Not fair to see Farooq as enemy of the state

Hours before being placed under house arrest on August 6 – a day after the government annulled Article 370 that gave Jammu and Kashmir its special status – Farooq Abdullah, former chief minister and four-term Member of Parliament, spoke in emotional terms.

“How do you think one would feel when your body is being carved, the body that stood together in all odds, fought every evil unitedly... They divided regions, will they divide hearts too? Will they divide Hindus and Muslims? I thought my India was for all, everyone who believes in secular, unity,” he said to journalists in Srinagar, before being locked up inside his house.

The 81-year-old politician, who was on Monday booked under the Public Safety Act -- that allows an imprisonment of two years without a trial -- has unfailingly and unflinchingly stood for India. He has often rebuked Pakistan, accusing it of sponsoring terrorism in India and always maintained that Jammu and Kashmir was an integral part of India.

At grave personal risk to his own life, Farooq has saluted the Indian flag and taken on terrorists. On several occasions, he has annoyed his own domestic constituency, to stand by India. In several interactions with this writer he has been firm in the belief that India, not Pakistan, has the best interests of Kashmiris at heart. In the early 1990s, when terrorism gripped the Valley, he spoke up against the popular demands of ‘azadi’ (independence) and secession.

His son Omar Abdullah was a minister in the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), but today, Abdullah Sr is considered a threat to the Indian state.

He can be criticised for being flamboyant, for mismanagement, for being cavalier, and for playing golf when the state burned, but he isn’t anti-national. In the run up to the nullification of the state’s special status, Abdullah spoke often against the revocation of Article 370, but even then, he was measured in his choice of words. “Our right of Article 370 and Article 35A should be protected. This is very important for us. We are soldiers of this country, not enemies of this nation,” he said then.

In 1989, when Rubaiya Saeed, daughter of the then home minister Mufti Mohammad Saeed was abducted by terrorists, Abdullah, then chief minister of the state was against the release of militants in exchange for the minister’s daughter. You are setting a dangerous precedent, he warned. The militants were jailed in prisons across the state and the CM’s nod was required. The reluctant chief minister relented only after then Prime Minister VP Singh sent two of his cabinet colleagues to Srinagar to persuade him. In an interview some years later, he told this writer that he had asked the two ministers to give it to him in writing that they wanted terrorists released.

Then, in 1999, a decade later, his approval was needed again, this time to secure the release of terrorists Masood Azhar and Mushtaq Zargar, in exchange for passengers aboard IC 814, an Air India flight hijacked from Kathmandu to Kandahar. He was furious when the Vajpayee government decided to release the two dreaded terrorists – the first has since become India’s scourge – and even wanted to resign, although he eventually did not.

The government’s playbook in Jammu & Kashmir, according to its own statements over the past month, includes elections. Leaders such as Abdullah are central to that democratic process and it is therefore unclear why he has been arrested under a draconian law. Indeed, it is also not clear under what law he was detained earlier. In the early days after Parliament passed laws and resolutions to bifurcate the state of Jammu & Kashmir into two union territories and also revoke its special status, the government maintained that Abdullah was not “detained” but at home of his “free will.” It was, however, soon clear that he, and many others, across party lines, had been detained. Whatever Abdullah’s politics are, it is unkind to see him as an enemy of the nation.