Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mufti Muhammad Sayeed on Sunday said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s weekend visit will be a turning point in the state’s history.
The people of the state, he said, have great expectations from the visit as the Prime Minister “is a visionary and has his eyes fixed on overall development of J&K.”
“I see this visit as an opportunity for history to repeat itself,” he said while recalling the address of the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to the people in 2003 from the same venue — Srinagar’s Sher-i-Kashmir Cricket Stadium — from where Mr Modi is scheduled to address a joint rally of the ruling PDP-BJP coalition.
Reiterating that politics was the art of the possible, Mr Sayeed thanked both the Congress and the National Conference for extending unconditional support when the 2014 Assembly election results threw a fractured mandate.
He said after thoughtful consideration that took more than two months, he took a calibrated decision to opt for the BJP in the larger interests of all the three distinct regions of the state. “Way back in 1947, our visionary leaders had demonstrated similar political maturity and acumen to accede with India, keeping in view the pluralistic demography of J&K,” he said.
