Omar Abdullah: From skiing on slopes to tweeting on tragedies

Ahmed Ali Fayyaz

SRINAGAR, Feb 15: These days in 2009, Omar Abdullah was being tutored on the need and timing of making ‘political corrections’. This inspite of the fact that, nearly a decade ago, he had learned how his own guts were far more correct than many of his senior National Conference colleagues’---his predominantly experienced father included. On both the occasions---contemptuous treatment to NC’s demand of greater autonomy by the Vajpayee Government and massacre of Muslims in Gujarat during Narendar Modi rule---Omar was forced to remain hooked to the NDA.

Nonchalance, that was dangerously reminiscent of Farooq Abdullah’s ‘Disco Dancer’ escapades in 1983, marked the beginning of Omar’s first spring. He remained absent from key deliberations in the first session of Legislature and, while being present, fiddled with his BlackBerry. Even on the crucial day of his first reply on the Governor’s address in the Budget session, he enjoyed skiing on the alpine slopes and joyrides on the snow-scooter at Gulmarg. His speech in the evening impressed many but did not make for the damage done to preeminence of the House by the Leader of the House.

The youngest Chief Minister spent next 12 months in apologizing, even on things that had not happened. Taking him a lame duck, one of the most respected opposition leaders fired on him pointblank on the floor of Assembly. Omar didn’t lose a minute to step down. The UPA leadership in New Delhi not only salvaged his persona but also put him firmly back to the saddle.

Months later, a band of elected separatists denigrated him as “bacha khour” on the same floor of the House when stone throwers caused the death of first infant in Baramulla. In the efforts of making ‘political corrections’, Omar bowed to the extent of reducing himself to Hurriyat’s postman. That alone, he seemed to think, was the way to be ahead of the PDP. The flames did not subside even after a senior Minister in the Cabinet abused the “unbridled” CRPF publicly. It took the greenhorn in the hot seat months to realize that cheap appeasement to separatists and pseudo-separatists in the Valley was, in fact, a great political incorrection.

As Omar learned that the judiciary was not crippling with the detention of the separatist icons in the Bar and every arrest of the ‘stone pelter’ was marginalizing men, and women, from Hurriyat to Dukhtaraan to PDP, he began listening to his own guts. Things have come to full circle in the past four months. While ‘heroes of the revolution 2008 and 2010’ are now either in jail or camping between New Delhi and New York, their villain is shuttling between villages and towns in Kashmir, with vengeance.

Omar’s BlackBerry has not gone under Harsh Dev Singh’s fear. It is continuing as an integral organ of the techno-savvy Chief Minister’s persona. With a difference, indeed. On Twitter, he was the first J&K politician to condemn not only the carnage of two young women last fortnight in Sopore but also the “silence” all Kashmiri leaders had adopted on every killing perceived to be done by militants. Next week, he again took the lead to visit the family of a youth gunned down by troops in Handwara. On his return to Srinagar through Sopore, he tweeted in profusion on the tragedy.

Omar is now on Twitter over the death of three young members of an extremely impoverished family at Maloora, in Srinagar outskirts. He seems conscious that tweeting alone would not be the healing touch. In all the three cases, he has reportedly sanctioned extraordinary measures of relief. If he succeeded in coming out of the political trap of “killings of my period” and “killings of your period”, he may be doing the real correction. It will take Omar Abdullah only minutes to reconsider relief to hundreds of families, like those of the four young children shot dead by Army at Bangargund (Kupwara) when Mufti Mohammad Sayeed was the Chief Minister.

Documents are evidently clear that the head of the “healing touch” regime had categorically denied ex gratia relief (under SRO 43) to siblings of all four of the Bangargund children with the bureaucratic argument that they were not “bread earners” of their respective families. This paradoxically in a land where money has been disbursed and government jobs granted to families of hundreds of armed militants in days of their “martyrdom” at the hands of “Indian security forces”!

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