BJP trying to appease RSS by raking up Article 370: Congress

Congress general secretary and in-charge JK Affairs, Ambika Soni, Wednesday said the BJP’s Mission 44+ is “nothing more than an immature assertion.”
Speaking at a press conference here, Ambika said the BJP has “created a kind of utopia in the state and their Mission 44+ is nothing more than an immature assertion.”
“In haste, the central ruling party announced Mission 44+ but they are now in utter mess on how to achieve it. Hence they are resorting to all possible alternatives to accomplish the ‘mission’ which is evident from their communalizing and regionalizing politics,” she said.
She said the BJP is “buying academics, professionals and prominent faces, who had some personal following, to contest on their ticket, to make an impression that people are impressed by their ideology of BJP in Muslim-dominated regions,” Ambika said.
She asserted the BJP is holding “secret meetings with those people, whom it always considered adverse to nation.”
“BJP always criticized UPA for improving relations with certain section of the society, but now when they are in power they are following the line of UPA,” Soni said and added that the Mission 44+ of BJP is a big failure and it was a failure from the very beginning.
She said Congress always believed in overt politics and “whatever it did in last two governments was all in public.”
“In 2002 and 2008 Congress kept one-time settlement of refugees in its manifesto and for this, a series of meetings were held to reach at some consensus with the coalition partners. After mooting over the issue for long, a complete and comprehensive package for one time settlement of refugees was submitted to the state government under the leadership of Ghulam Nabi Azad,” she said and regretted that “when state government proposed same to present regime, it was declined by the government at Centre.”
She claimed that like 2002 and 2008, the Congress will continue its efforts to provide equitable development of all three regions of the state.
She warned people of the state against “divisive politics of the BJP” and said the BJP double speak was exposed in its recent appeasement approach when some of its senior leaders had announced to contest independently.”
“BJP is promising something to everyone to maintain their support,” she added.
Accusing Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) of fooling people of Jammu and Kashmir over the ‘sensitive’ issue of abrogating Article 370, JK Congress chief Saif-ud-Din Soz said it is impossible to scrap the Article as it forms the basic structure of the Indian constitution.
Addressing the press conference, Soz said that Article 370 is a bridge between Indian Union and the state of Jammu and Kashmir and any attempt to abrogate it will be equivalent to violation of the basic structure of the constitution.
“To amend Article 370 the parliament needs to constitute the original constituent assembly, which is next to impossible. So, BJP is just playing with the sentiments of the people to garner votes.”
He said the BJP is wholeheartedly putting efforts to abrogate the Article, but they know “this exercise is futile, as constitution of India has made it impossible to touch its basic structure.”
He said the BJP has kept abrogation of Article 370 in its manifesto “only to appease RSS, which is making inroads in the state to disturb its secular fabric.”