PDP imposes curfew on Civil Secretariat
Mehbooba: Curfew Govt has lost moral right to continue in office

Ahmed Ali Fayyaz

SRINAGAR, Jul 29: Opposition PDP President, Mehbooba Mufti, alongwith 20-odd MLAs and MLCs of her organization, today locked the main entrance of Civil Secretariat. She said that Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and his Ministers and bureaucrats required to be taught what the residents of Srinagar and some other towns had been feeling during weeks of endless curfew. Calling for an end to prohibitory orders, curfew, detention of people under the label of stone pelters, harassment to separatist activists and ‘killing’ of youth by Police and security forces, Mehbooba asserted that NC-led coalition government had lost credibility as well as moral right to continue in office.

Members of PDP’s Legislature Party reached Civil Secretariat entrance individually from 1215 hours to 1245 hours. Led by Mehbooba Mufti, the legislators locked the Secretariat gates and organized a sit-in that ran for nearly three hours. Fifteen out of twenty-one MLAs and two out of three MLCs of the main opposition party, besides its General Secretary and former Minister, Mohammad Dilawar Mir, and District President Srinagar, Mohammad Ashraf Mir, participated in the peaceful demonstration.

Six MLAs, namely Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, Muzaffar Hussain Baig, Mohammad Sartaj Madni, Javed Ahmed Dar, Sardar Rafeeq Hussain Khan and Choudhary Zulfikar besides MLC, Asgar Ali, were not present. PDP sources said that some of them were preoccupied with important personal and party schedules while few others were either outside the Valley or indisposed.

Slogans shouted by the demonstration and the placards carried by the legislators called for an end to “genocide of Kashmiris” and demanded “punishment to the killers”. There was also considerable emphasis on releasing the detainees even as some of the MLAs and MLCs also carried photographs of the seventeen youth killed during clashes between Police/CRPF and the demonstrators from June 11th to July 11th in Srinagar, Sopore, Baramulla and Anantnag.

With this kind of a protest demonstration coming for the first time in the last 20 years, there was high drama at the highest seat of power in the capital city. Ministers, bureaucrats and the government employees suspended their work intermittently and watched the PDP dharna from their windows in the Civil Secretariat. Informed sources said that a large number of staff and common visitors, as also some Ministers, failed to enter the premises as they found the gates locked and the PDP legislators staging a demonstration. Nobody was able to come out from the Secretariat premises.

Speaking to the participants, and later to mediapersons, Mehbooba said that bringing home the tribulations of the people of curfew-bound areas to the state government was the key objective of today’s demonstration and sit-in. She said that the PDP wanted to communicate to the “deaf and dumb government” that residents of curfew-bound Srinagar and other towns in the Valley had been tormenting for coming out their homes. She alleged that Police and security forces had not only killed as many as 17 young civilians in just one month but had also unleashed a reign of terror by harassing and detaining innumerable individuals under different allegations.

Mehbooba said that Omar Abdullah’s government had lost everything---control on situation, credibility and moral right to continue in office. She said that hundreds of thousands of the hapless Kashmiris had been forced to confinement for weeks together as the authorities enforced declared and undeclared curfew without any plausible reason and justification. She claimed that as many as 1400 youth had been picked up from different places and detained under Public Safety Act and other laws.

(Government later clarified that around 800 people had been detained temporarily and only 71 of them were currently in jails and Police stations. It also claimed that, in all, 22 persons had been detained under PSA).

Without being critical on endless shutdowns enforced by the separatists with stone pelting on civilian traffic and beating the female commuters with nettle, PDP chief alleged that state government’s curfews had made life miserable for people of the cordoned localities who, according to her, were faced with acute shortage of food and baby milk. She condemned government’s seizure of the trucks carrying relief items from rural areas to the curfew-bound urban areas yesterday and declared that PDP would soon form a committee for the purpose of providing relief to the worst affected population.

END