoples Democratic Party in J&K and said the coalition was ‘erroneous’. The BJP-PDP coalition would be short-lived, he added.
“J&K chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed is a ‘behrupia’ (con artiste). He has a ‘pro-separatist inclination’, .
He maintained that Kashmir was an issue of ‘izzat’ (honour) for the BJP. “Deaths of more than 37,000 security personnel in militant attacks in the valley could not be forgotten by the nation.
“The day when the BJP-PDP government was formed, I had opposed it by writing an article in my newspaper. I still firmly believe that the decision of an alliance government was incorrect. But the party high command and the Prime Minister perhaps had taken a conscious decision (on the alliance),” Chopra said.
Pertinently, Chopra is owner and editor a Hindi newspaper based in New Delhi.
