ONE of his earliest brushes with power was pushing the siren button on grandfather Sheikh Abdullah's jeep as it zipped around Srinagar. That was in the '70s when convoys weren't worried about lobbed grenades. Today, Umar Farooq, 27-year-old son of Jammu & Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah, is the National Conference nominee from Srinagar and takes up his new vocation more because of his lineage than any perception of merit.
Eldest son of the chief minister, Umar shifted to Srinagar from London in 1975 when he was five years old. In 1981, Farooq shifted him to Sanawar, the elite boarding school near Shimla. Finishing his 12th in 1989, Umar joined St Stephen's for 15 days, where he enrolled in Philosophy honours, but left for Sydenham college in Bombay for a B Com. That over, he flew to London, where he has the right of abode because of his UK birth, and found himself hunting for employment for a full 18 months in vain. In his own words, he sent "70 resumes to companies and tried and tried". Ultimately, he got fed up of applying. Says Umar: "Initially, you take it in your stride but then you begin to think that something might be wrong."
In the summer of '93, he was back in India, in a sales and marketing job at Oberoi, Delhi. He spent a year selling hotel rooms, a process which has "acquainted (him) with nearly every office on Barakhamba Road". He soon jumped to ITC Global Holding trying to sell coffee, tea and pulses, moved to Landbase, an event management division in the ITC, and finally to marketing real estate from where he put in his papers three weeks ago to "provide a helping hand to father, to make him see reality instead of what others might be feeding him".
Meanwhile, he met Payal Singh, an Oberoi colleague, tied the knot in '94 and had a son, Zamir, two months ago. He's candid enough to admit that he did ponder a bit about the conspicuousness of having a Hindu wife in polarised Kashmir. "I don't know whether it will impact me politically but if somebody brings it up they should be exposed for what they are." The Abdullahs have quite a line-up of inter-religion marriages—Umar's mother is English,and grandmother half-English.
His own political baptism came about in 1996 when the people of Jammu gave a reception to the democratically-elected government in the state after years of strife. The organisers suddenly announced his name as a speaker. Says Umar: "Both my father's and my wife's head went down. They thought, 'God, he is either going to stammer or speak in English'. But I spoke for three minutes in Urdu and I guess that's when I felt I might be a natural. That it was in my blood."
His own political agenda, or the one that he is starting off with, is rather simplistic. He would like to build a rapport with the youth in the state, a segment that he thinks is no longer enamoured of the NC. Says Umar: "We have a lot of support in the older generation but not the young. I would like them to feel that I am accessible. Make them more comfortable with the idea that our best future is with India. You see the grass is always greener on the other side till you cross over." And he sees entering Parliament both as an opportunity to make political friendships that will stand him in good stead and also as a means to spend some time in Delhi, because otherwise it "could be too big a dislocation for my wife".
He's also brimming with some passed on wisdom. "My grandfather told my father and he tells me that no matter what you do for people in the cities they will never be behind you but the villagers are different." A bit of recent history as well: "My father didn't see 1989 coming or he would have done something. Aligning with the Congress in '87 was a mistake. Earlier, you were either with the NC or the Congress. There were no fanatical elements. When the two aligned, the disgruntled had nowhere to go. This element is now with the Hurriyat." For someone starting with a clean slate, Umar, one would have thought, would generate some hope. But the people view him as another dynastic imposition to be suffered. And the opposition is armed with an allegation he might find difficult to counter. Says Javed Mir of the JKLF: "Where was he all these years when the Valley was burning?"
Apparently, Mir posed this question to him at a meeting and Umar didn't have a satisfactory answer. And though Umar is likely to win from Srinagar, he's going to need a lot of imagination to enthuse the Kashmiris. For someone whose favourite authors are Tom Clancy and Collin Forbes, that shouldn't be all that hard.
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