Omar Abdullah

From the GQ India archive: My interview with Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu & Kashmir, for the October 2009 cover story. It's also online here.

In the cockpit of his twin-turboprop Beechcraft Kingair 350, Captain Surender Katoch is becoming impatient. He turns to peer down the cabin from behind his gold-rimmed Ray-Ban aviators, looking vaguely disgusted. We’re supposed to be in the air already, but we’ve got stuck in a typical Delhi traffic jam.

“We’re number 13 in the VIP movement,” the 48-year-old Katoch tells us, raising his voice over the radio chatter. “Delhi is a bloody maddening place. Everyone is a VIP, that’s the problem.”

Right now, there aren’t any on this plane. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and his wife of 15 years, Payal, have sensibly hung back at the terminal building, but the narrow eight-seater cabin is already pretty crowded. There’s Abdullah’s private secretary, Asgar Hussain (an enthusiastic, youthful looking, 37-year-old career bureaucrat), his security chief of 10 years, Mr Shabir (a silent, moustachioed slab of muscle in a safari suit, who looks like he could snap your arm with a discreet cough), photographer Farrokh Chothia, a couple of other anonymous secretaries and myself. Chothia and I are just along for the ride, here to accompany Abdullah to a polo match in a former war zone, the town of Dras in Kargil district, the coldest inhabited place in India.

Hussain has worked for plenty of Kashmiri politicians over the years, but, perhaps not surprisingly, he says he’s particularly keen on his current boss. “He’s very practical, intelligent and quick to make decisions,” he says. “Earlier chief ministers want to wait and watch, and wait and watch, and they can sometimes lose the essence of what’s happening.” The other thing he likes about working for the country’s youngest chief minister is that Abdullah “wants to go out rather than stay home”, and he rattles off an impressive list of outdoor activities, including white-water rafting, riding snowmobiles and cycling. “He’s a very good skier also,” effuses Hussain. “He skis in Gulmarg, and rides his Ducati.”

So, will he be riding a horse in the polo match today, too? “I don’t know,” says Hussain earnestly. “You never know with him – he might.”

As he speaks, a silver Ford Explorer draws up next to the plane, and Hussain quickly hops down the fold-out steps hinged into the fuselage. Out into the hazy August morning steps the 39-year old Abdullah, in a grey suit, white shirt and bright red tie, his cropped hair forming a sharp widow’s peak. Eyes hidden behind narrow rectangular sunglasses, he bears a weirdly nagging resemblance to the sinister Agent Smith from The Matrix.

We follow Hussain down the steps to greet him. Abdullah has been in Delhi for an internal security conference with the PM and state leaders from across the country. How was it? “All right. You can’t do much in a meeting of 30 chief ministers,” he says wryly. “The action is more on the sidelines; a word here, a nod there.” After Hussain’s action-man build-up, Abdullah seems low-key.

We settle into the plane’s butter-soft beige leather seats for take-off, but our wait in the VIP queue drags on even longer. “Every time the president or the PM flies, they close the airspace for 10 or 15 minutes,” says Abdullah. “That’s what this is about.” They’ve become well used to this routine, and the pleasures of travel by private plane. During the week, Payal and their two sons, Zamir and Zahir, are in Delhi, Abdullah is in Srinagar. One weekend he flies down, the next, she and the kids fly up. At last, we get clearance. We are headed first to Kargil, a two-hour flight at around 27,000 feet. Abdullah reaches behind the seat and produces a lunch hamper. He and Payal serve us coffee from a thermos, and pass cheese-and tomato and egg sandwiches around the cabin.

I ask what exactly the polo match we’re going to is all about. “It’s in honour of Lalit Suri, a man who invested heavily in Kashmir. It’s always good to promote normalcy in Jammu & Kashmir. This is the first time we’ve had ‘social polo’.” It’s also an attempt to boost tourism in a region still regarded by many as a war zone, an effort strongly supported by Abdullah’s government. The Lalit Suri Hospitality Group, a major hotel chain, has shipped in some top polo players from Delhi to the town of Dras in Kargil to play a local team. Polo has been a Drassi tradition for over 300 years. The slight snag for the Delhi players? Dras is over 10,000 feet above sea level. “I hope they’ve had time to acclimatize, or they’ll be falling off their horses.”

So, will he be riding today? Hussain, it turns out, will be disappointed. “I prefer things I can control,” Abdullah smiles. “Nine times out of 10, a motorbike will go where I tell it to go, but a horse, I’m not sure about.”

A new breed

Despite the political storms he’s weathered in Kashmir since his election, Abdullah has made good progress in boosting his popularity on the national stage. He is seen as an entirely new type of Indian politician – young, charismatic, well-educated, articulate in English, media-savvy, fluent in the language of business. In a landscape dominated by traditional netas whose outlooks mesh most tightly with India’s working-class majority, pinstripe-suited politicians like Abdullah, Sachin Pilot (who is married to Abdullah’s sister, Sarah), Milind Deora and Rahul Gandhi speak more to the aspirations and tastes of the middle and upper classes. During the run-up to his election in November 2008, Abdullah managed to generate a level of euphoria rarely seen among those kinds of voters. Some of his more excitable supporters even took to calling him “Kashmir’s Obama”.

