New Delhi: Rubbishing Home Minister Amit Shah’s statement that he was at home of his own free will, an emotional National Conference chief Farooq Abdullah on Tuesday said he was arrested in his own house and no else was allowed to meet him in the last two days.
“Whatever the Home Minister claims about my absence is a complete lie. It is baseless. I am totally jailed. They have stationed a DSP outside my house. I can't even visit my daughter who lives a few metres away. There is a lock outside her door," he said, breaking down on camera while speaking to CNN-News18.
Shah, after he was asked by NCP’s Supriya Sule on why Abdullah was not present in the Lok Sabha while Jammu and Kashmir’s special status was being discussed, had said the NC leader has neither been detained nor arrested. “He's at his home out of his own free will," he said, adding that the government can't bring him out on gunpoint.
But the former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister said he “broke the door" to come out and speak to the media.
“Dictatorial authority has been invoked and not a democratic authority that we thought they will invoke. I don’t know how many have been arrested. Nobody is allowed to come in or go out, we are under house arrest," he said.
The government, in a security crackdown in the Kashmir Valley ahead of its move to repeal J&K’s special status, had sent thousands of troops, snapped all communication and put Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti on house arrest. The two leaders, on Monday, were detained by authorities and moved to guest houses.
Abdullah said there was complete curtailment of movement in Kashmir as he described the Centre’s move on Article 370 via a presidential decree as a “robbery".
“This is absolute dictatorship," he said, as he called the government actions “undemocratic" and a betrayal of the secular and democratic principles that had made Kashmir align with India.
“For them, all Muslims are separatists. Is this what we deserve? I have never thought of this… not even in my wildest dream," he told CNN-News18.
"As soon as the gate will open and our people will be out, we will fight, we'll go to the court. We're not gun-runners, grenade-throwers, stone-throwers, we believe in peaceful resolutions. They want to murder us," he added.
The veteran leader further said that when he had gone to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week to seek a response on the reasons behind troop build-up in the Valley, he was assured that the Amarnath Yatra was going well.
He said he and his party would fight the government’s repeal of special status and would explore all possible options. Omar Abdullah, in a statement issued on Monday, had also said that the move was “unconstitutional" and the party would challenge it in the Supreme Court.
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