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Last week, India’s former spy chief Amarjit Singh Dulat made a startling revelation. In his new book, The Chief Minister and the Spy, Dulat claimed that Farooq Abdullah, Kashmir’s seniormost politician and president of National Conference, had suggested that he could have helped the Narendra Modi government in scrapping Jammu and Kashmir’s special status if it had taken him into confidence.
“We would have helped (pass the proposal),” Abdullah told Dulat, an old friend, when he met him in early 2020, claims the book. At the time, Abdullah, like most political leaders of Kashmir, was detained under the Public Safety Act, after the Centre read down Article 370 and split the erstwhile state into two union territories. “Why were we not taken into confidence?” Abdullah allegedly asked Dulat. The purported secret meeting between the two, according to the book, was one of the first attempts by the Centre to engage with the Kashmiri mainstream leadership after the events of August 5, 2019.
Abdullah and his party were swift in denying Dulat’s assertions. “If we had to betray (Article) 370, why would Farooq Abdullah (pass a resolution on autonomy) with a two-thirds majority in the Assembly?” the three-time chief minister and Member of Parliament, Farooq Abdullah told reporters in Srinagar on Wednesday.
In June 2000, the National Conference government under Farooq Abdullah passed a resolution in the assembly seeking to restore the pre-1953 constitutional position in the state. It was, however, rejected by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government.
The senior Abdullah has also expressed his sense of betrayal at Dulat’s claims. “It is unfortunate that he calls me a friend, a friend can’t write like this… He has written such things which are not true…”
The disclosures set off a political firestorm in Kashmir.
Opposition parties like Peoples Democratic Party and Sajad Lone’s Peoples Conference accused the National Conference, currently in power, of betraying the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
Vocal PDP legislator Waheed ur Rehman Para said the National Conference was misleading people into believing that they were “standing guard over their rights”. “In truth, they were complicit – quiet facilitators of our disempowerment,” Para said.
Dulat’s assertions about senior Abdullah offering support to the scrapping of Article 370 – almost six years ago – may or may not be true. But to many Kashmiris they have sharply underlined a persistent feature of the six-month-old National Conference government – its evasion in confronting the Centre. They also confirm that the BJP continues to exercise control over Kashmir’s politics, even if it is not in power.
A spy’s paradise
Having held top posts in India’s premier intelligence agencies, AS Dulat’s engagement with Kashmir dates back to the early 1990s when an armed insurgency was at its peak in the Valley.
Once a pointsman for Delhi to navigate the treacherous politics of conflict-riven Kashmir, Dulat, like any professional spy, managed to engage with every shade of political opinion in Jammu and Kashmir, including militants and separatists.
Despite his decades-long engagement with Kashmir, Dulat’s perspective of Kashmiris is agonisingly condescending. In his earlier book ‘Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years’, Dulat had fallen a whisker short of calling Kashmiris perennial liars. According to him, a Kashmiri “rarely speaks the truth to you because he feels you are lying to him”.
As someone who was central to the shadowy games played in Kashmir in the late 1990s and early 2000s, his claims have always been difficult to cross-check and have rarely been countered. His earlier works have been full of carefully crafted half-truths.
This is why his recent assertions need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Ever since the reading down of Article 370, Dulat has appeared in numerous interviews or events concerning Kashmir. He also published a memoir in 2022.
Why the former spy chief, known to have bought or won over people in Kashmir for New Delhi, choose to reveal senior Abdullah’s offer of supporting the move to annul the special status of Jammu and Kashmir now, is a puzzle only he can answer. But the claims indirectly aid the Bharatiya Janata Party’s attempts to discredit the National Conference government.
A cornered NC
The book’s revelations come at a difficult time for Abdullah’s ruling National Conference.
Sandwiched between an unrelenting Bharatiya Janata Party-led Centre and a huge mandate from the people, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s strategy has been to avoid antagonising New Delhi. But Abdullah’s pragmatism is gradually coming across as a surrender to many in Kashmir.
