Excelsior Correspondent
SRINAGAR, May 19: Apni Party president, Altaf Bukhari today said that the NC and PDP have a long history of deceptions. He said the leaders of these parties created empires and established their family rule here by deceiving innocent people who had placed their trust in these leaders.
Bukhari was addressing a party convention at Pahalgam in south Kashmir’s Anantnag district.
He said that the dynastic rule has caused intense damage to the interests of Jammu and Kashmir and its people over the past seventy years. He urged people to use the power of their vote to rid themselves of the clutches of these traditional parties and their leaders.
Talking about his and his colleagues’ association with the PDP in the past, Bukhari said, “We had joined the PDP with the aim of combating NC’s decades-long dynastic rule, which we believed was harming the interests of J&K and its people. The founding leader of the PDP claimed that he believed in democratic values and was thus against dynastic politics. We trusted him but were utterly shocked to see that, while passing away from this world, he did not forget to hand the reins of the party to none other than his own daughter. Now, his daughter is grooming her own daughter to inherit the legacy of Khandani Raj,” he added.
On the PDP’s prolonged relationship with the BJP, Bukhari recalled, “Shortly after the Assembly elections in 2014, I visited Mufti Sahib, who had decided to join hands with the BJP to form a coalition Government, despite having received a public mandate based on the PDP’s promise to keep the BJP at bay in Jammu and Kashmir. I strictly opposed the idea of forming a Coalition Government with the BJP. I strongly tried to convince him, even using some harsh words to emphasize that this decision was not right. Finally, he joined hands with the BJP, and the rest is history.”
On the deceptions of NC, Bukhari said that this party has been deceiving people through its misleading narratives and emotional slogans for the past more than seventy years. He said NC leaders has a long history of deceptions. The party that Kashmiris had placed their trust in was the Muslim Conference, established in the 1930s. Nobody knows at whose behest the name of the party was changed from Muslim Conference to National Conference. This marked the beginning of deception by the leaders of the NC.
Subsequently, they kept people occupied with fake and deceptive slogans such as ‘Raishumari’, ‘Autonomy’, ‘Self-rule’, and so on. They were happy with New Delhi when in power and oppose it when out of power, he added.
Senior leaders Rafi Ahmad Mir, Mohd Ashraf Mir, Hilal Ahmad Shah, Abdul Rahim Rather and others also spoke on the occasion.