Mehbooba Mufti attacks Republic Bharat for its nationalistic line, here are 5 reasons we shouldn't be surprised

Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti attacked Republic Bharat on Friday, choosing to take a swipe at its nationalistic "Rashtra Ke Naam" line.

Taking to Twitter, the PDP chief attempted an offhand jibe and in doing so, betrayed an irritation with the concept of nationalism that given her abysmally flip-floppish record comes as no surprise.

Mufti has shown a quite alarming change in outlook towards the country since the time that her insistance on a terrorist-friendly Ramzan ceasefire resulted in the PDP-BJP alliance breaking apart. One could say that she's come out into the open with her real outlook and is trying to fashion a votebank out of separatist, anti-India, pro-Pakiatan and most importantly, anti-Forces elements, ahead of the Lok Sabha and J&K Assembly elections.

Here's a list of five flagrantly anti-National things she's done and said in her efforts to rabble-rouse over the past year:

1. Less than a month ago, on the occasion of Army day, rather than praising the armed forces that kept the peace in the face of repeated Pakistan-sponsored terrorism attempts during her tenure as CM, she instead sang peans of the terrorists, calling terrorists "sons of the soil" and calling for talks with Pakistan, separatists and terrorist leaders. 

"Right from the time I came into politics in 1996, I have been saying that local militants are sons of the soil and our maximum efforts should be to save them because they are assets. If an encounter breaks out, the two people (militants and security forces) come face to face and no one can do anything about it then,"

2. By the time that Mufti made the above remark, she was already on something of a spree, having just a day earlier given her backing to 2016 JNU sedition case accused Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and others, though with a twist. While others, like Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal have only alleged an electoral motive citing the timing of the chargesheet being filed, Mehbooba Mufti also gave a clean chit to 2001 Parliament attack mastermind Afzal Guru.

"Before elections 2019 these investigations are coming out hence we have doubt in this.  You must have things in mind that before 2014 elections, Congress hanged Afzal Guru to death as they would have thought that they will win 2014 election with this move. Now BJP is doing the samething what Congress had done in 2014. Now, they have chargesheeted Kanhaiya, Umar Khalid, 7-8 Kashmiri students. I condemn this. They are unnecessarily charging Kashmiri people before 2019. They are using Kashmiri people to garner votes." 

3. One thing that Mehbooba Mufti has been consistent about is that she wants to talk to Pakistan which is inexplicably a "stakeholder" in Kashmir, with the criteria possibly being export of terrorism. Following the neutralisation of PhD student-turned-terrorist commander Mannan Wani, she made a case for why Pakistan should be spoken to:

“It is high time that all the political parties in the country realise the gravity of this situation and try to facilitate a solution through dialogue with all the stake holders including Pakistan to end this bloodshed.”

4. Months before her government had fallen, she decided that the rights of would-be lynchers were more important than the Army personnel, specifically Major Aditya Kumar and his 10 Garhwal Rifles personnel, who had come under attack in the Shopian firing incident. Mufti's government sought to file an FIR against the forces after a group of stone-pelters had tried to lynch an unconscious JCO at which point the Army resorted to retaliatory fire in which two pelters were killed. In her attempt to target the forces, she had cleverly not named officers directly, but had left open the door for any of them to be roped in at a later stage. The Supreme Court got in the way of her designs, however, telling her government to not treat an army officer as a common criminal.

5. And before that, in the biggest backing to stone-pelters in terms of there being no consequences for their actions, she provided then a mass-amnesty, withdrawing criminal cases against nearly 10,000 of them who had been booked for attacking the armed forces between 2008 and 2017.