Mukhtar Naqvi slams Congress on Kashmir Files comments, accuses Party of communal politics

Union Minister of Minority Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi on Monday condemned the now-deleted tweets made by the Congress unit of Kerala which took on Vivek Agnihotri's 'The Kashmir Files' movie on Sunday. Sharing a long thread of 'facts' about the Kashmiri Pandit exodus in 1990 in a bid to downplay the exodus, Congress claimed that it was the terrorists who killed the Kashmiri Pandits. Following this, Union Minister Naqvi stepped forward to slam the comments and said that Kashmir was now progressing after the abrogation of article 370.

Facing severe backlash for its tweet, Congress later took down the first tweet and further raised an allegation that the Kashmiri Pandits left the Valley under the direction of former Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Jagmohan. Union Minister of Minority Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi launched an apparent attack on the Congress Party following the tweets and said that the party was now suffering for their ‘communal politics’.

Speaking about the situation in Kashmir, the minister said that the UT was now on a better path since the abrogation of article 370. “After the abrogation of article 370, Kashmir is progressing. Some people were doing the work of commission, corruption, communalism before abrogation of article 370. These dynastic parties are now suffering due to their communal politics,” Naqvi told ANI. With the comments, Naqvi joined a list of BJP leaders that slammed the Congress for its controversial comments on the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits.

Congress stirs fresh controversy over The Kashmir Files

Days after the release of 'The Kashmir Files' on March 11, Congress' Kerala Twitter handle, on Sunday, shared a long thread of 'facts' concerning the Kashmiri Pandits' exodus in 1990. In a bid to downplay the exodus, Congress alleged that it was the terrorists who killed 399 Kashmiri Pandits between 1990-2007, while 15,000 Muslims were killed during the same era. After facing major backlash for its tweets, the Congress unit later deleted the first post.

In its tweets, Congress claimed that the then-J&K Governor Jagmohan was an RSS leader, under whose rule, Pandits were driven out of the Valley. Pointing out that BJP continued to support the VP Singh govt till 1990, Congress claimed that the UPA administration had built 5,242 tenements for Pandits in Jammu and provided one-time assistance of Rs 5 lakh to each family. It also blamed the BJP for engineering a Hindu-Muslim divide in the country over the Ram Mandir issue in Ayodhya during the migration, adding that the Pandits’ issue suited BJP’s propaganda to create a fake outrage for electoral gain. 

Image: ANI/ INSTAGRAM