Union Home Minister Amit Shah today said that the centre’s decision to scrap Jammu and Kashmir’s special status under Article 370 last month was only the first step towards correcting a series of “blunders” by Jawaharlal Nehru that had ended up alienating the region from the rest of the country.
Addressing an event organised by the Samkalp Former Civil Servants Forum at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in the national capital, Amit Shah claimed that the first Indian Prime Minister’s decision to internationalise the Kashmir issue was his biggest mistake in the years following the country’s Independence. “In 1948, India went to United Nations. That was a Himalayan blunder. It was more than a Himalayan blunder,” he said.
The second mistake, Amit Shah claimed, was choosing the wrong article in the UN Charter to address the issue. “Instead of Article 35, the government should have opted for Article 51. That would have made it a matter of illegal occupation by Pakistan on Indian land and not about who owns it,” he said, adding that the demand for a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir has risen from this very mistake.
While Article 35 of the United Nations Charter is used to bring disputes among member-nations to the attention of the Security Council or the General Assembly, Article 51 provides for the “inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a member-nation”.
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