NC Chief Dr Farooq Faces Heat From Ex Raw Chief A S Dulat On Art 370 Abrogation

Srinagar,New Delhi: A political storm has been triggered in Jammu and Kashmir following a claim by former head of Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) A.S. Dulat that National Conference patron Farooq Abdullah had privately endorsed the abrogation of Article 370 and even expressed readiness to “help” in the process if he had been taken into “confidence”.
Dulat, in his new book ‘The Chief Minister and the Spy’, quotes Abdullah as saying during a private conversation: “We would have helped (pass the proposal). Why were we not taken into confidence?”
Abdullah, however, dismissed Dulat’s claim as a “cheap stunt” aimed at boosting book sales.
Claiming that the contents of the book were “figments of imagination” of the author Dulat, he insisted that NC would never have supported the abrogation of Article 370.
Abdullah, a former Chief Minister of J&K who enjoys very close relations with Dulat, had publicly slammed the revocation of Article 370 on August 4, 2019, a sudden move by the Narendra Modi government at the Centre, which had taken everyone by surprise.
Hours before that development, Farooq Abdullah and other top political and other leaders of Kashmir were put under house arrest and the detentions continued for several months.
Interestingly, a few days before Article 370 was scrapped, Abdullah and his son Omar Abdullah met Prime Minister Modi in Delhi. “What transpired…nobody will ever know,” the former spy chief writes in the book.
The controversial excerpts of Dulat’s book were published by The Hindustan Times newspaper and the former spy chief confirmed the crucial elements later in an interview to Karan Thapar.
In the interview, he said that Abdullah told him that if he had been “taken into confidence”, “we could have found ways of overcoming this without having to send extra troops and scaring everybody and making it difficult for Kashmir to accept this, without everybody being upset and it would not have required locking up everyone.”
When asked whether Farooq Abdullah would have helped Delhi abrogate Article 370 which granted special status to J&K, Dulat said, “Not abrogate 370. You are putting it very bluntly. Obviously, he was against the abrogation of 370. Every Kashmiri was against the abrogation. It’s just that, what he was saying at that point of time, is that we could have helped in doing it more smoothly if it had to be done”.
On whether Farooq Abdullah trusts Delhi, the former RAW chief said, “More than the Kashmiri people, Farooq does not trust Delhi at all. But he was still willing to help them. That trust has to be created by Delhi and Delhi has not been able to create that trust… Despite that, he always wanted to be on the side of Delhi and always wanted to help Delhi.”