BJP to scrap Art 370 in J&K; introduce NRC in the country, says Amit Shah

Uluberia/Krishnanagar: BJP president Amit Shah on Monday said his party will scrap Article 370 of the Constitution which grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir and introduce National Register for Citizens across the country after returning to power.

Shah accused TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee of questioning the air strikes to "appease" her minority vote bank and wryly said she can do "Ilu Ilu" (I love you) with Pakistan but if that country fire bullets on us we would respond with cannon balls.

On the campaign trail in West Bengal's Uluberia Lok Sabha seat in Howrah and Krishnanagar constituency in Nadia, Shah demanded the TMC chief to clarify whether she too favoured a separate prime minister for Jammu and Kashmir like her ally National Conference leader Omar Abdullah. 'Apko (Mamata) Pakistan ke saath ilu ilu (I love you) karna hain toh kijiye. Lekin agar Pakistan goli marega toh hum gola marenge' (If you are interested in showing love with Pakistan, you can do that but we would respond to their bullets with canon balls), Shah said, referring to the popular Hindi song from a film in the early 1990s. "We will remove Article 370 from Kashmir after forming the next BJP government at the Centre. The Congress and Trinamool Congress want Article 370 to stay. We will also introduce NRC across the country," Shah told an election rally here. "For us, national security is supreme unlike Mamata didi for whom infiltrators are vote bank. We will identify them and throw them out," Shah said. Lashing out at the chief minister for allegedly running a "mafia raj" in Bengal, the BJP president also claimed that the state has topped the chart in cow smuggling and become a safe haven for infiltrators.

Urging the people to ensure that the BJP wins more than 23 out of 42 seats in the state, Shah said it would ensure that the syndicate raj ends within 90 days in Bengal. The BJP had two seats in Bengal in 2014 against TMC 34, but after a good performance in the rural polls and some bypolls last year, the saffron party is buoyed to break the monopoly of Banerjee's party in the eastern state.

In West Bengal, 'syndicate' means the business run by persons allegedly enjoying political patronage, who force promoters and contractors to buy construction materials, often of inferior quality at high prices.