Home Minister to Mufti; ‘No Compromise on National Security’

NEW DELHI: After Pakistani flags were raised at the rally of Kashmiri separatist Masarat Alam, who was controversially released from prison recently, Home Minister Rajnath Singh has told Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed to take “immediate and stringent” action.

“There can be no compromise on national security. Politics cannot impinge on national security,” the home minister reportedly said as he spoke to Mr Sayeed last night.

Masarat Alam had organized the rally in Srinagar to welcome Hurriyat Conference hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani back to the Valley after several months in Delhi. As hundreds of Mr Alam’s supporters marched through the city and right in front of the office of the state’s Director General of Police, several of them waved Pakistan flags.

“It is absolutely condemnable. No one has right to raise pro-Pakistani slogans in this country.

Those who have done it have violated the law of the country. I am sure the state government will act in the strictest possible manner against Masarat Alam and his supporters,” said the BJP’s Sambit Patra.

Masarat Alam’s release from jail in March deeply embarrassed the BJP, and became another point of conflict in its tense alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir.

As opposition parties attacked the BJP-led central government, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said in the Lok Sabha, “I also lend my voice to the outrage on the release of the separatist… this is not one party’s outrage, it is the nation’s outrage.”

The PDP and BJP, ideological opposites, came together after weeks of negotiations to give Jammu and Kashmir a government on the basis of a common minimum programme.

Masarat Alam, 44, is allegedly the main organiser of the massive protests in 2010 that saw Kashmiris clashing for months with Indian soldiers and police officers. More than 100 people were killed in the violence. He was released controversially from Baramulla jail in March, days after the People’s Democratic Party or PDP’s Mufti Mohammad Sayeed took over as chief minister at the head of a government in which the BJP partners.

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Source:Ndtv