SRINAGAR: Former separatist and chairman of the People’s Conference party (PC), Sajjad Lone has launched a scathing attack on senior separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, piqued by the latter’s criticism during a seminar yesterday.
“We have a firm belief that Geelani was the best gift that status-quo lobby in New Delhi could aspire for,” Lone said in a statement.
He was reacting to remarks made by Geelani on Sunday that the PC (the faction represented by Lone is in mainstream politics now) only strengthened “the Indian occupation in Kashmir”.
“The Peoples’ Conference led by Sajjad Lone claims that it would bring a change; the fact is they will only bring miseries. They will become part and parcel of a country that has anti-Kashmir agenda since 1947,” the octogenarian leader, who heads the hardline faction of the Hurriyat, had said.
Lone and Geelani have no love lost for each other. They have had a series of spats in the past after Geelani accused Lone of fielding proxy candidates in the state elections in 2008, when he (Lone) was still part of the separatist quarter.
Lone had retorted back by calling Geelani “a liar who worked in tandem with Indian agencies”.
In 2009 Lone contested the parliamentary elections from the Kupwara-Baramulla constituency, but said during campaigns that he had only “changed his strategy and not his ideology”.
In his fresh attack of words, Lone has criticised the ‘hartal and election boycott politics’ of the separatist leader.
“The Kashmiri nation deserves to know what his policy of back-breaking hartals and election boycotts has achieved till now. He should desist from his post-winter-vacation sermonising…,” Lone said.
“Has nobody told Geelani that people do not heed to his boycott calls, because unlike him they have the wisdom and foresight to understand that the boycott of elections and the resolution of the Kashmir Issue are two separate issues that have nothing in common.”
Lone said his party “firmly believed that the best bet is to empower people economically before making political decisions because an economically secure and independent Kashmir will be more politically resilient and stable than an economically impoverished one.”
