Part 11 (1/2)

While this was tame compared to the azaadi demand of militants, it was anathema to the BJP and its ilk, which have always stood for the abrogation of Article 370 and putting J&K at par with other states in the Union. The NC had always walked this tightrope, with Sheikh Saheb adept at wording political matters in such a way that satisfied both Kashmiris and Delhi. Farooq, looking ahead to the 2002 a.s.sembly election, knew he had to deliver on his promises well in time, and so, on 19 June 2000, the a.s.sembly was convened for a week-long special session to discuss the committee's report and pa.s.s a resolution accepting it.

The NDA was not happy about the turn of events. 'What is your friend up to?' Brajesh Mishra asked me.

I spoke to the chief minister. 'There is a little concern here, everyone is asking about the resolution.'

What Farooq told the top IB man in Srinagar, K.M. Singh, was that he had contested the 1996 election because the government of India wanted him to contest, and at that time he had told the government that he needed a plank to fight an election. Autonomy had been that plank. His committee had in fact been discussing the matter with Governor Gary Saxena while preparing the report; and now another election was coming up, so his government had to do something about autonomy.

Furthermore, Farooq said to me, ever since the report was tabled, he had been pleading with New Delhi to also appoint a committee, which could have a couple of cabinet ministers on it. He seemed to imply that such a committee could be an eyewash, but at least it would keep autonomy in play, to help the NC in the 2002 elections. However, there was no response to his suggestion from the NDA, and left with no choice, Farooq was forced to move this resolution in his a.s.sembly.

'Why are you worried?' Farooq asked. 'Everybody has to be kept happy. Tell them not to worry, the resolution won't get pa.s.sed. Kucch nahin hoga.'

Events apparently overtook the chief minister and the resolution was pa.s.sed by the J&K a.s.sembly. Again Farooq thought it was no big deal and he sent the resolution to the Union home ministry, knowing fully well that the home ministry headed by the NDA's resident hardliner, L.K. Advani, was not going to do anything with the resolution. He figured the NDA government would just kick the can down the road, giving him both an escape route and an election plank.

But New Delhi was not happy at all. Members of the NDA government were upset, and a cabinet meeting was immediately called. It summarily threw out the resolution, saying it was not acceptable.

Farooq was infuriated. The NDA government was not playing politics when he needed it to, for his own party's well-being; it was almost symbolic, as if it were being more hardline than was necessary, shutting the Kashmiris out, without so much as a conversation. The DelhiSrinagar relations.h.i.+p became strained.

Farooq threatened to resign, but more than that, he threatened to pull out of the NDA coalition. Omar was summoned to Srinagar, and there was on 10 July 2000 a meeting of the NC MLAs. The meeting discussed what the next step should be. The atmosphere was very tense, both in Srinagar and in New Delhi. The meeting carried on the entire day, and the MLAs decided to continue the following day.

But the next morning, on 11 July 2000, Begum Abdullah died of a cardiac arrest. The lady was eighty-four years old. And this unfortunate event fortunately saved the day.

K.M. Singh called up and said, 'Please help, this is an opportunity.'

I went to Brajesh Mishra. 'Farooq has lost his mother,' I said.

'Haan-haan, Advaniji jaa rahe hain,' he said.

'Maybe something more than Advaniji,' I suggested. 'Maybe the PM should go.'

Brajesh Mishra looked at me. 'You really think so?' he asked.

'Yes, I think so.'

'Okay,' he said. 'Let me speak to the PM.'

Vajpayee, not surprisingly, said, theek hai, jayenge.

'In that case,' I said, 'I would also like to go.'

'Sure,' he said.

The delegation included Defence Minister George Fernandes, Advani, and the prime minister. When we reached Srinagar, the VIPs took their time in coming out, so I was off the aircraft ahead of everyone. When I stepped onto the tarmac, the first thing that happened was that Omar Abdullah hugged me. People might have thought it unusual because Omar was not normally given to displaying emotion, but on this occasion he was relieved to see us.

