Omar’s losing battle
The multiple challenges facing Omar Abdullah – external as well as internal – threaten to cut short the tenure of J&K’s youngest chief minister, reports Zubair A Dar

The Jammu and Kashmir cabinet expansion this week – six months after Omar Abdullah took over as the state's chief minister – exposed all the cracks in the Congress-National Conference coalition. The first embarrassment for Omar came when pradesh Congress committee chief Saif-u-Din Soz addressed a news conference to announce the portfolios allotted to his party men. The move may have prevented further erosion, but it also strengthened the general impression of Omar being a weak chief minister. Soz’s insistence that Omar had been “taken into confidence” did nothing to repair the damage that had been done.

It is already known that Soz has reported Omar’s interference in the J & K government affairs to the Congress high command. Insiders say that Soz, who left the National Conference after voting against his party whip in Parliament – thereby leading to the fall of the Vajpayee government – preferred the People’s Democratic Party to the National Conference. Former J&K chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, on the other hand, prefers the NC. All this has been hurting the Omar Abdullah-led coalition .

“The Congress is not being reasonable,” believes Professor Gul Mohammad Wani of the Political Science Department at Kashmir University. “The rift between the Soz and Azad factions is spoiling Omar’s chances.” It greatly adds to the challenges that Omar has faced in the past six months as chief minister of this “difficult” state, which lately has seen further deterioration of the human rights situation. “There is a very strong impression that things are not going according to plan. In the beginning the perception was that the clean Omar carried no baggage and had a vision for his state,” says Wani. “But at this point Omar is mired in all kinds of confusion.”

The violence that has rocked Kashmir valley over the last two months, following the rape and murder of two women in the south Kashmir town of Shopian, and the death of four youngsters in police firing in Baramulla, have been giving the Omar Abdullah administration sleepless nights. By the time Omar responded by withdrawing the CRPF from the town, the situation had gone completely out of control – a fact of which the opposition PDP took full advantage.

Wani, and others of his persuasion, feel that the PDP has not played the role of a responsible opposition, as the NC had done for six years between 2002 and 2008. The party chose a confrontationist approach, even as the security agencies worked at odds with the government, and was accused of shameful conduct. This came as something of a shock after the marked decline in incidents of LoC infiltration and militant activities.

Everything points to poor coordination between political parties and security agencies, hugely compounding the problems of the state’s youngest chief minister who initially held out so much hope and promise. Talks between New Delhi and the separatists have come to a halt, and the composite dialogue process between New Delhi and Islamabad has been all but abandoned after the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai. And the different camps of separatists, who wish to be part of the dialogue, have been exploiting this waning of political discourse by providing cover to the almost daily protests in the valley.

The Manmohan Singh government had formed five working groups on Kashmir, four of which have submitted their reports. But none has been implemented. At a time when everyone is seeking meaningful political intervention, the Omar establishment finds itself ill equipped to resume the dialogue on Kashmir.

Indeed as violent protests become the norm in Omar’s regime, previous claims of administrative accountability are being replaced by all round cynicism and a sense of hopelessness. After taking over as chief minister, Omar continued with the administrative arrangement that was put in place during Governor’s rule.

This arrangement hurt Omar when his government’s own economic adviser and other senior bureaucrats failed to answer certain questions raised by Union Home Minister P Chidambaram during his Srinagar visit.

Omar’s own interface with the public is depressingly limited. His only political adviser is a businessman from Jammu who does not speak Kashmiri. Party sources say his attitude has resulted in widespread disgruntlement, not only among general visitors but also cabinet members. The result is that what little interaction Omar has with people remains limited to district-level public darbars. The J&K Police too has given a rough time to the chief minister. After the Shopian incident, Omar publicly admitted that he had been misinformed by the police, and that they had gunned down several stone-pelting protesters.

So it looks like a case of being now or never. Kashmir-watchers are of the view that unless the Centre acts fast and bails out Omar by engaging the separatists, there is every chance of his first turbulent tenure as chief minister being drastically cut short.

          

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