Omar and friends

Some of you may have read this past week about Omar Abdullah, the president of National Conference, escaping a grenade attack in Kashmir. It wasn’t the first time for him. It probably won’t be the last.

He’ll go about his business just the same. An intense young man made more intense with the habitual grim face he wears, a passionate yet precise speaker who makes is father Farooq appear an overwrought, unbelievable gasbag at speaking engagements, a man given up to golf, not taken much with the legacy of his father, the redoubtable Sheikh Abdullah. You know about the Sheikh—another leader forcefully neutered by Indira Gandhi, another deathscape created by her with myopia that places the Nehru-Gandhi ego above all else. But that’s another story, for another time.

In Kashmir a politician lives with death. I remember driving with Omar during state elections in 2002. He was driving a new Scorpio SUV himself. I was riding on the front seat. Security were swarming ahead and behind, Heckler & Koch submachine guns, frequency jammer cars, the works. Omar was on his way to an election meeting in Kupwara and I was tagging along, reporting a story for India Today magazine.

As we passed a forested area just before entering Kupwara town, Omar pointed to his right at a ridgeline, one that would in dips and rises and uninterrupted forest travel all the way across the Line of Control beyond the horizon to our left. “They know everything,” he said. “They are watching us now. If they choose to attack, there isn’t much we can do.”

As in, if some jehadi decides to have a party, picks up a RPG launcher and sends a rocket-propelled grenade our way, well then, Merry Christmas.

Omar survived that day, as he survived last week. And I know he isn’t going to stop going to out to address rallies or stop working at election meetings. It’s death if he stops, even if it means death if he doesn’t.

He isn’t the only one.

I met some other relative youngsters on that, his political enemies and not. I met Sajjad Lone, whose father Abdul Ghani Lone, a moderate of the Hurriyat Conference, was assassinated in May 2002, because he advocated a sensible, peaceful, participatory way head to resolve Kashmir. Now his younger son Sajjad, estranged from loose-cannon brother Bilal, lives in a gated compound, and has a price on his head courtesy of the crazies and their manipulators. Yet Sajjad, a moderate “separatist”, will not cow down, and will speak his mind. As he did last month when brought to bear a reality of Kashmir, that a solution would be easier reached by delinking Ladakh and Jammu from the Kashmir muddle. That pragmatic approach—little regarded—has also been advocated by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh!

As Sajjad won’t stop, neither will his contemporary and one time close friend Mehbooba Mufti, the hard as nails daughter of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, who had a turn as chief minister of Jammu & Kashmir thanks to the elections Omar lost. Mehbooba is not a wallflower. I’ve seen her trudging through slush and rain to address election rallies—and damn the fever. She has had a stint as the most powerful lady in Kashmir and it’s no secret she wouldn’t mind another, this time as chief minister. She has burnt some goodwill bridges with her ranting and throwing her weight around, but she isn’t yet completely sullied.

These people, and clerics like Mirwaiz Umar Farooq—Omar and he are closer in age than to Sajjad and Mehbooba—are undeniably the future of Kashmiri power play. They all walk with the knowledge their lives are forfeit. (In that the young Mirwaiz and Sajjad know what it means: his father the Mirwaiz, Moulvi Mohammad Farooq was assassinated in 1990, coincidentally on May 21, the same day Sajjad and Bilal lost their father). And they, like their contemporaries elsewhere in India, are a generation saddled with tragedies foisted upon the nation by hate-blinded, monomaniacal, inept, corrupt non-leaders who have subverted our nation’s parliament and assemblies of our 28 states and all manner of state-led agencies to a level of wrenching decrepitude and theft.

It’s much the same in Jammu & Kashmir. The hatemongers hate profusely, and like fine art. The fat cats live very well. The most subsidized state in the country is also among its poorest—and not on account of terrorism, but the grand act of see-the-development-rupee-disappear. See the squalor in Srinagar but note the Swiss-style chalets on the way in from the airport. See CRPF personnel selling diesel—accepted black marketeering. See the Rashtriya Rifles outpost where the commandant makes a good entrepreneurial turn lifting fruits and wood for packing cases for his own thriving exportation to the plains of India. See unaccounted security-related funds remain unaccounted.

It is not for nothing they say Jammu & Kashmir has three parallel economies: one at face value, the second dictated by narco-terrorism, and the third fuelled by funds that pour in to combat terrorism and develop Kashmir. The fat cats will stay fat if the conflict continues.

These “youngsters” have much to deal with. None of them lack blemishes, but none of them lack vision and none are scared of being there—if they are, they don’t show it, and if that isn’t a sign of immense bravery and commitment to the future of their land, I don’t know what is.

I hope they all live to cheat death and the crazies who don’t care about their own lives because they are taught lives are worth nothing for the greater glory of god.

It will be such a shame if Kashmir—and India and the region—doesn’t get to see the next generation play. These folks aren’t “separatists”. The true separatists are the people who are conspiring to keep Kashmir in the festering mess it is in.