The return of Omar Abdullah to the chief minister’s chair of Jammu and Kashmir after a decade is the beginning of a new chapter for the region. How that chapter gets written – as a return to stability, or a continuation of the strife and troubles of the past many years – is to be seen. The Kashmir that Abdullah led as Chief Minister in his first term, from 2009 to 2014, is different from the Kashmir of today. For starters, Abdullah was then the Chief Minister of a state; today he heads the elected government of a Union Territory.
Congress, the alliance partner of Abdullah’s National Conference (NC) in the recent elections, declared just hours before the new government was to be sworn in that it would not join and only offer outside support for now. The official reason for Congress’s stand is that since full statehood has not been restored to J&K, it has decided against joining the government. On the ground, Congress’s performance in the Jammu region, where it was looking to do robustly, was dismal, allowing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to split the votes on religious lines, with NC sweeping Muslim-majority Kashmir and BJP making big inroads in Hindu-dominated Jammu. That really left the Congress nowhere, and with little purchasing power in the new government. The party would have been offered only one ministerial berth, and it decided to sit it out. Wisely perhaps.
At the first Cabinet meeting led by Abdullah on Thursday, his government passed a resolution demanding that the Centre restore full statehood to Jammu and Kashmir. NC already has a draft resolution in place and the Chief Minister is expected to present it to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi soon. However, this resolution has already led to sharp criticism of the new government within J&K’s political circles. People’s Conference leader Sajad Lone has reacted against the resolution being passed by the Cabinet without it being discussed in the Assembly. He wrote on X: “Cabinet is a majoritarian institution of governance. It does not reflect all shades and opinions as per the will of the people of J and K.” The People’s Democratic Party, led by former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, has also criticised the resolution, saying that a demand for the restoration of statehood without Article 370 that granted special status to J&K was a “huge setback”.
The vexed question of Article 370 will be the proverbial albatross round the neck of this Abdullah government. Not making Article 370 the focal point of his administrative decision making right away can be read in two ways. One interpretation could be that Abdullah, a battle-hardened politician, knows the limitations of leading a government in a Union Territory, where the Centre has a strong hold on the day-to-day operations. Hence a confrontationist approach will only lead to more friction with the Centre, which Abdullah, with a slender majority in the Assembly, can ill afford. The NC has 42 seats, and the Congress six, with 45 as the majority mark. Moreover, after years of strife and Central rule with an iron hand, there's a need for healing and reconciliation. No one is suited to do that better than the popular elected government of Abdullah. So the mantle of a statesman, rather than that of an unyielding and difficult politician, might suit the moment. His decision to induct two Hindus from Jammu into the Cabinet can be seen as the perfect conciliatory move in bridging the religious divide between the Jammu and Kashmir regions.
The other way of reading the NC government’s resolution would be to see Abdullah as someone who is hand-in-glove with Prime Minister Modi, and by extension, the Central government. After all, it was Modi’s government that decided to do away with Article 370 back in 2019, plunging the region into a period of uncertainty. In December 2023, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the abrogation of Article 370, putting a further stamp of approval on the Centre’s move, leaving little room for maneuvering to the new government.
One doesn’t know which of the two interpretations is correct. All eyes are on Abdullah now, as he charts the future course of Jammu and Kashmir. For the people of the Union Territory, there is hope mixed with an equal dose of trepidation. As the third of his family – after his father and his grandfather – to be anointed Chief Minister of J&K, Abdullah has been given a crown of thorns. But it’s a crown nonetheless. Let’s see how he wears it, easily or otherwise.