Dear Mr Omar Abdullah,
The people of Jammu and Kashmir did not elect you in the October 2024 assembly elections out of affection or faith. Had that been the case, you would not have lost the Baramulla-Kupwara Lok Sabha seat just a few months ago to Engineer Abdul Rashid.
People voted you in the assembly polls for something larger—against the arrogance of majoritarian Delhi, against the steady dismantling of their identity, against the suffocation of their dignity. When they pressed the button beside the plough symbol, it was not out of forgiveness for the Abdullah dynasty—the rigged election of 1987, the broken promises, and the corruption are not forgotten. It was out of desperation, believing that even a flawed shield was better than no shield at all.
But it now looks like they have miscalculated.
Today, as Kashmir is hollowed out—its books banned, its shrines seized, its youth jailed under draconian laws—you sit in Srinagar, tweeting indignation as though you were an opposition leader in a far-off democracy. But you are not in opposition. You are the Chief Minister. The blood on the streets, the silence in the mosques, the erasure of our language—all take place under your watch. Your condemnations sound hollow, almost obscene.
Let us be clear about what you have allowed:
· When the BJP-government introduced the Waqf Amendment Bill to seize Muslim religious endowments, you raised no meaningful resistance.
· When your own MLAs were detained under the same Public Safety Act (PSA) that your family governments once wielded against ordinary Kashmiris, you offered meek protests.
· When books by Kashmiri writers were banned, you held press conferences but risked nothing.
· When Hazratbal, the most sacred symbol of Kashmiri Muslim identity, was taken under Delhi’s grip, you merely wore your cap to Friday prayers and called it resistance.
The cap on your head is not a crown of leadership. It is a costume, and the people see through it.
Nobody expected you to reverse August 2019 changes. We knew you could not restore Article 370 or 35A. We knew you could not bring back the dead or undo demographic engineering. But there was still a fragile hope that you could slow the bleeding, that you could at least stand between Kashmir and complete absorption into the Hindu Rashtra project.
Instead, you have become the velvet glove covering the iron fist. Delhi points to your presence as proof of “normalcy” while dismantling every institution of Kashmiri life. Your administration provides the fig leaf of democracy while the reality on the ground is colonisation.
This is not the first time. In 1999, you justified your alliance with the BJP by claiming you could “moderate” them. That claim has curdled like milk in the Kashmiri summer. They did not moderate. They consumed you. They used your legitimacy to accelerate the very project you once promised to resist.
Your rival-turned-partner, Mehbooba Mufti, also bears responsibility. She was the one who justified an alliance with the BJP as a “bridge to Delhi” and who surrendered Muslim Auqaf institutions to the same forces now weaponising them. She, too, now wraps herself in the cloak of resistance. But Kashmir remembers. We remember the tears shed for the cameras and the compromises behind closed doors.
Both of you helped Delhi finish what it began on 5 August 2019: the conversion of Jammu and Kashmir from a semi-autonomous state into a colony administered through local collaborators.
You had other options. When new criminal laws were imposed to replace the IPC and CrPC in Kashmir, you could have refused to implement them. When Waqf properties were seized, you could have resigned in protest. When your MLAs were jailed, you could have marched to the prison gates and refused to leave until they were freed.
You did none of this. You chose survival. But what survives is not Kashmir—only your chair.
You speak of restoring statehood as if redrawing the map were the solution. Kashmir’s wounds are not geographical. They are about dignity, history, faith, and memory. A return to statehood without the right to exist as a people is just another cage, and you are its keeper.
Do the young men languishing in prison for attending funerals not haunt your nights? Do the mothers of the disappeared—whose sons vanished in the 1990s and whose grandsons now vanish again—remain unheard in your conscience? Do you not feel the suffocation of writers whose books are banned, of preachers whose sermons are censored, of scholars whose research is criminalised?
Perhaps you tell yourself this is pragmatism. But pragmatism without principle is simply collaboration by another name. Collaboration always extracts a price, not just from the collaborator but from the entire community that dared to hope.
The cap on your head is fraying. The crown on Delhi’s head grows heavier with each of your compromises. Between them lies the battered body of Kashmir—still breathing, still bleeding, still waiting for leaders worthy of its sacrifice.
History will not be kind. But history’s judgment is for tomorrow. The urgent question today is: Will you spend what remains of your time in office as Delhi’s accomplice, or will you at last stand between your people and their annihilation?
The choice is yours. But remember this: Kashmir is watching. And Kashmir remembers.
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