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Bharatiya Janata Party leader Narendra Modi’s comment on Article 370 has kicked up another debate within the Sangh Parivar. Publicly, the RSS defended Modi by saying that he did not tone down the Sangh Parivar’s stated position on Article 370. Within the organisation, however, there are murmurs that Modi should have first initiated a debate within the party.
The RSS said Modi’s statement was distorted deliberately. RSS spokesperson Ram Madhav tweeted saying that the rights enjoyed by Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah were denied to his sister, Sara Abdullah, is no ‘toning down’ of the RSS’s stand. “370 is a hurdle to national integration,” he said.
The RSS and the BJP have been demanding that Article 370, which provides autonomous status for Jammu and Kashmir, should be repealed. “We have not changed our stand on this issue. There is no scope for a debate on the matter, as the issue has been debated for the last several decades. We do not know whether the BJP has changed its position,” a senior RSS functionary said.
A section of the RSS was unhappy with the BJP leadership’s “failure” to take any steps to repeal the Article when it was in power between 1998 and 2004.
The top BJP leadership, however, came to Modi’s defence. Opposition leader in Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj said Modi had not softened the party’s stand on the issue. “He, in fact, has hardened the position by demanding a debate on the issue,” she added.
Opposition leader in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley said the BJP believes that Shyama Prasad Mukherjee’s vision of complete integration of Jammu and Kashmir was the correct vision for India. “The Nehruvian vision of a separate status has given rise to aspirations for the pre-1953 status, self-rule and even Azadi. The desire of proponents of these three ideas has weakened the constitutional and political relationship between Jammu and Kashmir and the rest of the country,” Jaitley wrote on Facebook.
He said the journey of separate status has been toward separatism, not toward integration. “It would be incorrect for anyone to interpret BJP’s challenge for a debate on this issue as a softening of stand on Article 370,” he added.
jigeesh.am@thehindu.co.in
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