All issues settled, Mufti to meet PM today

Arun Joshi

Tribune News Service 

Jammu, February 26

PDP patron Mufti Mohammad Sayeed  left for Delhi this afternoon  ahead of his meeting with Prime Minister  Narendra Modi in the morning tomorrow. It will be the last step before the swearing in of the new PDP-BJP government in Jammu and Kashmir on March 1.

  Before leaving for Delhi, Mufti told The Tribune, “Everything  has been settled”, a code that all  issues those had caused some last-minute problems in  firming up the alliance between the PDP and BJP, the two ideologically different parties, had been resolved.

Mufti planned his visit only after a call from New  Delhi saying the issues have been sorted out and the meeting with the Prime Minister has been scheduled for   Friday morning.

The semantics  on Article 370 that grants special position  to Jammu and Kashmir in the Indian Union  and the  Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), the law that provides legal impunity  to the armed forces while fighting terrorism, had become the stumbling block.

The language part has been taken care of and it will be reflected in the Common Minimum Programme which has  been rechristened as “Agenda for Alliance Vision”. It is likely to be made public after the meeting of the Prime Minister with Mufti that is scheduled between 9 am and 10 am. 

“I am leaving for Delhi  and will be meeting the Prime Minister tomorrow morning  and return in the afternoon,” he said.

  It is expected that after his return, Mufti Sayeed, who is certain to become the Chief Minister of the first-ever  government in which the BJP will be a partner  in Jammu and Kashmir, will be meeting  Governor NN Vohra  to stake the claim  for forming the PDP-BJP coalition government, the talk of which had  been doing  the rounds for almost  for over a month now.

The PDP has 28 seats, BJP 25 and they also have the support of four Independents. The significance of this fractured mandate was that the Muslim Valley had voted for the PDP on a majority of seats, while the BJP had gained majority from the Hindu dominated region — the two parts of the state which had been playing a politics of estrangement and political conflict over the decades.

“These were the hard negotiations  and there were many ups and downs,”  a source told The Tribune.

After the meeting of the BJP president  Amit Shah with PDP president Mehbooba Mufti on  Tuesday, it was declared that the  state would “soon get a popular government”, which is  in the nature of the mandate as the PDP won overwhelmingly in the Kashmir Valley and BJP registered its all-time-high performance in the electoral history of the state.

But then, as a source put it, “started another round of mind games that resulted in the postponement of the Mufti-Modi” government.

Union Finance Minister  Arun Jaitley gave the first clear picture on Thursday when he told Rajya Sabha  that the “PDP, which had got the maximum seats in the Valley, and  the BJP, which has  got tremendous  mandate in  Jammu, were coming together for national reconciliation”.

This will  undo the history of opportunism and undermining of democracy for over five decades by the Congress, he said. It was an echo of what PDP president Mehbooba Mufti  had said on February 24.

The written reply of the Home Ministry that the “Article 370  cannot be deleted”  also  added cushion for the PDP to  shake hands with the BJP.