Expressing gratitude to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman for Central assistance to J&K, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Tuesday asked whether it was wrong to thank someone who had done something for the UT. “Are we ungrateful,” he asked, responding in the Assembly to the opposition PDP’s charge that his budget and the L-G’s address were “love letters” to the BJP. “If the PM, Home Minister and the Finance Minister have helped J&K, shall I feel shy in acknowledging it. I expressed my thanks that day (presentation of Budget) and I will do it again today,” the CM said. Acknowledging that “we wrote love letters” to all including BJP, PDP, People’s Conference, Congress and even the Independents, he said one writes love letters to express his love. “I immensely love people of J&K and through this love letter, we have tried to give them a little bit of relief,’’ he said, adding that “God willing, we will continue to write such love letters during the next five years’’. Justifying his expression of gratitude to the Centre for its assistance to J&K, the CM said, “I myself say that we are not financially independent.” He said his government was looking for sectors where it can generate income to avoid dependence on assistance. Referring to the UT’s own finances, he said that for spending nearly `35,000 crore Capex, J&K government pays over `70,000 crore in salaries to its employees. “To get work done worth nearly `35,000 crore, we have to pay salaries worth over `70,000 crore,’’ he pointed out, adding that if you run a company like this in the private sector it would close after one or two years. He also took a dig at the BJP for giving a wrong impression that J&K’s Budget was only about Centrally sponsored schemes.
