Asks to Bring Statehood Resolution in Assembly First, Not on Delhi’s Streets; Draws Parallel With 1975, Pre-Empts NC’s BJP Narrative Attack on Opposition
Srinagar, July 17:
J&K Peoples Conference President and MLA Handwara Sajad Lone launched a pointed attack on the National Conference on Friday, questioning both the timing and the real motive behind Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s call for a sit-in at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to press for statehood.
Lone opened by noting the press conference had been delayed by a day out of respect for a bereavement in the Abdullah family and said his party’s position has not shifted: the pre-August 5, 2019 status of Jammu and Kashmir, Article 370, Article 35A, and full statehood, remains paramount, with Article 370 the most important of the three.
Lone’s core argument was that major political decisions in a democracy require consensus, not unilateral calls to the street. He recalled that in early August 2019, Farooq and Omar Abdullah had traveled to Delhi without taking other parties into confidence, only for a photograph with the Prime Minister to emerge the next day along with assurances that nothing was going to change, assurances undone within forty-eight hours when Article 370 was revoked.
He said that to this day, nobody knows what was actually said in that meeting, and that despite the public warmth shown toward the central leadership since then, the National Conference has never once confronted them publicly about being misled that day. He added that the media, too, has never asked the question directly.
Turning to the present, Lone said the Jammu and Kashmir assembly may have lost its old powers but has not lost its representative character — it remains the constitutional voice of the people. On that basis, he said it was unacceptable that no statehood resolution had been passed in nearly two years, and that his own attempts to move such a resolution had been blocked by the Speaker on grounds that the matter was sub judice.
He specifically cited an amendment he moved on February 3, 2025 during the Governor’s address, seeking to add a demand for the return of Article 370, 35A and statehood, which he said was rejected by voice vote with every NC member voting against it alongwith BJP leaders, a development he said went almost entirely unreported.
Lone’s central demand was that the government call an emergency session of the assembly, pass a resolution on statehood, and then send an all-party delegation — without theatrics — to meet the Prime Minister, the Home Minister and the Leader of the Opposition.
Only if that route failed, he said, should Jantar Mantar even be considered, and his party would join at that stage. Bypassing the assembly and taking the issue straight to Delhi, he warned, would reduce the statehood question to a fight between the BJP and the opposition at the national level, stripping the people of Jammu and Kashmir of any real role in their own cause.
He went further, suggesting the protest may not really be about statehood at all, but about quietly burying the demand for Article 370 and 35A — issues that fall under Parliament’s jurisdiction rather than the assembly’s, and on which he said opposition parties had promised support during the election campaign that never materialized.
He drew a historical parallel to 1975, when previous constitutional safeguards were similarly given up in exchange for power, calling the present moment a repeat of that pattern.
Lone was equally critical of the Chief Minister’s conduct in the run-up to the announced protest, noting that Omar Abdullah met the Defence Minister and several other Union ministers, and eventually the Prime Minister himself, in the days after declaring his intent to protest.
He said Abdullah claimed to have raised statehood in that meeting and argued that if the Prime Minister, whom he called the final authority on statehood, had said no, the government owed the public a straight answer rather than proceeding to Jantar Mantar without clarifying what was actually said.
He accused the National Conference of inconsistency, recalling how the party rushed to present shawls to central leaders even before final election results were in, and later sent flowers to the Union Home Minister after Mamata Banerjee’s defeat in West Bengal, while simultaneously invoking anti-BJP rhetoric for public consumption.
He also accused that non-NC MLAs from Kashmir, including himself, have faced administrative obstruction at the behest of NC leaders, while NC-aligned MLAs from Jammu face no such restrictions, a pattern he said exposed the party’s selective use of power even within a diminished Union Territory framework.
Lone closed by inviting the public to verify his account of the assembly amendments personally, urging people to search for his moved amendments to the Governor’s address to see for themselves how the National Conference voted. He reiterated that dharnas historically produce little beyond media coverage, and suggested the protest also serves to distract from governance failures.
He ended by saying that while he could not be certain of the National Conference’s true motive, his assessment was that this was less a genuine campaign for statehood and more an exercise aimed at burying Article 370 and 35A for good, leaving statehood as a secondary and diminished consolation prize.