In an exclusive interview with ThePrint, Abdullah also says the Centre cannot wait for the last gun to fall silent before starting talks to bring peace to the troubled state.
Srinagar: Former Jammu & Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah said the NDA government could not “wait for the last gun to fall silent” to hold a dialogue to address the problems facing the besieged state.
In an exclusive interview with ThePrint, Abdullah added that the NDA government’s approach to the state had led to a sense of complete alienation among the people. The disillusionment among the youth has to be addressed through talks, he said.
“Do you wait for the last gun to fall silent…? Clearly, that seems to be the position the government of India has taken,” said Abdullah, who heads the J&K National Conference.
“The time to talk is when you have a problem. Not when the problem has already disappeared.”
“Every day, there are protests, there are disruptions,” he added, “Almost a few days a week, there are incidents where civilians are either injured or, god forbid, killed. If you don’t talk now, when will you talk?”
The Centre, he said, should realise “the futility of its own course of action”. “The fact is their semi-hard stand has not achieved anything. In fact, you have alienated people to the point where you are unable to conduct the election to a Parliament seat vacated by the chief minister… Nothing could be worse than that,” Abdullah said.
He was referring to the bypoll for Anantnag that has repeatedly been deferred on account of “unconducive local conditions” since Mehbooba Mufti vacated it in early 2016 to assume the CM’s office after her father Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s death.
The former chief minister added that the Hurriyat Conference had to be a part of the dialogue to resolve the Kashmir situation. “To suggest that the Hurriyat Conference is irrelevant to the situation in the state would be wrong. The more we try to suggest they are irrelevant, the more their relevance grows,” he said. “So, the right way to approach the Hurriyat would be Vajpayee sahab’s and Dr Manmohan Singh’s, to try and bring them into a dialogue process.”
Abdullah, who was sworn in as India’s youngest Union minister under the A.B. Vajpayee-led NDA government in 1999, is the son of former chief minister Farooq Abdullah and ‘sher-e-Kashmir’ Sheikh Abdullah, the state’s former ‘prime minister’ as well as chief minister. He himself took office as CM in 2008, at the time the youngest in India to have ever done so.
His government was unseated after the 2014 state elections, when the then Sayeed-led PDP emerged as the biggest player in a hung assembly. Thus began a long period of suspense as parties began efforts to cobble together an alliance with enough numbers to establish a majority in the 87-member assembly. A coalition was eventually formed between the PDP (28 MLAs) and the BJP (25), an unlikely alliance between two parties with sharply divergent views on crucial issues such as Article 370, which grants J&K a special autonomous status.
Abdullah said the blame for the current mess in the state lay squarely with the two coalition partners, adding that they had left no stone unturned in “destroying” J&K. “I consider them both equally responsible,” he added.
Crises in paradise
J&K, in the throes of tumult for decades, has faced fresh cause for tensions over the past few months: there was the Shopian case, where an army major and his unit, who opened fire on a mob, were reportedly booked for the deaths of three men killed in the firing; the alleged rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl by two police personnel in Kathua that has taken on communal overtones; and, again in Shopian, anger over the Army’s claims that three civilians killed in an exchange of fire with terrorists last weekend were militant ‘overground workers’.
Abdullah said there seemed to be a “complete lack of desire” on the part of state government to hold anyone accountable for the first Shopian case.
“You have the chief minister committing in the assembly, not once but twice, that the matter will be taken to its logical conclusion, and then taking a complete U-turn when the matter reaches the Supreme Court,” he added.
While initial reports claimed the major was among those named as accused in the FIR, the J&K government stated in the Supreme Court earlier this month that he wasn’t.
Abdullah also slammed the allies for “talking in different voices” on various issues. The army major incident as well as the Kathua rape saw PDP and BJP members take divergent stands, leading to questions about the alliance.
“The PDP is very much a constituent of the NDA,” Abdullah said, “When they talk in different voices, obviously it adds to the confusion…”
Talking about the Kathua case, Abdullah said the state government had done nothing about it “other than make things worse”.
‘Contradictions, contradictions’
“Again, the contradictions in the government come to the fore. Section144 is imposed in Kathua. Ministers go there and call their own police ‘Jungle Raj’ and the chief minister is so helpless that she can do nothing about this,” he added.
“At this point, it looks like ground is being prepared by Mehbooba Mufti to save her chair. She doesn’t care for justice to the victim and her family. She wants to remain in office for as long as possible,” he added.
Abdullah said J&K was in a state of “sheer helplessness”, adding that the opposition was “ready for elections any day”.
“These three years have been so destructive for J&K that the next three years, if the PDP-BJP government continues… I think only god will be able to retrieve this state from the mess it has been brought into,” he said.
The J&K assembly and government have six-year terms.
Abdullah also described as “humiliating” the Centre’s reported diktat to CM Mehbooba on what to and what not to tweet. “It was not only humiliating for her, but the entire state. I may not support her politically but she is our chief minister…”