Ahmed Ali Fayyaz
JAMMU: President of the Jammu and Kashmir Pradesh Congress Committee (JKPCC) Tariq Hameed Karra has claimed for the first time that the BJP Government at the Centre began the process of breaking the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) during the last days of the life and the government of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in 2015.
“They trusted Mufti Sahab but not Mehboobaji. When, towards the fag end (in 2015) they learned that (then J&K Chief Minister) Mufti Sahab was unlikely to survive, they immediately started attempts to break the PDP. I was PDP’s MP from Srinagar. I was the first they approached but I refused to take the bait. Had I agreed, what happened in 2018-2022, would have happened in 2015-2016”, Karra, now Congress party’s MLA from Central Shalteng (Srinagar) revealed in “Kashmir Podcast with Ahmed Ali Fayyaz”.
The 70-minute podcast is scheduled to be uploaded on ‘Talkistan’ in the evening on Saturday, 11 January.
Karra suggested that the BJP leadership suspended its plan and formed a new coalition with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir after it failed to break Mufti’s party from December 2015 to March 2016. Without naming anybody, he said that the BJP top brass used the ‘tacit support’ of some PDP insiders to generate a sense of insecurity for Ms Mufti and become a part and head of a coalition of its convenience.
Finally, Ms Mufti’s PDP-BJP government was terminated prematurely in June 2018. It was followed by a bigger and well organised plan of breaking the PDP which was accomplished in the next 2-3 years, Karra asserted. “Everybody knows the lead character of that drama”, Karra quipped.
Asked why the three major parties—National Conference, PDP and Congress—supported the then PDP leader Syed Mohammad Altaf Bukhari’s claim of the government formation when the Assembly was about to be dissolved in November 2018, Karra said it was a ‘ploy’ to hasten the dissolution of the Assembly by Governor Satya Pal Malik.
In July 1999, a nephew of the veteran Kashmir politician Ghulam Mohiuddin Karra, Tariq Hameed Karra, was among the men who laid the foundation of the PDP under Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s leadership. After serving as PDP’s MLC from 2002 to 2004, Karra contested and won the mid-term Assembly election from Batmaloo. He lost to NC’s Irfan Shah in 2008 but created history when he defeated the NC patriarch and then Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s father, Dr Farooq Abdullah, in the Lok Sabha election from Central Kashmir in 2014.
In 2015 and 2016, Karra vehemently opposed PDP’s formation of the government with the BJP. After functioning as the PDP’s Lok Sabha member for two-and-a-half years, Karra resigned both from the party and the Parliament in 2016. He intensified his opposition to the PDP-BJP coalition and charged the State government with unleashing a reign of terror on the valley’s civilian population after the Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani’s death in an encounter and a resultant street turmoil.
Karra thereafter joined the Congress party. He was inducted as a member of the Congress Working Committee. In August 2024, he was appointed as the JKPCC president in place of Vikar Rasool Wani.
“Mufti Sahab argued that he had a compulsion to form the government with the BJP as that party had won 25 seats in Jammu and the PDP 28 seats in Kashmir and Jammu’s Muslim belt. They maintained that PDP’s refusal to form the government would lead to a constitutional crisis and fresh Assembly elections. I told Mufti Sahab and Mehboobaji that the PDP would sweep the next polls if it refused to become part of the government with the BJP. But they didn’t relent”, Karra added.
