Azad declines to promise Article 370's restoration doubting Cong's performance

Jammu: The Congress party has no chance of winning 300 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha election as per how things are now, senior Congress leader Gulam Nabi Azad said.

While addressing a rally in Poonch district on Wednesday, he added that he could not promise that Congress could restore Article 370 since the party will need to win 300 seats in the next general election, which he believes impossible, reports The Indian Express.

Justifying his silence on Article 370, he said that the case is pending at the Supreme Court, and only the judiciary and the government could restore the article. Since the BJP led government abrogated it, they won't restore it, he said.

Recently, Azad had said that it was irrelevant to talk on Article 370, and his main demands are the restoration of statehood and holding assembly elections in Jammu & Kashmir. But the statement earned him criticism from J&K National Conference vice-president Omar Abdullah who said that the Congress party had accepted defeat even before the Supreme Court started hearing the case.

But Azad responded that he alone had been speaking about it in Parliament for the past three years. Their fight with the government is that when the article was withdrawn and the state bifurcated, the Union government has the right to bring changes in the Constitution, but only through the Assembly of J&K and not Parliament, Azad said.