The spy sees the ‘tallest leader’ as the one bartering Kashmir’s interest. The most telling thing is not what it reveals about the former CM but how so-called liberals see Kashmir and Kashmiris.
The latest controversy over former RA&W Chief, A.S. Dulat’s latest book on his relationship with Jammu and Kashmir’s former Chief Minister, Farooq Abdullah, reminds me of an iconic scene from the blockbuster Sholay. When Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) goes to Maussi to seek her niece Basanti’s (Hema Malini) hand for his bosom pal Veeru (Dharmendra), Jai speaks highly of Veeru in one breath and in the other exposes him as a gambler, alcohol addict and habitual of visiting nautch girls.
Dulat, who has never shied from expressing his admiration for Farooq, goes a step further now to label the senior Abdullah as the ‘tallest’ leader of Kashmir (taller than his father, Sheikh Abdullah) and sees him as a synonym of both National Conference and Kashmir. And, yet, he says Abdullah would have co-operated with New Delhi if they had confided in him on 2019 abrogation – a move that doesn’t sit well with the aspirations of the majority in Kashmir. Like Jai, while projecting him as the biggest ‘sell-out’, Dulat makes a case for Farooq as the ‘towering beacon of leadership’, whose arrest in 2019 he deems as the ‘biggest tragedy of Kashmir’.
As a political storm blows in Kashmir over Dulat’s book ‘The Chief Minister and the Spy’ and his interview with Karan Thapar, Farooq Abdullah has accused him of ‘inaccuracies’. Much of the book is reported to be based on private conversations between Dulat and Farooq, who is known to be a glib-talker and a non-serious ‘blow hot, blow cold’ politician who can say one thing in the heat of a moment and one in another. Did Farooq Abdullah actually say what Dulat claims or did the latter imagine all of that out of his adulation for this colossus of leadership?
It is strange that Farooq Abdullah would talk about getting a resolution in the legislative assembly (on Article 370) if he had been taken into confidence in 2019 at a time when the assembly did not even exist. It is also strange that Dulat should talk about the vice-president ‘offer’ or ‘bait’ to Farooq Abdullah as an attempt to stage a coup by anointing Omar Abdullah in Jammu and Kashmir in 2002. Surely, Dulat, who was privy at that time to what was going on behind the scenes in the Delhi-Kashmir political drama, was also aware of Delhi’s blessings to Peoples Democratic Party enabling the meteoric rise of this neo-born formation. Was New Delhi desisting from keeping all its eggs in one basket?
The long history of messy and complex relations between New Delhi and Kashmir and the even messier politics of Jammu and Kashmir make anything, even the most bizarre theories, sound plausible. The truth about it is unfathomable. All one is left with is conjectures and speculations. Similarly, we’ll never know whether Dulat’s revelations are true or not.
It may not even matter. Much of his reported revelations about the complexity of Farooq’s profuse love for and differences with his son, Omar Abdullah, and the ‘Payal’ chapter in the latter’s life have been part of gossip in Kashmir and taken in a stride. Speculations and debates about Farooq’s opportunistic politics and his readiness to ally with the BJP have also been doing rounds for a long time. In Kashmir, nobody takes his words seriously, unless someone wants to make a political capital of it.
So, what purpose has Dulat achieved by stirring a hornet’s nest?
While Farooq Abdullah is struggling to distance himself from Dulat’s pronouncements and called his (Dulat’s claims) as ‘cheap stunt’, the former spy has sought to clarify that the “book is full of praise” for Farooq and has “nothing against him.” In these two extreme reactions lies the tale of two different perspectives as well as the distance between Delhi and Kashmir. What Dulat sees as ‘praise’, Farooq would be aware is treated as an ‘abuse’ in Kashmir. Dulat is yet another archetype of so-called Indian liberals who understand Kashmir as they want it to be, not as its ground realities shape it.
In the Indian spymaster’s eyes, presenting Farooq as more Indian than even a mainland Indian is the best gift he can offer to his admired friend. Farooq, however, wary of both India’s wrath and the diametrically opposed Kashmiri sentiments, but wedded to mainstream politics, would ideally like to sail in both the boats. For any ordinary Kashmiri, Dulat’s assertions about Farooq Abdullah would be decoded as the ‘Tallest leader willing to barter the interests of Kashmir’.
Dulat doesn’t see this as problematic, only as something admirable. Therefore, the more he tries to iron out this controversy, the more he will end up entangling his friend in knots and offering the friend’s adversaries with a rich cash crop to harvest at the expense of the friend. Interestingly, Dulat quotes Abdullah as once telling him: “You people in Delhi think you’re playing chess, but this is a game where even the pawns have memories.” He probably, never understood the import of those words.
Did Dulat do the appropriate thing in bringing out remarks of his ‘dear friend’, made to him in private, in the public? That may be a subject matter of another larger debate. For now, it may be pertinent to recall that this is not the first time that the spy has turned private words into a public spectacle.
His first book ‘Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years’ which was an expose on how the Indian state co-opted and corrupted Kashmiri mainstream and separatist leaders, particularly put the separatists in a spotlight. As head of the Intelligence Bureau and later RA&W Chief, Dulat was engaging with many of them on behalf of India. Some he could successfully woo and transform into collaborators; some were tempted but did not fully give in. In exposing them, Dulat unveiled confidential conversations and had no qualms about that. As he wrote, “it was better to corrupt, than to kill”, for him it was fine to both expose the Indian strategy of manipulating Kashmir and to tar the very people he was wooing with consequences that would not only jeopardise their careers but put their lives at the altar in a conflict zone.
This time, he’s done his friend in at the most cataclysmic moment when the National Conference is slipping into a vortex of crisis of credibility, whose hastening will benefit only the BJP.
The Jai of Sholay is shown as deliberately talking from both corners of his mouth, balancing Veeru’s vilification with praise. Did the Jai of this real-life story give his Veeru under the bus intentionally or out of his naivete? Only God knows or Dulat!
Content retrieved from: https://kashmirtimes.com/opinion/comment-articles/farooq-caught-in-a-tornado-stirred-by-his-friend-dulat.