Much More, Omar

Will the new chief minister make a new beginning by taking some bold decisions?

Iftikhar Gilani Delhi, Hardnews

The wheel has turned full circle in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). Riding on the back of the Congress, the grand old party of National Conference (NC) has returned to power. On December 24 evening, the day Srinagar and Jammu districts went to polls, Congress President Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi were sewing up an alliance with the NC days ahead of counting. The only condition the Gandhis had made was that their party would work with young Omar Abdullah -- leaving party patron Dr Farooq Abdullah in the cold, the veteran who had projected himself as chief minister all through the poll campaign.

A day before Christmas, Sonia Gandhi rang up Prof Saifuddin Soz, PCC president, and former chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad. She specifically wanted their assessment of young Abdullah and the Congress party's tie-up with the NC. Contrary to the political drama enacted to appear that the tie-up was a fait accompli, the deal seems to have been scripted even before elections. Insiders say it was brokered by none-else than the Congress MP from Rajasthan, Sachin Pilot, through Rahul Gandhi.

Sachin had stepped into the shoes of his late father Rajesh Pilot, a former Union Minister, who also brokered an accord between Rajiv Gandhi and Farooq Abdullah leading the latter to return to power in 1986. The experiment, however, boomeranged as the tactics they adopted in the polls gave birth to militancy in 1989.

Even during the polls, while the NC officially projected Farooq Abdullah as its chief ministerial candidate, many in Delhi like former RAW chief AS Dulat, who has been the Centre's pointman for Kashmir, was projecting Omar as the next head of government.  Sachin is believed to have convinced the Abdullahs -- who run the NC as their family fiefdom -- that their relationship with the Congress would be good for Kashmiris as well as for the nation. Azad has also been pushing for an alliance with the NC due to his uneasy relations with alliance partner Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) during his stint at the top. But the Congress high command had torpedoed his moves.

The elections have thrown interesting indicators. The NC succeeded in retaining 28 seats, emerging once again as the single largest party in the fractured mandate. Its rival, the PDP, won the largest share of votes and raised its tally to 21 -- up by five seats. Further, the NC got majority of seats in the low polling areas hit by the separatists' poll boycott campaign. The PDP, which swept south Kashmir, got seats mostly in the heavy polling areas.