Statehood is not a gift for the Centre to bestow upon us: Omar Abdullah

So much has changed. It has been ten years since the last assembly election. This is perhaps the longest interval between assembly elections in J&K, longer even than the interval during militancy in the early 1990s. So, there is a yearning for a return to democratic rule. We haven’t had an elected government in J&K since 2018; Delhi has ruled us directly for six years.

Then, of course, all the changes that have happened in the interim—J&K’s special status was written down, it was divided into two parts and then downgraded to a union territory.

A new generation of voters has come forward. Organisations participating in this election were on opposite sides—by calling for a boycott—during previous elections. Today they’re asking people to come out and vote. This election is different, it’s new and that accounts for the participation.

I don’t think there is any scope for overconfidence. We are extremely hopeful that the party will do well, individually, and in alliance with the Congress, the CPI(M) and one party in Jammu, and that the people will return us to the assembly with a majority.

I think it was a sentimental vote. The campaign on behalf of Engineer Rashid was fought on two fronts. The first was that Engineer Rashid had to be saved from being hanged, so people had to vote for him. This was, at the very least, dishonest because the punishment for the charges against him did not include the death penalty. They tried to play the sympathy card.

The second front saw his sons, who led the campaign, appealing to voters to vote for their father and bring him out of jail.

Elections do not release people from prison. If they did, Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, Hemant Soren and others wouldn’t have been imprisoned. It was a campaign designed to tug at people’s heartstrings and it worked.

There are elements of that as well. You had a lot of first-time voters... his (Engineer Rashid’s) three main slogans [in previous elections] were that J&K is not an integral part of India, accession is unacceptable and that J&K must have a plebiscite. His campaign focused on these three points. Strangely enough, these points seem to have slipped his mind during his 20-day campaign. The only thing he is talking about is the National Conference.

It’s again dishonest on the part of the prime minister to take this line against parties like the National Conference that have lost thousands of members, senior party workers, office bearers, ministers and elected representatives. I think we deserve better. By all means, criticise us on governance; the BJP is [also] within its rights to talk about a family that is connected to the leadership of this party. But to say we have a terrorist or separatist agenda is gross injustice and an insult to the thousands of people who died simply because the National Conference didn’t raise the flag of separatism.

Whenever we talked about a solution to the problems of J&K, we talked about them within the scope of the Constitution. In 75 years, when has the National Conference carried out a secessionist or pro-terrorist agenda?

As a concerted effort to divide votes. Why are all these parties and candidates only present on this side of the Pir Panjal, on the Kashmir side, and not in Jammu? Why is this sort of division of votes being attempted in seats where the BJP has no stakes? You don’t see it happening in seats where the BJP believes it has a chance. That’s one way of looking at it.

I don’t think there is any one main issue. There is the overwhelming issue of what was done to J&K in August 2019... the humiliation heaped on us with the downgrading to a union territory.

But there are [also] the day-to-day governance issues on which the administration, over the past five/ six years, has failed miserably. Services like electricity, health, education, clean drinking water... unemployment have all worsened. Today, J&K’s GDP to debt ratio is 49 per cent. We are, alongside Punjab, the most debt-ridden territory in this country and a lot of that has to do with this so-called double-engine government we’ve had in J&K for the past 10 years.

Well, of course, there is the legislative business, which I believe any incoming administration will have to initially battle; that includes restoration of statehood. Enough commitments have been made publicly, privately, in Parliament, and in the Supreme Court, about restoration of statehood to J&K. So, I think the first thing any government should do is demand that restoration, failing which, they should explore legal options.

It is not a gift to be bestowed upon us; they had no business taking it away in the first instance. And what are they trying to suggest—that the people of J&K have to beg, bow and scrape to get it? They didn’t even conduct this election willingly; it was forced upon them by the observations of the Supreme Court, while adjudicating on the Article 370 issue. We now have Supreme Court records stating that the government committed itself to the restoration of statehood. So if they don’t do it willingly, we’ll ask the Supreme Court to remind them of their promise.

Normalising relations with Pakistan is not the domain of an elected state government. That said, any elected state government should try and create conditions that are conducive for such a dialogue. One of the things that holds us back is violence in J&K. The BJP has been responsible for this through its failures in promoting and allowing militancy to regroup in the Jammu region.

The BJP has said that if the Congress is elected, militancy will start again, yatris will be targeted, and so on and so forth. In fact, yatris were targeted while the BJP and the PDP were allies. Militancy has regrouped and restarted in Jammu during their regime. So, instead of accusing us, they need to explain why militancy started again in their time.

I don’t think we can quantify that response right now because we have no results on which to base it. Let the election results come and then we’ll understand. There is certainly a lot of anger in large sections of the Jammu population, be it with the durbar move decision and what that has meant for the status of Jammu; or the system of recruitment in the army, the Agnipath scheme; or the regrouping of militancy...

But to what extent Jammu will move away from voting on religious lines and vote to express this anger, this unhappiness, we’ll wait and see.

It was never going to be an overnight thing. We’ve begun to see its creeping effect, and more in Jammu than here (in Kashmir), but it’s not gone unnoticed. Even the way in which assets here are being mortgaged or sold or handed out to people who don’t belong to J&K — how the Centaur Hotel in Srinagar has been given to people who don’t belong to J&K, how this government is trying to part with the club and other tourist assets in Pahalgam.

There are similar stories in Jammu. As I said, it’s a creeping phenomenon rather than overnight change.