That’s because the party has, so far, been unable to deliver big on its election manifesto.
While the 2024 assembly elections were contested on the plank of fighting for the restoration of Jammu and Kashmir’s scrapped autonomy and statehood, the Omar Abdullah government has not appeared eager to take on New Delhi.
The party did pass a resolution in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly against the Centre’s August 5, 2019 decision, but the Omar Abdullah government has unceasingly banked on restoration of statehood as a sort of panacea for the erstwhile state’s lost political power. Yet, even that decision remains with the Centre.
Moreover, the Centre’s appointed Lieutenant Governor administration has shown little regard to the National Conference’s election manifesto.
Take the case of summary dismissals of government employees over allegations of supporting terrorism. In its election manifesto, the party had promised an “end to unjust terminations”. Not only has the Omar Abdullah government been unable to revoke the previous dismissals, it has even failed to prevent the new terminations by the Lieutenant Governor administration.
Sometimes, the overwhelming discretion enjoyed by the Lieutenant Governor administration has been embarrassing for the National Conference.
Recently, the Manoj Sinha-led UT administration ordered the transfer of 48 junior-level bureaucrats from Jammu and Kashmir Administrative Service The transfers prompted a strong letter of protest from Omar Abdullah to the Home Minister, LG and chief secretary of Jammu and Kashmir.
The junior-level transfers, according to Abdullah’s letter, was the domain of the elected government. In contrast, the Lieutenant Governor has explicit jurisdiction over the transfer of officers from central services and other matters like law and public order.
There is no word if the government received any response from the Centre or LG’s office, but the transfers did take effect. Apart from the letter, Omar Abdullah could do little.
The ambiguity over the clear demarcation of powers between the LG administration and the elected government is due to the absence of business rules. Here, too, the ball is in New Delhi’s court. The National Conference government submitted the draft of business rules to the Lieutenant Governor’s office more than a month ago, but the Ministry of Home Affairs has not approved them yet.
Helping BJP’s agenda?
The Omar Abdullah government has performed poorly on the other major promises. Some of its major decisions min the last six months pertain to the change in academic calendar in schools, free bus rides for women, 200 units of free electricity for the poorest of the poor and other assistance schemes for the deprived.
It has not pushed back against summary detentions of individuals, rejection of passport applications of relatives of separatists or tried to scrap Kashmir’s harsh preventive detention law. Even Omar Abdullah’s efforts to revive the Kashmir Press Club – the independent journalists’ body that was forcibly shut down by the LG government – has remained in deep freeze.
Amidst all this, the Omar Abdullah government has consistently faced allegations of tacitly supporting the agenda of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The refusal of the Jammu and Kashmir assembly Speaker, Abdul Rahim Rather, to allow a resolution against the newly amended Waqf (Amendment) Act has been criticised as another example of the government’s surrender.
Rather, a National Conference leader, did not relent, even when the adjournment motion was moved by the party’s own legislators. The chief minister Omar Abdullah appeared to be defending the speaker’s decision, this time over a technicality that an adjournment motion pertains to the issues on which the local government can respond. Since the Waqf (Amendment) Act was passed by Parliament, Omar later explained, the Jammu and Kashmir government had nothing to say. “Had this resolution been brought in another form or through a different provision of law, then it could have been admitted,” Abdullah said.
As a result, the government’s six-month-long tenure is being viewed as, what the opposition calls “normalising” the post August 5, 2019 identity and status of Jammu and Kashmir.
“Farooq finds it important to stay on the right side of Delhi,” Dulat has reiterated in his new book. In post-2019 Kashmir, which remains under the firm grip of a Hindu-nationalist centre, the senior Abdullah might need to rethink if that philosophy is still relevant.
The Abdullahs have strongly rejected Dulat’s claims. But a better answer should be to put up a strong stand against New Delhi and mobilise country-wide support to seek the restoration of the erstwhile state’s special status. So far, Kashmir’s grand old political family does not seem eager to walk down that path.
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