Who cares who Omar’s sleeping with!

Poor Omar Abdullah. Talk about his various predicaments dominated an otherwise dry news week in Delhi. A political friend asked me whether or not the Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister would survive (though I humbly admit that Omar’s fate is hardly in my hands). Another asked me whether or not Omar had had an affair with a TV news anchor. For God’s sake, I would hardly know. And I also heard talk that his father, Dr Farooq Abdullah, would replace him as CM. It is bizarre stuff.

It’s unlikely that anyone in the Government of India, particularly the Intelligence Bureau (IB) which has run Kashmir policy since BN Mullick’s time, would topple Omar. A disruption in Kashmir is too risky. Remember the Amarnath Shrine Board land controversy in 2008? Anything can trigger street protests in Kashmir, and it’s a headache an already beleaguered government in Delhi can do without. A friend in Srinagar says there were no stone-pelting protests this summer not because the sentiment had fizzled out, but because after three summers of protests, Kashmiris wanted to spend 2011 making some money. Also, Omar’s government had made key pre-emptive arrests. But this did not mean that protests could ever be ruled out, even if winter was around the corner: recall the agitation during the winter of 1989-90.

A central government which needs all its attention to tackle price rise, corruption, Anna Hazare, internal Cabinet skirmishes, and a rapidly approaching UP assembly poll, cannot afford to nudge Kashmir into an internal security nightmare.

Also, it’s unlikely that Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi will let Omar fail. One reason is what I have said in earlier columns: that Omar’s reign is a preview of how Rahul will rule, when his time comes. They’re almost the same age; both come from political dynasties that have had close links; both are English-medium; both have similar extra-curricular interests (like drag-racing); and both share the middle-class view of politics, that good governance is above all else (as opposed to crony capitalism or social responsibility of the State).

And while the Opposition will always be hard on Rahul, it can never be as venal as the PDP in Kashmir. Omar has a tough time that is made more difficult by his coalition partner, the Congress party, whose leader Ghulam Nabi Azad was a disastrous Chief Minister but is now keen to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of his party chief. You may argue that the Congress also has a tough time with its coalition allies, as with the Left Front during UPA-1 and as with various regional parties during UPA-2. Omar, however, has yet another shoe in his pebble: the elders in his party. These are the old National Conference bosses who know the political ropes as stalwarts generally do, but who are associated in public perception with inefficient administration and low-level corruption (and even the infamous poll-rigging of 1987).

Omar obviously felt that he should start his innings with a clean slate. This has hurt a lot of vested interests in Kashmir. And since the beginning of Omar’s tenure in 2009 there have been murmurs of discontent from the NC’s old guard, to the extent that they have long been pining for Dr Farooq as Chief Minister. It would be no surprise if Omar’s current troubles were engineered by the old guard.

This repeated whisper-campaign to return Dr Farooq to helm J&K is baffling. Some keep referring to an imaginary father-son chasm; but even if Omar in his early days had harped more about emulating his grandfather Sheikh Abdullah, the fact of the matter is that he is Dr Farooq’s son. End of story. Dr Farooq would want Omar to stick with it till the end, and find his own way in the process. Furthermore, Dr Farooq’s ambitions are a bit different: for long he has wanted to go to Rashtrapati Bhawan. He should: during the darkest years in Kashmir, if there is one person who has steadily and openly flown India’s flag in the Valley, it is Dr Farooq. The separatist Hurriyat fellows tell the IB one thing in private, but in public they’re too afraid of the ISI’s bullets to repeat what they have said. Dr Farooq deserves to be President of India, and I do believe a vacancy is coming up next year.

As for Omar, there is talk that the current controversy of the dead NC worker may be used by the Congress to force a rotational CM post, similar to the arrangement it had with the PDP. This would be a blunder, make no mistake. True, Omar has made some errors of judgment, like the handling of the Shopian rape case, and he does not help his own cause by being on twitter; there are better forms of transparency. It also doesn’t help that the army, paramilitary forces and intelligence agencies do not cede power to him.

Omar is on a learning curve and is sure to play an important role in Kashmir in the years to come. If the government of India is interested in investing in Kashmir, it will let Omar find his way; it will let the democratic process take its own course.

— The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai