On his birthday, Farooq Abdullah summoned again; Party calls it a coercive plot

Srinagar: After being summoned and subsequently questioned by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Monday, National Conference president Farooq Abdullah has been summoned by the agency again on Wednesday, a party statement said.

Interestingly, the move comes on Farooq’s birthday. He turns 83 today.

The party “expressed anger over today’s ED summon to party President Dr Farooq Abdullah, a day after he was questioned by the same agency for a marathon six hours,” the statement said.

The party lambasted the government for it’s “agenda of cornering any voices of dissent.”

Terming these ED summons, the latest being today, calculated coercive measures, the party spokesperson Imran Nabi Dar said that its aimed at curtailing Dr Farooq’s efforts to weave unity among mainstream political parties in J&K.

Calling the repeated ED summons “pressure tactics”, he said: “What is it that ED forgot to ask during the six hours it interrogated an 83-year-old Member of Parliament?”

The government and its agencies, the spokesperson said, has no consideration for a law-abiding citizen who is severely immuno-compromised and diabetic.

“Dr Abdullah being treated like this is a proof that the BJP is not even interested in a face-saving act and is completely comfortable with being seen as a bully by the nation,” he said.

“How many times will BJP use CBI, ED, anticorruption Bureau and its other agencies to browbeat opposition? The plot has become predictable. Anyone who speaks against the government or musters courage against its divisive politics will be hounded and summoned,” he added.

“The only way to get a clean chit these days is to surrender one’s ideology and join the BJP. We’ve seen this story play out from Assam to Karnataka, from West Bengal to Andhra Pradesh but Dr Abdullah is not going to surrender to the BJP, come what may.”

“This on a day when my father turns 84!,” Omar Abdullah said in a tweet while sharing the party statement.