HT interview: When you don’t get to decide who your officers are, it’s not a pretty picture, says Omar Abdullah
Omar Abdullah reflects on his first year as J&K CM, discussing challenges in governance, lack of statehood restoration, and tourism recovery post-terror attacks.
SRINAGAR : A year into his term as the first chief minister of Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah has been navigating a raft of challenges stemming from the Pahalgam terror attack that gutted the Valley’s thriving tourism business, dealing a debilitating blow to its economy, and the Monsoon disasters that ravaged infrastructure in Jammu region. In an interview to Ramesh Vinayak and Mir Ehsan at his residence in Srinagar on Sunday, soon after completing a 21-km run in the Kashmir Marathon, the 55-year-old National Conference leader spoke on a range of issues, including the lack of progress on statehood restoration and his frequent run-ins with Raj Bhawan. Edited excerpts:
How has been the first year of your government?
For any government, it is a challenge when the transition is from one elected government to another. Our transition was even more unique. We transitioned from the President’s rule to an elected government. And, for a lot of us, transition has also been from a state government to a Union Territory government. So, it has been a steep learning curve.
In the last one year, you have been at odds with the Lt Governor on several issues. How is that impacting your functioning?
Look, when you don’t get to decide who your officers are, it is not a pretty picture. If (someone) was to tell Prime Minister Modi that he is not going to decide who are going to be his secretaries of various departments in the Government of India, or who would be the next chief of army staff, how easy would it be for him to govern? That is the situation we find ourselves in. I look after the departments, but the administrative secretaries are not of my choosing. I don’t even get to discipline officers if their performance has been less than satisfactory. Obviously, they are accountable to the person who puts them here. The distribution of powers makes it very clear that IAS and IPS appointments are the direct responsibility of Raj Bhawan . But even on J & K Administrative Services ( JKAS) officers, there is a problem.
Similarly, you decide which officer you want to send to Ladakh. I understand this is part of the discretionary powers of Raj Bhawan, but some amount of consultation is necessary. At the moment it appears that sending state service officers to Ladakh is more a punishment than anything else. It almost as if a message is being sent to them not to toe the line of elected government, and if that you do, you will face the consequences. Even an officer in chief minister’s office was threatened with being sent to Ladakh. So this doesn’t make for a very healthy picture. The information department that is meant to be headed by a JKAS cadre officer has an IAS officer at the top just to keep it out of the purview of the elected government. As CM, I should be deciding who my director, information is. Why is this the case? It is now more than a year, we don’t have an advocate general. When the elected government allowed the existing AG to continue to work, why was he not allowed to work?
Have you flagged these concerns to the Centre and sought clarity on power distribution?
We have submitted what we believe is the correct interpretation of the J&K Reorganisation Act, 2019, to clarify the business rules. That has come into some amount of difficulty because there is a difference of opinion. Obviously, if it had been as smooth as we wanted it to be, the rules would have been notified by now. But at various levels these things have been talked about, particularly on the posts of AG and director, information...
We know our place. But chief minister is the ex-officio chancellor of Islamic universities which are still not with us in spite of the fact that we have moved this file in the secretariat. As power minister, I should be ex-officio chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Power development corporation. But I am not. Why the reluctance to give this back to us. The culture department is with me but I am not chairman of the Cultural Academy...
If the LG’s responsibility is security and law and order, I don’t interfere in those decisions. But why are the bodies that should be part of the elected government not returned to us?
Have you spoken to Lt Governor Manoj Sinha on these issues?
Why do I have to beg for these things to come back?
How are your relations with Raj Bhawan?
There are working relationships but nothing beyond that.
Do you mean the synergy is missing?
Nahin hai (It’s not there).
What do you make of the delay in restoration of statehood?
I don’t understand it. It was a three-stage process: delimitation, election and statehood. Now we keep hearing that it will returned at an appropriate time. Yet nobody has quantified what is that appropriate time. What is the yardstick by which I as elected chief minister or our government with a popular mandate will know that we have reached that appropriate time. What steps do I need to take? Because ultimately we all need a goal.
As an elected chief minister with a mandate based on return of statehood, I need to be told that statehood will returned in this timeframe and circumstance... But, it is left vague and I don’t know when statehood will come.One interpretation is that the appropriate time will be when the BJP is in power here...
