The “callous response” of the state administration has added to the miseries of passengers stranded in Jammu owing to bad weather and highway closure, the Hurriyat Conference (G) chairman Syed Ali Geelani said on Tuesday.
Expressing his sorrow over multitude of problems faced by the stranded people, Geelani said the “tall claims of the establishment have been exposed”.
“This unnatural road link (Srinagar-Jammu highway) has consumed thousands of people and destroyed properties worth millions of rupees. This deadly link continues to suck the blood of Kashmiris for the past 71 years. No year has passed when the connectivity along the highway has remained uninterrupted throughout the year,” Geelani said in a statement.
He said thousands of fruit-laden trucks and their owners are stranded and left “at the mercy of weather” and “poor and helpless fruit growers are made to watch their hard-earned wealth decaying”.
Geelani said stranded passengers are “financially exhausted and instead of providing them food and shelter, the government has left them to the mercy of the sick-minded Hindutva preachers, who thrashed and stoned these helpless people and made them to run for their life”.
“Every event in Jammu and Kashmir for the last seven decades has proved the genesis and philosophy of two-nation theory right. When a yatra bus meets an accident in Kashmir, people come to their rescue and provide them every possible help, but when our people face any hardship outside, a handful of venomous people try to take their revenge by harassing them,” the statement read, quoting Geelani.