Kashmir Valley is boiling again. Protests against New Delhi are once again rumbling like the precursor to troubles that can push back the Valley to the turbulent days of violence. With the Centre’s decision to execute Afzal Guru—the Parliament attack convict, an already embattled Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah is on the edge. He is walking the tightrope. While one doesn’t know whether there is some kind of pact between him and the UPA at the Centre, one thing is clear that Omar certainly doesn’t want to be seen as toeing New Delhi. So, he had to wash off his hands from Guru’s execution. “Like it or not, I had no role to play in it. It would have been different if I had to sign the warrant of execution,” he said at the press meet soon after Guru’s hanging on February 9. He criticised the Centre for hanging Guru and his strong words resembled the anger on the streets of the Valley.
Omar’s stand is not surprising. He cannot afford to lose his constituency to his formidable rivals—the PDP, besides the hardline faction of the Hurriyat Conference led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The Opposition is losing no opportunity in gunning for Omar and all his initiatives to consolidate his position before the Assembly elections have been negated with Centre’s one decision. Omar knows it too well. So, he attacked the Centre and the judiciary for Guru’s execution. In an interview he said hanging on the basis of circumstantial evidence was unparalleled. “I think that there are enough voices in the rest of the country also who believe that the judicial process in this matter was flawed. The judgement of the Supreme Court has words that are difficult to explain, when the judgement itself says that there is strong circumstantial evidence. I have never known circumstantial evidence to be a basis of death sentence.”
He added: “Of course, there is something that we will always have to keep ourselves aware where the judgement talks about satisfying the collective conscience of society. You don’t hang somebody to satisfy collective conscience, you satisfy somebody because his hanging satisfies all the legal requirements not societal requirements... you hang somebody because the law demands it, and if its only circumstantial evidence then obviously there will be people who will have doubts and you can’t blame them...”
Whether people in the Valley buy his words or not, analysts feel these face-saving measures have both short-term and long-term implications. “If you see the statement in the context of Kashmir, it is a face-saving exercise and is similar to the resistance discourse. In the shorter run the rhetoric is aimed to calm Kashmir people and in the longer run at his election prospects,” said a professor at the Central University in Kashmir. However, there is a faux that has crept in Omar’s kneejerk defence. “In standing clear from the secret execution, Omar unwittingly admitted that his father Farooq Abdullah had a role to play in the hanging of Mohammad Maqbool Bhat who was also sent to gallows in 1984,” he added. Farooq had signed Maqbool’s death warrant.
Besides dealing with the Opposition in the state, Omar has also targeted the local Congress. When he said, “I hope this is not a single case and selective execution,” the remarks implied that a panicked Congress executed Guru to stop Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s advance to Delhi. “The execution has taken away a core issue from the clutches of the BJP and there is a reason to believe that Guru was sent to gallows to thwart the saffron party’s advance,” said Inshah Malik, a Kashmir scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
The professor added that Omar wanted to kill two birds with one stone. “The remark should not only be seen in the context of New Delhi. While Omar created an impression that the onus was completely on Delhi and they were responsible for the execution, at the same time, his message to the Kashmiris was that local Congress was a party to it,” he said. The state Congress has remained mute to the execution that took place at the Tihar Jail.
However, with his seemingly tough stand against the Centre, Omar may have further weakened his party, the National Conference (NC), in the Jammu region where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has made inroads. Already Omar’s flip-flops over Kashmir’s all-girls rock band Pragaash has not served him well among the liberal-minded people in the Valley as well as in Jammu. To make matters difficult, Additional Secretary of NC, Dr Mustafa Kamal, recently demanded plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir. Then Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front chief Yasin Malik met Pakistan-based terrorist Hafiz Saeed in Islamabad at a prayer meeting for Guru. The NC described Malik-Saeed meeting as “unfortunate” but at the same time accused Delhi of indulging the separatists. Kamal said, “Saeed has links with the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Now it is for New Delhi to decide. Now New Delhi’s conscience should be stirred and people should see what the country is doing.” But it was the Jammu unit of the BJP that stole the limelight as they took to the streets and protested against Malik. “In the longer run the event is going to have an impact in Jammu where BJP has made good ground in the last five years. This would be a major issue in the coming elections and particularly in the Jammu town and adjacent areas NC’s prospects will diminish,” said Inshah.