The strain over the autonomy resolution had rattled him completely. At that time he was not dreaming of, or even distantly dreaming of, becoming chief minister. He just didn't want to lose his job and his life in Delhi. So when he saw me, he realised the prime minister had also come, and he knew that this gesture would end all talk of snapping ties and save the day.

And it did. Farooq was extremely touched by the prime minister's thoughtfulness at coming to his mother's funeral. The resolution controversy died, along with Begum Abdullah.

It did, however, plant the seed of doubt about Farooq Abdullah in the NDA government's mind, and possibly pushed Vajpayee into looking beyond Farooq for cutting the Gordian knot in Kashmir. While this seed was growing in his mind, I left R&AW and reached the PMO.

As Omar was Farooq's son and I was fond of him, I looked out for him. In the PMO I heard that the prime minister, during his next trip abroad, was taking such-and-such minister along. I went to Brajesh Mishra. 'Why don't you take Omar on one of these trips?' I said. 'He looks good and he's a Kashmiri. It gives him good exposure and it also sends a positive signal.'

Brajesh Mishra was agreeable and on the next trip, Omar went along. Then he went again. And again. Vajpayee had a chance to watch Omar from close quarters, and he struck him as a bright young fellow. The more Vajpayee and Brajesh Mishra saw Omar, the more they liked him. They moved him to the external affairs ministry, which was a sort of promotion, where he was the junior minister.

Another episode which solidified Vajpayee's positive feelings was a dinner that Omar hosted for the prime minister at his residence on Akbar Road. It was an exclusive dinner for the prime minister and his family: the PM was there, his foster daughter and Ranjan, Brajesh Mishra and myself; there was Omar, his wife Payal, Omar's in-laws and Farooq.

There was a high table at which everybody sat except Brajesh, Ranjan and I, who were drinking at the bar outside. It was a personal, private dinner, the PM with his family meeting Omar's in-laws, and reinforced positivity all around.

And the germ of the idea that Omar and Farooq should be switched, with Omar taking charge in Kashmir and Farooq settling down in Delhi, may have been planted during this time. Between the prime minister, Brajesh Mishra, and I'm sure Advani was involved in this, they decided to suggest Farooq Abdullah an inducement to leave Kashmir: they decided to offer to make him the Vice-President of India.

12.

VAJPAYEE'S 'BETRAYAL' OF

FAROOQ ABDULLAH.

These facts are well-known: in 2002, Vice-President Krishan Kant was on course to become the eleventh President of India. Such promotion to Rashtrapati Bhavan was a tradition and the six previous vice-presidents had gone on to become president. Vajpayee and Sonia Gandhi were agreeable to Kant's candidaturehe was one of the Congress party's original 'Young Turks' and later a member of the 19771980 Janata Party governmentand his name had been announced as such. Several members of the NDA government like Home Minister L.K. Advani, however, remembered that along with Madhu Limaye, Kant had been responsible for the fall of the Janata government over dual members.h.i.+p in the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS). So they opposed Kant. Vajpayee then had to propose longtime civil servant and Tamil Nadu governor P.C. Alexander as the NDA's candidate, but the Congress vetoed the idea. Ultimately A.P.J. Abdul Kalam became president and proved to be the most popular one India has had. Two days after Kalam was sworn in, a broken-hearted Kant pa.s.sed away, the only vice-president to die in office. What is not widely known is that Vajpayee had offered Farooq Abdullah the vice-presidency. The offer was made when it was a.s.sumed that Kant was going to be the president. It made sense in the informal formula that politicians followed: to balance out the two high offices with either a north-south or a majority-minority combination.

The offer was made at my residence, by the prime minister's princ.i.p.al secretary and national security advisor Brajesh Mishra, later reaffirmed, according to Farooq, by the home minister, L.K. Advani, and of course the prime minister himself. Farooq was elated. His life ambition had been to one day become President of India, and this was the penultimate step to that goal.

It did not happen and it was the great tragedy of Farooq's life. It was a betrayal.

