Rahul Gandhi said Amit Shah is unaware of history
New Delhi:
A day after Amit Shah blamed the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru for blunders on Kashmir, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi said the Home Minister has a “habit of rewriting history.”
“Pandit Nehru gave his life for India, he was in jail for years. Amit Shah is unaware of history. I cannot expect him to know history, he has the habit of rewriting it,” Rahul Gandhi told reporters outside parliament today.
“It is just a way of distracting people from real issues,” added Mr Gandhi, who is the great-grandson of Nehru.
Hours after the Supreme Court backed the Centre’s move to scrap Article 370 and end special status to Jammu and Kashmir four years ago, Amit Shah blamed Jawaharlal Nehru for “two major blunders” – declaring a ceasefire in a war with Pakistan and taking the Kashmir issue to the United Nations.
“If there was no untimely ceasefire (during the war with Pakistan), there wouldn’t have been a PoK (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir). Our country was winning, had he (Nehru) waited for two days, entire Kashmir would have been ours,” said Mr Shah.
“People say if not for Nehru, there would have been no Kashmir. People who know history, I want to ask them, Hyderabad faced a bigger problem, did Nehru go there? Did Nehru go to Lakshadweep, Junagarh or Jodhpur? He only used to go to Kashmir and even there he left the job unfinished,” Mr Shah said.
The court’s order vindicated the government’s stand, said Mr Shah, who was the one to announce in 2019 the revocation of Article 370 and bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir.
The government’s move to mainstream Jammu and Kashmir has ensured that the lives of people there have improved, the minister said.
He said that Article 370 had “led to separatism” in Jammu and Kashmir. “There are other states with more Muslim population than Kashmir. Then why only J&K was suffering from terrorism? It was because Article 370 led to separatism,” Mr Shah said, pointing out that top court, in its judgment, said the Article was temporary in nature, meant only to ease Jammu and Kashmir into being a part of India.
Congress MP Manish Tewari described Amit Shah’s remarks against Jawaharlal Nehru as “absolutely erroneous”. “Ceasefire happened because the then government was advised by the commander-in-chief of the Indian Army General Roy Bucher which was inevitable,” news agency PTI quoted him as saying.
