KD NEWS SERVICE
SRINAGAR, Mar 18: Dr Shah Faesal’s new party that he launched on Sunday has started facing the heat. A statement issued here late last night said a party with the same name already exists and is part of the Hurriyat Conference.
The statement reads: “The Jammu and Kashmir People’s Movement (JKPM) has strongly objected to the launching of a new political outfit under the identical name and style by the former bureaucrat Dr Shah Faesal and urged him to make a modification in the name of his party which he launched on Sunday. Senior APHC leader and chairman of the JKPM Mir Shahid Saleem in a statement said that a political outfit under the name and style of “Jammu and Kashmir People’s Movement” (JKPM) has been functioning for the past twenty years in Jammu and Kashmir. He said that the party was launched on April 4, 2000, at press club Jammu. After being launched, the JKPM became a constituent member of the APHC and presently is a member of its executive body.
The JKPM Chairman Mir Shahid Saleem taking a strong exception to the party name being used by Dr Faesal called upon him to make a necessary modification in the name of his newly launched political party to avoid unnecessary confusion. Saleem said that during a conversation Dr Shah Faesal agreed to make a change in the party name failing which JKPM would be forced to go to the electronic and print media at large to prove its claim. Mir Shahid Saleem said that this was unbecoming and against the basic ethics for a man like Dr Shah Faesal to commit a sort of plagiarism, who has always been talking of moral high grounds in the public life. He wondered “why a tech-savvy Dr Faesal could not Google out the name of Jammu Kashmir People’s Movement which has been in use for the past over twenty years.”
On social media, it was creating a lot of buzzes, last night, that the IAS topper 2009’s party has used a tag-line that wire-manufacturer Havells has been using for a long time: Hawa Badleghi – the winds will change. It has been using the tag-line for marketing its fans, for some time now.
Now the party will have to face the criticism from the seniors occupying the space that JKPM has jumped into. The criticism has actually started. While NC CM-candidate Omar Abdullah has been saying that the mandate of Kashmir is being deliberately fractured by the central government, his aide, Tanvir Sadiq has written on Twitter: “J&K’s political history is witness to the fact of many attempts to snatch away its special status especially by the use of proxies by New Delhi. Today is no different. A party has been created/funded to divide us to make it easier for them AGAIN. Beware and be on guard! #OnlyHal”.
