KL Report
SRINAGAR
National Conference has said that PDP by admitting and promoting known criminal and corrupt faces in its party fold has made it pretty clear that Mufti Sayeed has chosen to re-invest his faith in the politics of embezzlement, crime and corruption as a route to political power.
Party Additional General Secretary Dr Sheikh Mustafa Kamal has asked Mufti to come clean on substantiated allegations of corruption and grave criminal records against various senior PDP leaders who are masquerading as “new faces” in the party. He has also sought a public apology from the PDP top-brass to the law abiding citizens of J&K for giving political patronage to one of its leaders from Srinagar to steal power worth lakhs and crores for his commercial establishments that have been established from ill-gotten money.
A party statement said a PDP leader’s flour mill in Tangmarg was found to have stolen power worth lakhs of rupees by criminally by-passing the meters. Power Development Department has imposed a fine of Rs 30 lakhs on the owner of the flour mill who is also one of PDP’s “new faces”.
Asserting that PDP’s desperation for gaining power had led the party to invest in criminal elements, money launderers and former dreaded counter-insurgents, Kamal said that this was an alarming development and could lead to an increase in corruption, major crime and organized suppression within the State’s polity. Dr. Kamal said that it had also become very evident that PDP was now being supported by some recently retired, dreaded and notorious police officers who flouted all norms and policies of leniency announced by the State Government and suppressed the youth of Srinagar on their own whims and arrogance. The NC Spokesman said that one such recently retired police officer who allegedly boasts of the number of youth killed by him and the number of them thrown into jails by him is another “new face” of PDP and is expected to contest the forthcoming elections on the party’s ticket from north Kashmir.
Dr Kamal also lashed out at the PDP for picking and choosing dreaded former counter-insurgents across the Valley to constitute a team of infamous, criminal faces that the party intends to use to harass the people ahead of the forthcoming polls. He said the party plans to criminalize the state’s polity through brazen dual standards and blatant intimidation of the voters speaks volumes about the party’s political intentions.
Stating that a lot of senior PDP leaders had serious cases of graft, tax-evasion, land-grabbing and embezzlement of public money registered against them in the courts of the land, Dr Kamal said that those faces that were openly pronounced corrupt by PDP in the past miraculously became “honest” overnight the very moment they joined PDP. The most glaring example was that of a former bureaucrat from the State who was sacked by Mufti government on charges of corruption in the Panchayat Ghar Scam in 2005 but was later rewarded with an MLC berth by the same Mufti Mohammad Sayeed when the said person joined PDP.
