Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram alleged on Sunday, speaking at a public event in Chennai, that the BJP ended Jammu and Kashmir’s special status because the region has a Muslim majority. BJP leaders condemned the remark on Monday as “provocative and irresponsible”.

What Chidambaram said

The former Union home and finance minister claimed the government would not have acted had the state been Hindu-majority. He said that in the 70 years since independence no state had been turned into a Union Territory, and asked why only Jammu and Kashmir was singled out when other states have special provisions under Article 371, blaming religious fanaticism.

He also said the situation in the region was “unstable”, questioned whether calm could be claimed if Indian media did not report unrest, and criticised seven regional parties, AIADMK, YSRCP, TRS, BJD, AAP, TMC and JDU, for not joining the opposition in the Rajya Sabha, saying their cooperation would have given the opposition a majority there. He accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of selectively citing laws in his August 8 address, saying he could list 90 other laws that applied to the state, and said the BJP was “stealing” Sardar Patel, who had never been in conflict with Nehru.

BJP’s response

• Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad called the statement irresponsible and provocative, said the decision served the people of the state, and asked the Congress whether over 42,000 people, mostly Muslims, had died in decades of violence.
• Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said the remark tried to give the issue a communal colour and that the move corrected a decades-old Congress mistake.
• Shivraj Singh Chouhan blamed the Congress’s “narrow mindedness” for seeing the issue through a Hindu-Muslim lens.
• Prakash Javadekar accused the Congress of failing minorities and other communities in the state during its long rule.
• Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi called the statement “unfortunate” and alleged that Chidambaram and Digvijaya Singh were trying to turn Muslims against the government.

See also: Indian National Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party.

Originally published on 13 August 2019. Rewritten on 9 October 2026.

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