NEW DELHI: Questioning Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies, Union Minister Jitendra Singh today said if Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had been given a free hand to deal with Jammu and Kashmir, as in case of other princely states, the situation there would have been different.
Delivering the 59th Sardar Patel Memorial Lecture here, the Minister of State in the PMO said just as Nehru’s “midnight arrival” heralded a new era for India, the “twilight arrival” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi can also be described as the beginning of a new era.
Singh said Nehru, free India’s first Prime Minister, believed that he knew Jammu and Kashmir better than Patel and thought he should take care of it rather than the Home Minister, who integrated over 560 other princely states into the Indian union.
“The common opinion is that the course of events would have been different if Sardar Patel was given the liberty to handle, like other (princely) states, Jammu and Kashmir as well. Because Nehru believed that he knew Jammu and Kashmir better than Sardar sahab and therefore he should take care of it. And then going to UNO and all those things…,” he said.
Noting that the UN resolution was not against the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India but Pakistan’s aggression against the country, Singh said the document itself became “infructuous” as one of its conditions was that Pakistan also had to withdraw from the territory it had occupied, something it refused to do. (AGENCIES)
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