Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi and his sister and party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi attended the oath-taking ceremony of the National Conference Vice President Omar Abdullah as the Chief Minister of the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
While a number of opposition leaders also attended the ceremony, the Gandhi siblings’ presence conveyed a special message, reliving the old, historic memories about the generational relationship the Nehru-Gandhis have with the Abdullah family.
It goes back to the days of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the great-grandfather of Rahul and Priyanka and Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, Omar’s grandfather. Sheikh Abdullah and Pandit Nehru enjoyed a special bonding. It was under Nehru’s influence that Sheikh Abdullah rechristened his sectarian Muslim Conference as the National Conference, which was secular.
It goes without saying that Sheikh Abdullah had an immense contribution to Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to India when the state ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, was wavering between remaining independent and joining India. Sheikh Abdullah was the most popular Kashmiri leader in modern history.
After the accession, Sheikh Abdullah became the ‘Prime Minister’ of Jammu and Kashmir, accorded a “special status” under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. Under this special status, the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir was designated as the Prime Minister. The practice was discontinued in the 1960s, much before the abrogation of Article 370.
Despite Jammu Kashmir being granted “special status” and “greater autonomy”, Sheikh Abdullah was alleged to have started toying with the idea of “independence” with the support of the United States. This led to his dismissal as the “Prime Minister” and imprisonment. Obviously, it soured the relationship between Pandit Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah.
Sheikh Abdullah subsequently revived the “Plebiscite Front,” which called for a referendum in Jammu and Kashmir following the United Nations resolution to ascertain people's views on whether they wanted to remain with India or Pakistan. Gradually, the “Plebiscite Front” gained traction with people, and Sheikh Abdullah eventually reconciled to the reality of Jammu and Kashmir’s irreversible accession to India.
In the meantime, Pandit Nehru had died in 1964. Sheikh Abdullah signed an accord with his daughter, Ms Indira Gandhi in 1975 when she was the Prime Minister. The accord was famously called the “Indira-Sheikh Accord of 1975”.
Return and rise/fall of the Abdullahs
It paved the way for Sheikh Abdullah’s return to the political mainstream and the 1977 assembly elections, which saw him becoming the Chief Minister. By now, Sheikh Abdullah and Ms Gandhi had buried the hatchet and built up a cordial relationship reviving the old tradition of bonding between the two families.
When Sheikh Abdullah bequeathed his political legacy to his eldest son, Dr Farooq Abdullah, Ms Gandhi duly supported him. When Sheikh Abdullah died in 1983, she helped Dr Farooq to become the Chief Minister against the strong claims from his brother-in-law, GM Shah, aka ‘Gulshah’.
About a million people attended Sheikh Abdullah’s funeral in September 1983. Dr Farooq apparently got carried away. He started aligning with the opposition parties, leaders and Chief Ministers. He held an opposition conclave in Srinagar, much to the chagrin of Ms Gandhi. She felt dismayed and betrayed and she eventually managed to dethrone Dr Farooq and install his estranged brother-in-law Gulshah as the Chief Minister.
After Ms Gandhi was assassinated by her own bodyguards, Rajiv Gandhi took over. Thanks to some mutual friends like Rajesh Pilot, Dr Farooq and Rajiv came closer to each other. They finally aligned together in 1987, thus again reliving the family tradition of cordial relationship. While the two families and consequently two rival parties, the National Conference and the Congress came together, it proved to be the undoing of Kashmir. The Islamic separatist militancy started since then.
After Rajiv was also assassinated in a suicide bomb blast carried out by the LTTE, the Congress party went out of the Gandhi family’s control. In the meanwhile Dr Farooq also remained low as Jammu and Kashmir were under the centre's rule. He became Chief Minister once again in 1996, thanks to the deft handling of the situation by the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, who wanted a political solution to the Kashmir problem.
The National Conference in the meantime joined the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government at the centre, headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Omar was a union minister in that government. Eventually, they fell apart for ideological reasons, and the National Conference later joined the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government at the centre headed by Dr Manmohan Singh. But by then Ms Sonia Gandhi had already taken control of the party.
The next generation holding the reins
As the baton passed to the next generation, Omar Abdullah in the National Conference and Rahul Gandhi in the Congress, they carried their families’ traditions forward. But more than that the glue for their bonding is their common “political enemy”, the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
So, when Rahul and his sister Priyanka attended the oath-taking ceremony, they conveyed a strong message of camaraderie with Omar and his party.
The fact that the National Conference and the Congress relationship is more because of their aversion to, and also fear of, the BJP, was admitted by Omar Abdullah, who was candid enough to admit that the National Conference aligned with the Congress in Jammu and Kashmir for the assembly elections, to dispel the apprehensions among people that the party (the National Conference) might align with the BJP to form the government in case the need be.
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