Omar Abdullah’s using direct quotes from an article published in a news portal that said the independent Engineer Abdur Rashid Sheikh’s election victory shows Kashmiri secessionism is far from spent is roiling Kashmir politics with the former chief minister being openly accused of echoing divisive politics by his opponents. Mr. Abdullah who lost to Eng.
Rashid in the just concluded Lok Sabha elections in Baramulla by a margin of over 2.04 lakh votes had in a post on microblogging site ‘X’ quoted from Praveen Swami’s article published in The Print which said, “Rashid’s victory, without doubt, will empower secessionists, and give Kashmir’s defeated Islamist movement a renewed sense of hope. Efforts to draw secessionism back into electoral politics led New Delhi to support the rise of the People’s Democratic Party, and its alliance with the BJP.
That, however, ended up empowering violent secessionists, not mainstreaming them—a warning of the unpredictable outcomes of trying to manipulate politics.” But as some news agencies attributed these lines quoted from the digital platform to Mr. Abdullah, People’s Democratic Party (PDP) leader Waheed Ur Rehman Parra too came on ‘X’ to say that he was extremely disappointed with the former chief minister’s “regressive stance”.
He said, “Extremely disappointed with @OmarAbdullah’s 's regressive stance, echoing the divisive politics of 1987, and dubbing a democratic expression as an 'Islamist wave'. His .