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| Rahul-Omar déjà vu | | |
For the generation of elders in Jammu and Kashmir who have been witness to the political metamorphosis this state underwent over past sixty years, seeing Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi and Chief Minister Omar Abdullah in Anantnag on Monday was something bringing a sense of déjà vu. It was not the first time that the Nehru-Gandhi’s and Abdullah’s were seen exchanging Karakuli headgears as Rahul and Omar fitted the caps on each other’s heads. While Congress makes a direct extension from New Delhi into Jammu and handles Ladakh with its overarching arm, the relations between Congress (read Nehru-Gandhi family) and the Kashmir Valley (may be the Abdullah dynasty) have always remained troubled. The prominent political parties and political dynasties have lived unstable relations of love and hate. Historians have argued in various books that one of major reasons for Sheikh Abdullah strongly vouching for the Indian Union was also his intimate friendship with Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru. The Rahul-Omar duet “man tu shudam tu man shudi man jaan shudam tu tan shudi” reminds the contemporaries that Nehru and Sheikh used every expression to convey that they believed in each other. When Omar and Rahul embraced each other with a reverberating replay of the paeans Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and Jawahar Lal Nehru had sung for each other at their historic rally of Lalchowk in Srinagar 60 years ago: “we’re two bodies but one soul” it freshened up memories of the past. Ironically, five years after Nehru and Sheikh sung for each other at Lal Chowk, the former bundled the latter in jail where he had to cool heels for almost quarter of a century. In 1975, Nehru’s daughter probably thought of easing Sheikh’s pains and she recalled her Congress party’s elected government to allow Sheikh to return to power. After seven years of renewed troubles relations with Congress and the Nehru-Gandi family, Sheikh died in 1982. His son Farooq came in the eye of the storm two years later when Indira Gandhi used the Raj Bhawan to arbitrarily dismiss his duly elected government. Two years after Indira’s death, her son Rajiv opened a new chapter between Congress and National Conference and more specifically between Nehru-Gandhi family and Abdullah family. Rajiv not only reinstalled Farooq to power but also entered into an electoral alliance with the National Conference which put Jammu and Kashmir in a fire that continues to rage on. To establish absolute control over Jammu and Kashmir, the Congress and the National Conference together resorted to blatant rigging thus fueling deep sense of alienation in the Kashmir Valley. Perhaps this was the only situation Pakistan was waiting for. The separatist movement and armed insurgency, it is well known, is a direct product of the 1987 rigging. 20 years later, Congress and the National Conference are again together and the Nehru-Gandhi and Abdullah families are again arm-in-arm. In the renewed friendship, while the National Conference has already started silently complaining of the Congress dominance and bargains, it is to be seen how or bad the reunion of both parties proves for the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
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