In a bid to retrieve the political ground that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had lost by forming the coalition government with the PDP of Mehbooba Mufti, the party chief Amit Shah is coming to Jammu on 23 June to address a public meeting on the road outside the Brahmin Sabha in the heart of the old city.
The state BJP chief Ravinder Raina and former deputy chief minister Kavinder Gupta said that the public meeting will be in connection with the death anniversary of the party ideologue Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee.
This will be Shah’s public meeting here within three days of the BJP withdrawing support to Mehbooba and the state
coming under the governor’s rule.
Shah’s meeting is considered politically important before the next year’s Lok Sabha polls as the “unholy” alliance with the PDP had annoyed several senior activists of the BJP in Jammu and Kashmir.
Shah might make efforts to mobilise such activists who were sitting aloof after the party virtually dumped its core agenda of scrapping the Article 370 while forming the government in 2015 with PDP that was tooth and nail opposing any move to even dilute the special status of the state.
Shah’s visit here is being seen as his attempt to show that the BJP stands by Mukherjee’s demand for complete integration of J&K with rest of the country by scrapping the Articles 370 and 35A.
Raina denied that the BJP had dumped these demands in the “hunger” for power. He said that the demand was on the top of the agenda of the
party.
He said that Shah’s visit was in connection with the ‘Balidan-Divas’ of Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, the founder of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, who had died under mysterious circumstances in the Srinagar jail on 23 June, 1953.