Congress general secretary and communication head Jairam Ramesh on Thursday criticised his senior party colleague Karan Singh for “sidestepping” Union Law Minister Kiren Rijiju’s “hit job” on Jawaharlal Nehru’s role in Jammu & Kashmir’s (J&K) accession to India.
Mr. Ramesh directed his comments at his colleague after Dr. Singh wrote an article in a leading daily, seeking to clarify the role of his father and the erstwhile ruler of J&K, Maharaja Hari Singh, in J&K’s accession to India.
Mr. Rijiju claimed that Maharaja Hari Singh had been willing to join the Indian union even before August 1947 and that Nehru had “blundered by dithering”.
Reacting to the piece, Mr. Ramesh tweeted, “There is not a single scholarly and serious work on J&K that portrays Maharaja Hari Singh in good light. Even this authoritative work by V.P. Menon doesn’t make Hari Singh a wronged man. It is hence natural that his son Dr. Karan Singh defends him in the HT [newspaper Hindustan Times] today.”
“What I find surprising though is that Dr. Karan Singh has sidestepped Rijiju’s hit job on Nehru. This the same Nehru without whose support Dr. Karan Singh wouldn’t have achieved much, as he acknowledges in his 2006 book with 216 letters exchanged between them during 1948-64. This is the same Nehru to whom Singh dedicated his book on Aurobindo in May 1962, and for which the country’s first PM wrote a wonderful foreword,” the Congress communication chief said in other tweets.
On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of J&K’s accession, Mr. Rijiju, in an article for a portal, cited “five Nehruvian blunders”, including floating the idea of plebiscite, and terming J&K’s accession provisional.
While Mr. Ramesh accused the Law Minister of distorting history, Dr. Singh in his article suggested that he had no knowledge of his father wanting to accede to India before October 26, when the princely State finally joined the Indian Union. However, the former royal from J&K didn’t contest Mr. Rijiju’s claims of “Nehruvian blunders”.
