Ready to Face People's Court, Don't Need Any Other Party's Support to Form Govt: National Conference

In the middle of an unprecedented political drama unfolding in Jammu and Kashmir, a senior National Conference leader and former Home Minister of the state told News18 in an interview that preparations for elections have already started and that NC is prepared to face “the people’s court” in all likelihood without the support of any other party.

Nasir Sogami, the provincial president of NC, described the Governor’s action to dissolve the state assembly after the coalition of PD—Congress-NC staked claim to form the government as the demolition of democracy, but did not kept mum on whether the party would challenge the decision in the Supreme Court.

Here are excerpts from the interview.

How did the idea of supporting PDP come about?

Keeping in mind the political anarchy in the state, to save the democratic institutions we decided to come together unconditionally to support the PDP-led front. Law and order in the state is deteriorating alarmingly, and there was fear among people. Nobody was speaking out in fear of retaliation.

Young people’s throats were being slit and it was getting difficult for people to move around. The situation was deteriorating since 2014, but in the last five to six months the conditions worsened with a fearsome speed. That’s when we decided to sacrifice our political positions to save democracy here.

How do you view the act of governor dissolving the assembly?

The democratic institution was demolished by the Governor through this action. Right after Mehbooba Mufti sent him the letter and we announced our outside support, he decided to dissolve the assembly. He seems to have done it at the behest of some political forces.

Some views about challenging this decision in a court of law have been expressed, would NC initiate such an action?

We will see when the party high command sits to discuss the issue. I can't say anything about it at the moment.

When was the decision to lend support to PDP taken? How did the idea come about?

We have been discussing this idea for a week now. There have been senior leaders from PDP, NC, Congress and independents. There had been some informal talks for several weeks, but about a week ago we started discussing this and about 3-4 days ago we broadly reached a consensus on it.

So NC was willing to lend support to PDP and was fine with Mehbooba Mufti as CM?

There were some nitty gritties that remained to be finalised but we were of the opinion that we would sort out these modalities later.

Abid Ansari says that the Sajjad Lone group was about to stake claim to form the government, that many of the renegade MLAs, including some from your party, were ready to support Lone and BJP.

We have been hearing these rumours for the past many months. If they had the numbers what prevented them from staking claim till now?

So what happens now?

There is a state of anarchy in the Valley as I said earlier. We have had just one spell of snow and already we are suffering from 8-10 hours of power cuts in urban areas, let alone the conditions in rural areas. There is no semblance of governance in the state. We never had this situation of educated young boys joining militancy that we have now. The Centre must understand that their hard approach isn’t working in the state

So will the NC fight elections alone or with PDP and Congress?

I think we have the people’s mandate, very good support in both Jammu and Kashmir so we shouldn’t need any other party’s support. But these are issues that need to be cleared by the party high command. We now are waiting for early elections to face the people’s court.