Satya Pal Malik on Monday rebutted Union home minister Amit Shah’s allegation that he had spoken out against the Centre only after the expiry of his multiple tenures as governor, and his credibility was therefore suspect.

“I respect Mr Amit Shah very much and I don’t want to get into an argument with him, but the fact of the matter is that both on Pulwama and the farmers’ issue I had spoken while I was governor,” Malik told TheTelegraph.

Malik said: “On Pulwama I was asked to keep mum. When I was Meghalaya governor I told them (in relation to the farmers’ agitation), ‘Log mar rahe hain, kuchh karo (People are dying, do something). Later the government itself was forced to say ‘sorry’ and withdraw the (new farm) laws.”

Malik had in a recent interview with journalist Karan Thapar for The Wire news portal said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had shut him up when he had, as Jammu and Kashmir governor, said the Centre’s lapses were to blame for the February 14, 2019, Pulwama massacre.

“I told it to the PM (on the) same evening. This is our fault. Had we given aircraft (to transport the CRPF men) then this (car bomb attack on CRPF convoy) would not have happened. He told me, ‘Tum abhi chup raho (You keep quiet now)’,” Malik told Thapar.

In the interview, Malik also reiterated allegations of corruption involving the BJP, which he claimed Modi was aware of.

On Saturday, answering a question on Malik at the India Today Roundtable in Bangalore, Shah said: “All I have to say is, you should also ask, how come all this is remembered after leaving us? Why doesn’t the soul awaken while being part of the administration? People and journalists should think about credibility. If all of this is correct, why was he silent when he was governor?”

However, in a telephone interview to NDTV, updated on its website at 1.07am on February 15, 2019, Malik had said: “There was no intelligence failure because we had received inputs (of a possible attack). But there was surely some kind of negligence. If the terrorists could bring such a big vehicle without being checked, it had to be because of failure on our part.”

In an interview uploaded on The Indian Express website the same day at 10.01am, Malik was quoted as saying: “We cannot accept that (intelligence failure). We could not detect or check the vehicle full of explosives moving on the highway. We must accept that we are at fault also.”

He had added: “The fact that we did not know that there was a fidayeen (suicide bomber) among them is also part of the intelligence failure. I can admit that.”

Asked by this newspaper on Monday whether he had also spoken out, while he was governor, about the government’s failure to provide transport aircraft to the CRPF, Malik said: “I had spoken about this back then. I can’t immediately recall the date…. I did raise this with the PM and was asked not to talk about it.”

Malik had from the beginning of 2021, when he was Meghalaya governor, spoken out at several public events and interviews against the three new farm laws that farmers were opposing.

In an interview with The Indian Express, published online on February 1, 2021, he said he had asked the Prime Minister “to resolve the issue immediately through discussions”.

Malik told this newspaper: “I went to see the PM and confronted him on this (farm laws). He said, 'Woh chale jayenge apne aap (They will leave on their own)'. I had met the home minister (Shah) also back then.”

In 2021, while he was Meghalaya governor, Malik had also claimed at a public event in Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, that bribes of Rs 150 crore each had been on offer for clearing two projects in Jammu and Kashmir when he was governor there.

He had accused an RSS leader of lobbying for these projects. The leader has filed a defamation case against him.

One of these projects was a group medical insurance, whose contract was awarded to Reliance General Insurance Company but which Malik cancelled as Jammu and Kashmir governor. The other was a hydel project. The CBI last year filed separate FIRs relating to the two projects.

The Centre did not remove Malik as governor until his term ended in October last year despite his criticism of the government getting sharper.

At the India Today Roundtable, journalist Sudhir Chaudhary had given Shah the example of the CBI summons to Malik — for questioning in the corruption cases — after the publication of the Thapar interview.

Chaudhary then told Shah: “We see that whenever someone criticises you, then in a week or 10 days they get a call from somewhere.”

Shah cut Chaudhary short and said this was the third time Malik was being questioned in ongoing probes on allegations that he had raised.

Malik’s intervention on the farm laws in 2021 had come after peasants from western Uttar Pradesh — his native region — gathered in hordes at the state’s boundary with Delhi in Ghazipur on January 28 night.

They had come in support of Rakesh Tikait, a leader of the dominant faction of the Bharatiya Kisan Union in the region. Tikait broke down live on TV as the Uttar Pradesh government cut off electricity to the protest site and the participants feared an impending raid.

The farm agitation had faced a lull after it had turned violent on Republic Day, two days before this, but Tikait’s outpouring of emotion infused a flood of Hindu Jats into an agitation dominated by Sikh farmers. Both Tikait and Malik are Jats — the main landed farming community of the region.

Malik on Monday also expressed sympathy for the renewed agitation by wrestlers demanding action against Wrestling Federation of India president and BJP parliamentarian Brijbhushan Sharan Singh, whom they accuse of sexually harassing women wrestlers.

Asked about this, Malik told this newspaper: “I could not go to meet them as I am out of town (Delhi). They have my full support and sympathy and I will meet them when I return. I am on the way to Rajasthan and I will go to a rally in Kudan village of Sikar district tomorrow.”

The Kudan rally will be commemorating the 1935 killing of several peasants in the village by the Jaipur princely state's police, during an agitation triggered by the exorbitant rates of revenues collected by the royal jagirdars.

While this was a consequence of the British rulers’ revenue impositions on the princely states — which were passed on to the peasants — the agitation is also seen as a milestone in Jat self-assertion against Rajput domination in Rajasthan.