Former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Farooq Abdullah has said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave no indication of the move during a meeting, just before the government scrapped the special status of Jammu and Kashmir in August last year.
“Nobody can trust the government of India anymore. There is not a day when they don’t lie,” the National Conference MP was quoted as saying by NDTV in his first interview since his release from detention earlier this year.
“This is not Gandhi’s India.”
Farooq Abdullah said he had met with PM Modi a day before a huge number of troops moved in, one of the many signs of something big afoot.
“It just came out of the blue. I had met the PM a day before, he had given us no indication. I told him so many troops had been moved in, what was the need? Tourists were being pushed out, the (Amarnath) yatra had been cancelled. All this was strange… as if it was war with Pakistan or something,” Mr. Abdullah said.
“When we asked the PM, he didn’t say anything. But he said other things that I don’t think I should say anything at this point. He was absolutely kind and nice and unbelievable.”
The veteran politician, asked what he would like to say to the PM today, said: “I would humbly request PM to be more honest and really face the facts. He knows what he did was not right.”
No one can trust government of India, Mr Abdullah raged. “It is impossible to… There’s not a day they don’t lie.”
“Anybody who is here was wonderstruck. It was only when I was closed in and informed by my police that I can’t go out (that I realized),” Mr Abdullah said on how he learnt of the mega Article 370 decision.
Recalling his emotional outburst in an interview to NDTV after the government claimed in parliament that he was not in detention, he said: “This was strange. We stood with the nation; this was something I never expected would happen to us. We were no different from separatists we hear.”
On the perceived lack of public sympathy after his arrest, Mr Abdullah remarked: “Many here believe you got what was coming for trusting India.”
He said he “had to beg” to go to a dentist and to go to the hospital for an eye problem.
My phones were cut, the only thing I had was TV. Being an MP, I was supposed to have a phone. I wanted to speak to my daughter in England but I couldn’t talk to her,” Mr Abdullah said.
“Delegations were stopped from coming here. They got puppets from EU, from US to go around Dal Lake, have their Goshtaba and claim everything is hunky dory.”
