New Delhi, Former Congress President Rahul Gandhi was on Saturday taken aback when a Kashmiri woman started narrating her ordeal to him and other Opposition leaders onboard the flight they were travelling back to Delhi from Srinagar, after denied entry to the city.
The video of the incident was shared on Twitter by Congress spokesperson Radhika Khera in which a Kashmiri woman is seen narrating how the lives of people had been affected after abrogation of Article 370 and lockdown in the Valley.
In the video, woman is is seen telling Rahul Gandhi, seated on a window seat, “Our children have not been able to move out of their houses. My brother is a heart patient. He could not see the doctor for 10 days. We are in trouble,” she said sobbing.
Rahul can be seen getting up from his seat and console the woman, while other Congress leaders, like Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, K.C. Venugopal, and other opposition leaders gave a patient hearing to the woman’s emotional outburst.
A delegation of 12 opposition leaders, led by Gandhi, on a visit to know the ground realities in the Valley, was not allowed to move out of the Srinagar airport and was sent back to Delhi in an evening flight.
After returning to Delhi, Gandhi said things in Valley were not normal. “We wanted to get a sense of what people are going through. But we were not allowed beyond the airport,” Gandhi said.
“The media people with us were manhandled. It’s clear the situation in J&K is not normal,” he said.
A few days back he was invited by J&K Governor Satya Pal Malik to visit the state and he had accepted the invitation.
The Valley has been under security lockdown since August 5, when Article 370 was abrogated.
The delegation comprised Communist Party of India leader D. Raja, Communist Party of India (Marxist) Sitaram Yechury, Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma and K.C. Venugopal, Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) Chief Sharad Yadav, Trinamool Congress leader Dinesh Trivedi, DMK’s Tiruchi Siva, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Majeed Memon, RJD’s Manoj Jha and Janata Dal Secular’s D. Kupendra Reddy.
The J&K administration had on Friday advised the leaders to stay away from the region, saying attempts should not be made to disturb the gradual restoration of normalcy in the state.
The opposition delegation’s attempt to visit the state had come almost three weeks after the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution that accorded special status to J&K.
