Jammu, Apr 27: Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has said that his administration was leaving no stone unturned to ensure a peaceful summer ahead.
“There isn’t another person alive who wants as much as I do, not to see a repeat of the summer of 2010,” Omar said in an extensive interview with a Delhi-based wire service Asian News International.
He said despite trying everything possible to ensure a peaceful summer, “Jammu and Kashmir is, however, one of the most unpredictable places on earth.” Omar said given the government’s experience of last year (summer 2010 unrest), the state administration was reacting to situations more proactively and much better.”
He said the state police have adopted better crowd control techniques, with better trained personnel. “But the proactive measures are more important, the administrative handling and the political handling. Handwara (where a civilian was recently killed in a security ambush) was a sort of a trigger point that could have created trouble. We reacted a lot better to that situation than on a lot of previous occasions,” he said.
Asked whether he is a more ‘hands on’, chief minister today, as compared to last year, when the unrest in the Valley resulted in the death of around 118 civilians, Omar said: “I was hands on then as well, but all of us were caught unawares of how quickly the mood could change. We’d seen it in 2008, perhaps we didn’t expect to see it in 2010 and that’s taught us that you can take Jammu and Kashmir for granted at your own peril. I have learnt that the smallest of things can become the biggest of things, in the blink of an eye. There is no chance to sleep on the job.”
Omar said his single biggest challenge remains security. “I thought I would have much more breathing space to deal with the economy, governance and things like that. But my primary focus, is still dealing with security. In Srinagar, I lost two policemen yesterday to militants. Had they got bullet-proof jackets and guns, they might have dealt with the situation, they were there to control crowds. That is the kind of tricky situation, how I equip the forces and how I deploy them. It is upsetting. Nobody likes losing people. Whether protestors who died last year or the police personnel who died yesterday. Nobody likes getting a phone call saying two people are dead. It is something I have to live with,” he said.
Omar said the political problem in Jammu and Kashmir is not just of the youth on the streets, it includes all the people of the state and “we are trying our best to include everybody in our dialogue process.” He said the interlocutors have had a fairly successful leg of visits and meetings.
Omar said Pakistan sees Kashmir as the unfinished agenda of 1947. “They feel they have a justified intent in what happens on our side of the LOC. “The fact that we react to their comments and that it irritates us gives them that much more pleasure and they do it with that much more enthusiasm. If we weren’t as quick in flying off the handle and react, they would get bored. But we don’t and we give them the pleasure from time to time,” he said and added that Jammu and Kashmir is the single most important issue between India and Pakistan.
“The two countries have fought three wars on Kashmir, but to say, let us first solve Kashmir and everything else later - No. It is part of the dialogue process that builds confidence. If we are able to solve other problems like Sir Creek, Siachen and ticklish trade issues like Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status, which we have given Pakistan and they haven’t given us, then we can have the confidence to take on bigger issues like Jammu and Kashmir,” he said.

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