On Tuesday, the People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration (PAGD) will meet in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, to discuss the current situation in the Union territory (UT). The meeting will take place at 11 a.m. at the home of alliance chairperson and National Conference (NC) patron Farooq Abdullah, according to a PAGD leader.
“This meeting will be a different one from the earlier ones. This time it is not only the top leadership of the constituent parties which has been invited for consultations but the middle rung leadership as well,” the alliance leader cited above said on Sunday. He noted that member political parties are free to choose their leaders for Tuesday’s meeting, and that 150-200 leaders are expected to attend.
“It (the meeting) will discuss the way forward and it is the first such attempt in the Kashmir valley by the alliance to get a broader perspective on the issues. We wanted to have this kind of consultation before but various factors like Covid prevented such a gathering,” the PAGD leader also told PTI.
The PAGD is a group of mainstream political parties that have been lobbying for the restoration of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status, which was revoked by the Narendra Modi-led Centre in 2019. The National Conference, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the Jammu and Kashmir Awami National Conference, the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Movement, and the Communist Party of India are among the parties involved (Marxist).
The meeting on Tuesday comes just days after the PAGD held a discussion on the second anniversary of the Centre’s abrogation of Article 370 and the bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir into a UT on August 5. MY Tarigami, the leader of the CPI(M), told reporters that despite the Centre’s lofty claims, the situation in J-K was deteriorating day by day. He also questioned where the investment and job opportunities would be if Kashmir’s special status was removed, as the Centre claimed.
On June 24, Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over an all-party meeting on Jammu and Kashmir, the first high-level meeting between the Centre and Kashmir’s political leadership since the former scrapped Articles 370 and 35A in 2019. Top leaders from J-K pushed for the region’s special status to be restored during the meeting. They also raised concerns about the delimitation process and demanded that Jammu and Kashmir be restored to full statehood before elections.
