Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the leader of the Indian Congress in the Lok Sabha, tried to get the BJP to answer questions about the exodus of minorities from Kashmir in the 1990s.
He said then Opposition Leader Rajiv Gandhi asked the then VP Singh government to intervene and stop the “atrocities” done to Kashmiri Pandits and Sikhs.
READ MORE: Salman Khan’s Blackbuck Poaching Case moved to the Rajasthan High Court.
When Jagmohan, the then governor of Jammu and Kashmir, told people to leave the valley because he couldn’t protect them, people started leaving. Chowdhury told the Lok Sabha that Jagmohan said he couldn’t protect Kashmiri Pandits and Sikhs, so he told them to leave.
There were “atrocities” against all Pandits and Sikhs, he said. “The V P Singh government was running with the help of the BJP,” he said.
People were leaving Kashmir at that time, said Mr. Chowdhury. The then Congress president and Leader of the Opposition, Rajiv Gandhi, had spoken out against it. He told the then government to stop it “anyway” and warned that the people of the country would not accept it,
“At that time, the Rath Yatra of Lal Krishna Advani Ji started, and our Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, was in charge of this yatra,” he said.
Sunil Kumar Singh, a member of the BJP, raised the issue again during Zero Hour. He said that the government should investigate the “large-scale atrocities” that happened to Hindus and Sikhs in Kashmir from 1980 to 1990, especially when Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister from 1984 to 1989.
A probe should also be done to find out who ordered 70 terrorists to be freed in Jammu and Kashmir, India, in 1989.
“What did these terrorists do? The country wants to know,” he said.
The debate about the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits has started up again after a film about it came out called “The Kashmir Files.”
