Arun Shourie: Government a one-trick horse with no policy on Kashmir

Arun Shourie

Taking a dig at the Narendra Modi government, former Union Minister Arun Shourie on Monday said that it was a "one-trick horse" with no policy either on Kashmir or Pakistan.

"There is no government and no policy regarding Kashmir or Pakistan or even the banks ... What we have is a one-trick horse that only knows how to divide the Hindus and Muslims of this country," Shourie said while speaking at the launch of the book "Kashmir: Glimpses of History..." penned by senior Congress leader Saifuddin Soz.

Terming the Modi government as "event-oriented and election-oriented", Shourie said that the focus was on organising events and winning elections with little heed to policy or governance.

Commenting on the Kashmir unrest, the former Union Minister said the situation has been hurting the whole country and not just the Kashmiris and people should realise that fact.

On the Centre's newly-declared "all out action" stance on Kashmir, Shourie said that what he understood of it was there would be "more aggressive target killings of individuals" but stressed that it would not be wise to use "foolish force" against the people.

Shourie said that a lynching of a Muslim in the Indian mainland in the name of the cow was a "thunderclap" in Kashmir that has the effect of alienating the Kashmiris by forcing them to think of themselves as Muslims being persecuted by the Hindus.

"You are pushing the Kashmiris to think themselves as just Musalmans, that too, of the Wahhabi kind, which they certainly are not. The Kashmiris celebrate their syncretic culture," he said.

He also took a dig at the much publicised surgical strike against Pakistan and termed it as "farzical" (fake) strike.

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