SRINAGAR, India, 3 September 2006 — The high profile Jammu and Kashmir Deputy Chief Minister Muzaffar Hussain Baig yesterday decided to quit the Council of Ministers, thereby ending a crisis that had cropped up in the Congress-Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) alliance in the state.
“I will meet the chief minister and request him to relieve me of my responsibilities as deputy chief minister and also from the Council of Ministers,” Baig told newsmen in the afternoon.
He, however, did not say whether he was also snapping his links with the PDP or with the party leadership which had asked him to step down from the post of deputy chief minister.
The PDP-Congress alliance was shaken this week when the state chief minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, refused to accept a PDP advice to divest Baig of some important portfolios he had been holding before the current reshuffle. The PDP convened an emergency meeting of its legislature party on Thursday night when Baig was removed as its leader in the 87-member Legislative Assembly and was also recalled from the state Council of Ministers.
Denying that he had influenced, Azad’s decision to retain him as deputy chief minister, Baig said: “I was not a party to the chief minister’s decision.” He said that during his recent meeting with the PDP boss Mufti Mohammad Sayeed he had been accused of dereliction of responsibilities on four accounts which included the creation of eight new districts in the state, appointment of former Chief Secretary S.S. Billowria as the head of the delimitation commission, transfer of a senior superintendent of police from south Kashmir’s Anantnag district to Budgam and operation of double shift in construction projects in the state.
He justified his stand, saying: “I didn’t want frequent friction in the running of the coalition and allowed room to the chief minister in matters of jurisdiction.”
The resignation of Baig will pave the way for the appointment of a new PDP- nominated deputy chief minister.
