By Sant Kumar Sharma
Jammu, June 22:
On June 23, 2013, Narendra Modi, who was then chief minister of Gujarat, visited Madhopur in Pathankot district to pay tributes to Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, who had died 60 years earlier in a Srinagar hospital in Jammu and Kashmir. Mukherjee had died allegedly of a heart attack but till date, there are accusations that he was not provided adequate medical attention, at the behest of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the Prime Minister of J&K at that time. In private conversations, it is fairly common to hear Mukherjee’s supporters accuse Sheikh of “cold blooded murder’’.
The optics were just so right to demonstrate Modi’s commitment to Mukherjee’s vision of “Ek Desh, Ek Nishan, Ek Pradhan’’. This vision was something RSS totally agreed with and special status of J&K was an anathema to it. So, Modi was starting his journey to bigger things with his best foot forward. The event at Madhopur, named as “Sankalp Rally’’ saw veteran Prakash Singh Badal, J P Nadda and several others on stage.
BJP MP from Gurdaspur Vinod Khanna was among one of the most glamorous parliamentarians present on the occasion. Dr Jitendra Singh, now MOS in the PMO, was one of the BJP leaders who had travelled from Jammu to attend the rally. As he was not a legislator, neither held any prime position then, others were ahead of him.
Incidentally, that does not mean that before that Modi had not demonstrated his unflinching loyalty to this ideology before that day. In fact, time and again, he had returned to this, and it was something that was a recurrent theme throughout his political career.
In 1992, the BJP was headed by Murli Manohar Joshi, and stalwarts like Lal Krishna Advani, Atal Behari Vajpayee, K L Sharma and others were among its top leaders. By comparison, Modi was much smaller in political stature compared to these people. Yet, he volunteered to go to Srinagar with Joshi when it was decided that the party would unfurl tricolour at historical Lal Chowk in Srinagar. Today, seeing the tricolour fluttering atop government buildings in Union Territory (UT) of Jammu and Kashmir is a fairly common, actually mandatory practice.
Not in 1992 though as J&K, then a state with a separate constitution, which was in the grip of Islamic terrorism backed to the hilt by Pakistan. The writ of the state hardly ran in vast stretches and it was in pillboxes that security forces personnel, then BSF and partly Army, used to feel safe. Challenging terrorists then and announcing that tricolour would be unfurled at Lal Chowk seemed foolhardy, impractical and nothing short of hara-kiri.
Organising the travelling of BJP workers from Jammu to Srinagar by road, and then looking after related logistics, was a very difficult challenge. Modi drew a plan, along with others, and executed it almost to perfection.
In 2011, the BJP announced that its leaders will visit Srinagar and unfurl the tricolour at Srinagar’s Lal Chowk on Republic Day (January 26). The announcement led to considerable discomfort for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) II government headed by Manmohan Singh. When the events related to this announcement unfolded later, discomfort was caused to Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah also.
There was high drama when Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, along with other BJP leaders, were arrested soon after they entered Jammu and Kashmir on their way to Srinagar.
Swaraj was accompanied by Arun Jaitley, and they together led a procession of around 500 flag-waving, slogan-shouting BJP workers. They crossed the bridge at which separates Madhopur in Punjab from Lakhanpur in Jammu around 5pm. However, they were immediately stopped by the police and booked for violating prohibitory orders. Swaraj and Jaitley were then taken to a guesthouse in nearby Kathua.
At a meeting in Madhopur before venturing into Jammu, Swaraj slammed CM Omar Abdullah. “He said there were security issues. We don’t want your security. Just don’t stop us. We will hoist the flag and return home, or we will get killed.”
That was a rather indelicate situation as the governments, at the Centre, and in J&K, had claimed several times that the security situation in the state was entirely under control. Incidentally, Omar Abdullah had become CM of the National Conference-Congress alliance government on January 5, 2009. In 2010, two words “summer unrest’’ were added to the political lexicon of J&K.
