Sameer Ahmad
The repeated announcements by the Government of India that they fully back Chief Minister Omar Abdullah in the endeavours to stop the now more than two month long popular unrest gives out an impression that he is in charge in the state. But the happenings on ground raise serious questions on that inference.
Omar’s disconnect from the people was always evident. His calls for people to remain indoors and respect curfew, both declared as well as undeclared, when people were dying or getting firearm injuries, were untimely and only naive optimists would have expected that people would pay heed to these pronouncements. His polemics while justifying the police and paramilitary police actions which took away many unarmed lives did not help either.
Omar’s calls for the government employees to show up at their offices did not work either. There were practical difficulties, even when some employee may have tried to. The curfew enforcing agencies did not respect any of the state’s chief executive pronouncements to treat official identity cards as curfew passes.
The only arm of the state that apparently is working is the police (and the firemen). The status of the chief minister was seriously damaged when a central government Babu asked for the performance report of the state police chief, who happens to be an employee of the state government and supposedly works under the state chief minister.
Whatever the public pronouncements from New Delhi or Srinagar Kashmiris continue to make sense of the reality as they see it. They see CM Omar as Delhi’s man, whose statements make a lot of sense in New Delhi and help the UPA government at the centre to ward off pressure from its opposition parties.
The Friday evening shock made him the butt of popular jokes, when Omar Abdullah had to return from the venue of the unified command meeting, where nobody showed up. The unified command is, essentially a security grid meeting, comprising of army, paramilitary officers, intelligence sleuths and local police. Even the police chief did not turn up.
Now politically conscious people of Jammu and Kashmir would not take him seriously when Omar talks about New Delhi’s seriousness about restoring justice in Kashmir, revocation or toning down of AFSPA, reduction of troops. His talk of autonomy does not cool any tempers either. The autonomy demand does ratchet up old memories when a police official dragged his grandfather, the tallest leader of Kashmir and put him behind bars.
They argue that a position where a low level police officer can arrest the state’s popular executive (a prime minister then) can’t be a dignified one. The defiance of Omar’s own officials exhibits a pathetic helplessness of the head of the state.
The demands, or rather desires, of the state government are nothing new. Things like autonomy et al are what the state had and were taken away treacherously and deceptively. It was not sufficient, when the tall leader Shiekh Abdullah was in charge. It cannot be now, when his much less popular grandson is in charge.
Well if Omar wants what was taken away from his grandfather, we wish him well. But that may not work, as his appeals and warnings did not.
