Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah on Thursday said Muslims were facing victimisation in India and it was no longer the country that its founding fathers had envisaged or that Jammu and Kashmir chose to be part of.
Omar, in his first interaction with the media after returning from Umrah in Mecca, also said that since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah were free after the elections, they should take up the demand for the restoration of statehood.
Senior National Conference leaders, including his father Farooq Abdullah, were part of the pilgrimage.
Although Omar said that the restoration of statehood was high on the National Conference’s agenda, he launched a no-holds-barred attack on the country’s Hindutva ecosystem, casting doubts on whether India remained a secular country.
“There was a well-planned conspiracy to target our seminaries and mosques. I have said time and again that while you (BJP) say you don’t want to appease Muslims, don’t appease. We don’t want appeasement. But not appeasing us does not mean you will target us. In the name of not appeasing us, don’t victimise us,” he said.
“Going after our mosques, shrines, our way of practising our religion, you are victimising us. This is not the India that Jammu and Kashmir chose to be a part of. This is
not India, as our founding fathers envisaged.”
Omar wondered whether the word “secular” was not in India’s Constitution.
“As long as it is there, keep it secular. If you want to delete it, do it through Parliament, if you can.”
Omar’s hardline posturing has come days after former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti ruffled BJP feathers by comparing India with Bangladesh over the issue of treatment of minorities.
The violence against Muslims in Sambhal and court-directed surveys on Muslim religious places have triggered an outrage in the Valley.
Hurriyat chief Mirwaiz Umar Farooq recently warned of a backlash against such incidents while Mehbooba feared another partition of the country.