NC prez Farooq’s critics eating out of his hand

Arun Joshi

Tribune News Service

Former Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah has critics eating out of his hand. The criticism that he has drawn for his anti-India assertions and “Pakistan-occupied Kashmir for Pakistan” talk serve him politically well in the Valley, where he won the parliamentary byelection with just 4 per cent of the total votes of Srinagar-Budgam constituency in April this year.

He is working to regain the fundamentalist constituency to become an alternative to the Hurriyat Conference that has occupied the plebiscite terrain, the legacy of his father Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. He is ridiculing the Hurriyat through his party men with an ambition to tell Delhi and Islamabad that he can be their best bet in Kashmir. That’s why he is targeting the ruling Peoples Democratic Party too.

Minister of State for Home Hansraj Gangaram Ahir, who hit out at Farooq by claiming “India will take back PoK”, and MoS in the PMO Jitendra Singh, who also charged Farooq with “changing his political stance”, perhaps were either unaware of the NC leader’s game plan or simply played into his hands.

The PDP suspects that he is playing, what the party calls, a “fixed match with the BJP” at the time of Gujarat elections. Farooq’s speeches are being used in the election campaign to say that the Congress had aligned with Farooq, who is ridiculing country’s political and military leadership.

Farooq is too clever a politician to be understood by his critics. His polarisation theme with the help of his party men is a long-term game in which he wants his party to take centre stage in Kashmir politics, edging out all rivals. Farooq always keeps his objectives in mind while it may seem that he is unnecessarily courting controversies. There is a method in his political madness.

He is demonising the PDP for continuing to stay together with the BJP for power. He wants to show the PDP in poor light as his party missed a shot at government-making in 2015 while he was away in London for medical treatment. His party had 15 seats only but Farooq has the persuasive power to surmount odds of all kinds. He ridicules the BJP while his son Omar accepts that Prime Minister Modi is the “most popular leader in the country”. This is part of the father-son strategy.

Farooq is right in pointing out that the Parliament resolution to take back PoK from Pakistan exists only on paper. He is also right when he said that then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had refused to order troops to cross the LoC during the Kargil war in 1999. But what he doesn’t tell is that it was he who nudged Vajpayee to do so “to teach Pakistan a lesson.” The difference is that he was the Chief Minister that time and the NC an ally of the BJP-led NDA

He also knows the reality that how Pakistani establishment is ruling the PoK and never allows parties challenging Pakistan to contest the polls. On the other hand, the Government of India goes out of its way to woo the Hurriyat to join the electoral race.

It is difficult to read his mind and those burning his effigies are guaranteeing longevity of his political life. The PDP has understood it, that’s why it is ignoring all his fulminations.