Congress Rajya Sabha member Digvijay Singh claimed on Friday that contrary to the BJP government’s repeated claims, terrorist attacks in Jammu and Kashmir have actually increased after the revocation of Article 370 and demonetisation in the country.
Talking to media persons at Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh, Singh said it was alarming to note that the cartridge casings, recovered after the terror attack on an army vehicle in Poonch that killed five soldiers, had Chinese markings on them.
The veteran Congress leader said after the scrapping of Article 370 in 2019, the number of terrorist attacks in J&K in the past three years rose to 1,033, in which 177 soldiers lost their lives. Drawing a comparison, Singh said that the number of terror attacks in the border state in 2019 was 594 and in 2020, it was 244.
He also said that it was disturbing that terror attacks were now taking place in hitherto peaceful and terrorism-free regions like Poonch in Jammu whereas earlier such events were witnessed in the Kashmir valley areas like Pulwama and Anantnag.
Singh said the Union government had claimed that scrapping Article 370, a constitutional provision granting special status to J&K, and the demonetisation in 2016 would help in fighting terrorism in the erstwhile state, but figures of Defence and Home Ministries suggest that terror-related incidents have actually gone up since these measures were announced.