Are you considering moving the Supreme Court?
It’s a subject of discussion.
You have dropped hints that if statehood is not restored within a reasonable timeframe, you would step aside and ask the party to nominate a new chief minister. How serious are you on this?
Look everything has an expiry period. Even patience has. How much patience are we expected to have.
Is the patience running out?
I am not given to such theatrics, but obviously the level of disappointment today is higher than it was a year ago. We had genuinely expected that within the first year, this promise made to the people will be kept. Statehood is not about me, my house, my family or even my party. It is about Jammu and Kashmir; it is about a sovereign promise made to Parliament and the Supreme Court of India. That must count for something.
The Lt Governor has publicly said that statehood cannot be an excuse for not taking up welfare projects as the elected government has full powers to do so.
What welfare projects we have not taken up? How about the powers that belong to the elected government but have not been returned to us. We have started new welfare projects. We have increased the quantum of social welfare payouts, launched a new scheme for self employment and entrepreneurship called Mission Yuva, made free transport available to women in government buses and made available subsided electricity at far better quality than was being previously maintained. We are completing long-languishing infrastructure projects. I recently inaugurated a bridge in Srinagar whose foundation stone I had laid in 2011. It remained stalled for 14 years. Please tell where we are failing to deliver...
Do you think the Pahalgam terror attack complicated security dynamics which in turn weighed against the decision on statehood?
If that is the case, it is extremely unfair because it was not our failure. Who chairs the security review meetings? They are chaired in Raj Bhawan, not in the CM’s office. No elected government has been responsible for an attack of this nature against tourists. None. Not Dr Farooq Abdullah’s government between 1996 and 2002, not Mufti Sayeed’s government from 2002 to 2005, Ghulam Nabi Azad’s rule from 2005 and 2008 and my government between 2009 and 2015. So how can you hold the return of statehood hostage to something like this.
And the wider concern is: are we going to export this decision to our neighbour? Pahalgam was not the fault of people of J&K. You held Pakistan responsible for it and Operation Sindoor followed. In a theoretical situation, tomorrow if we again come close to statehood, they (Pakistan) engineer another attack …then our statehood goes? So are we saying that J&K statehood will be decided first from across the border and then in Delhi. Statehood cannot be linked to Pakistan’s terror strategy.
Do you see any implication of the Ladakh discontent in J&K?
There will be. People are looking at what happens in Ladakh. One part of it is the disappointment that the territory that is normally peaceful has been pushed to the point where they have come out to agitate. But the second part is that if as a result of this agitation, Ladakh gets some of its demands fulfilled while J&K doesn’t, then how do you expect me to tell people in J&K to wait and that we will use peaceful, democratic, constitutional means. So both things are being looked at very closely.
Do you see any signs of revival of tourism?
It has been slow and understandably so. What happened in Pahalgam has never happened in J&K before. The scale of the failure was monumental. Let’s not underplay that. And it’s immediate impact has been on tourism and the revival has been slow. But it is heartening to see some people coming back.
How engaged are you with the INDIA bloc?
My association with INDIA bloc is limited to what happens in Jammu and Kashmir. I know where my boundaries end. I am not going to tell INDIA bloc what they should do in other parts of the country, the same way what I wouldn’t appreciate if they started telling me what we should do here. My concerns have more to do with the frequency with which we ( INDIA bloc partners) meet.
You said that you won’t ally with BJP for the sake of statehood. Politics is all about pragmatism. After all you were a minister in the Atal Bihari Vajyapee-led coalition government?
There is pragmatism and then there is also historic blunder. What the PDP did with the BJP was a historic blunder, and we are still reaping the fallout of that. I have no intention of doing that. If statehood doesn’t happen, so be it.
What are your priorities for your second year in office?
We will continue to work for fulfilling whatever promises we can this year. The goal is to step up development, to try and see where we can bridge the gap between our resources and expenditure and to try and pick up some big ticket items in terms of infrastructure projects.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi in one of his meetings with J&K leaders had talked about his intent to eliminate ‘dil ki doori aur Delhi ki doori’. How far it has happened?
It’s work in progress. We could have gone further.