There were two ways of looking at it, of course. One is that it was an outright betrayal. Farooq has time and again been let down by various people in New Delhi. Such people have argued that Farooq is frivolous, that he is unreliable, that he can't be trusted, or that they just didn't like him. For instance, Narasimha Rao fantasised about sorting out the problem in Kashmir by looking beyond Farooq at Shabir Shah because Rao simply disliked Farooq. Recall that his only question to me before he left for Africa was whether or not Farooq was necessary for the revival of the political process.

If Vajpayee did not like Farooq it would be different from Narasimha Rao's distaste. After all, Vajpayee and Farooq had a lot in common. Vajpayee attended the opposition conclave that Farooq as chief minister organised in Srinagar in 1983. The two were also of a similar kind: the kind that loved fun and the good things in life. The irony is that Rao, in 1994, had a brainwave and deputed both Vajpayee and Farooq to Geneva, to an important meeting of the United Nations Commission for Human Rights, where India was under great pressure for its dealing with the movement in Kashmir. It was ironic that a man like Farooq, thought to be unreliable, was sent to defend the country at a UN forum.

Vajpayee, as we saw in the previous chapter, saw the autonomy resolution as a disappointment even if it was a compulsion for Farooq, who had come to power promising greater autonomy and would have to face an election the next year; for Vajpayee, who ran a coalition government, balancing his allies and his own Nehruvian instincts with the hardliners in his party was never easy, as the Gujarat riots in 2002 proved. The autonomy resolution only added to the pressures on Vajpayee. His not liking Farooq or thinking that Farooq was unreliable would have been linked to this episode. Or it was deep down dislike that came to the fore with this episode.

The other way of looking at the betrayal would be that Vajpayee, ever the Chanakya, played a bigger game when he offered Farooq the vice-presidency. He liked what he saw in Omar, and he wanted to switch the father-son combination by bringing Farooq to Delhi and putting Omar in Srinagar. It was a masterly political play. It whetted Omar's appet.i.te, and when Farooq's current term as chief minister ended he never became chief minister again, even though he was publicly willing to do so in 2008.

True, many people are offered high office and then circ.u.mstances prevent it from happening. With Farooq, however, many forces in Delhi worked against him, unfairly. I wonder if, as such people say, Farooq is unreliable then who the h.e.l.l in Kashmir is reliable?

Is it a coincidence that the one Kashmiri that Pakistan never tried to approachbecause he was too unpredictable, that is, he was too much his own manwas Farooq Abdullah? And that the person with the highest bounty on his head ever since militancy hit full stride was Farooq Abdullah?

Earlier in the book, it's been mentioned how Farooq made the introduction to hijacker Has.h.i.+m Qures.h.i.+; how Farooq came through with a favour for Syed Salahuddin, the Pakistan-based Hizbul Mujahideen preacher who has for long wanted to come back to India; and he introduced to the Rashtriya Rifles a rural folk-singer named Kuka Parrey, who went on to lead a force of counter-insurgents, the Ikhwan-ul Muslimoon, which was one of the army's successes. Farooq also was vehemently against releasing terrorists in his jails in exchange for hostages in both the Rubaiya kidnapping and the IC-814 hijacking, a position many have advocated as national policy. Farooq has never cited any of his actions that were of national security importance to make a case for himself, either privately or publicly. And yet he is called unreliable by vested interests in Delhi.

One of Farooq's defining moments could be Independence Day, 1989. He was the chief minister, Gen. K.V. Krishna Rao was the governor, and I was the IB man there. For just over a year, militancy had taken root and risen with bomb attacks and targeted killings. Because of the steadily increasing level of violence, it was a 15 August like no other. The ceremony was at the Baks.h.i.+ Stadium, and during the governor's speech we could hear bombs go off somewhere outside. Yet the governor kept speaking.

When Farooq's turn came he made a moving speech. Essentially what he said was that Kashmir was an integral part of India and that it was not going anywhere, it would remain a part of India. It may sound routine for those sitting outside of Kashmir, but at that time, when the tide for azaadi in Kashmir was building up, when the mood and atmosphere was such that no one would publicly speak on behalf of India, Farooq's speech stood out.