That’s not a label that Abdullah feels particularly comfortable with. “Expectations are often too high and it has to be tempered by a dose of realism,” he says. “Sudden change doesn’t help. There’s a degree of resistance you have to work with.” And he doesn’t claim to see anything particularly unusual about the new breed of the Indian political animal. “It’s the same generational shift you’d see in any line of work. We’re not hamstrung by the baggage of Partition and colonialism. We’ve seen more of the world. The 70-year-olds started off at large public meetings, where you’d give a long discourse on every subject under the sun. People don’t have the patience now, which is what makes us more suited to the television era. We’re good at giving sound bites.”

He may be a new neta, but Abdullah still owes much to the old school: he is, after all, the scion of a democratic dynasty. In 2002, he effectively inherited the leadership of his party, the National Conference, from his father Farooq, who inherited it from hisfather, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, the party’s founder. Abdullah seems to accept this, without embarrassment, as a fact of Indian political life. He sees it as a tool, an advantage that enables him to make a difference. “The biggest thing in politics is name recognition,” he shrugs. But he admits he’s not especially keen on seeing a fourth generation of the dynasty. “I’m hoping they choose to do something different.”

I interrupt to ask how old his sons are, and he momentarily freezes. He looks at Payal.

“Don’t look at me,” she deadpans.“You should know.”

Abdullah is used to gruelling sessions in the state assembly, of course, and recovers swiftly. “Zamir is 12 in October,” he says smoothly, as if pulling the numbers off a policy brief. “Zahir is 10 and a half.”
I ask whom he turns to for advice, apart from his political advisors. “I talk to my dad – he has nothing to gain. I bounce ideas off Payal and get a refreshingly non-political reaction to what would normally be seen through a political prism.”

Does every decision end up being compromised by political considerations? “For the first four-and-a-half years of my government, I’d make the right decision. In the last year-and-a half, I’d probably go for the popular decision.”

I throw in a classic GQ question: What’s your biggest vice? Payal answers for him: “His mum is British, so he has that stiff upper lip. He’s very boring. He doesn’t dance – that’s his vice.”

Abdullah decides to concede this one: “I don’t dance,” he says, mock-embarrassed. “That’s my vice.”

Abdullah, with his confident, precise speech, each word weighed carefully for nuance, has the air of a man who has developed a strong sense of self-belief without letting it cloud his critical faculties. “I grasp what is being explained to me very quickly. I’m a pretty good judge of the people I come across and what it is they want. And I go with an instinctive reaction. I’ve found that when I trust my instincts then nine out of 10 times it’s right. The problem is that people can perceive being quick to decide as being arrogant. But if I can do something in five minutes, there’s no reason why I should do it differently.”

His snap decision on July 28 this year is a case in point. Without warning, Abdullah had been confronted in the J&K state assembly with allegations that he was involved in a long-running
sex trafficking and child abuse case. Abdullah instantly announced he would resign, an unexpected counterpunch that put his opponents on the back foot. “That was instinctive. I knew that if I was going to do my job as I wanted to do it, I’d have to take a stand. People complained that it was a conditional resignation – but why should I give an unconditional resignation when I haven’t done anything?”

It all seems a long way from Abdullah’s youthful intentions to stay out of politics, starting his career as a sales and marketing executive in the hospitality industry. “I really wasn’t enjoying what I was doing,” he says. “People ask me about my change of career, but all I’ve done is gone from selling hotel bookings to selling myself.”

The move felt natural. After all, he had spent his childhood absorbing the basics of a political role, living on the searing edges of his father’s megawatt limelight. It was something that his mother helped him prepare for, even though, he says, she never wanted him to go into politics. “My mum brought us up with the understanding that we were always going to be watched and commented on. We were always going to be judged.”

Dodging bullets

Abdullah tells the pilot to show us more of the landscape we’re passing over, and the plane obligingly banks steeply to the left. Through a plate-sized porthole window, he points out the wriggling switchback trail of the Rohtang Pass. To the right, we pass a series of jagged black-and-brown Himalayan peaks, veined with snow like the fat in cuts of meat. “The glaciers have receded a lot here in the last 10 years,” he says. The conversation turns to some of the environmental problems facing the area, the potential effects of global warming and threats to water security. Abdullah is well versed in the issues, especially the growing pressure on the cross-border sharing of fresh water.

Abdullah is bullish on the prospects for security in Jammu & Kashmir, a topic which is not just of political interest. “I’ve experienced about six or seven attacks,” he says. “The first one, in 2000, was a grenade tossed into a schoolyard just as I was leaving. The second was a rifle grenade, fired at our helicopter as we came in to land.”

After that, the exact order of what happened when gets a little vague. The shock of the attacks has long since worn off; he remembers them now more for what they taught him about managing security issues. “There was one where a land mine went off about 15 feet away, just as I was getting out of the car.” He recalls the unseemly scramble of security personnel after the blast, some of whom fired wildly into the air. “This is the problem with having multiple agencies in your security set-up. They tend to react in different ways.”

The last attempt on his life was in July 2007: a pair of rifle grenades fired at a house where he was meeting with party workers. I ask Payal how she feels about Abdullah taking a job that puts him so squarely in harm’s way. Doesn’t she feel like talking him out of it? “I have tried, many times,” she sighs, looking meaningfully at her husband.

“Don’t squint at me,” Abdullah gently chides her.

“I’m not squinting.”

“It is,” he turns to me, “the subject of a fair amount of discussion.”

Abdullah insists, however, that his personal security is in better shape than that of his predecessors. “There was a time when no CM of Jammu & Kashmir would have given an Independence Day speech without a bulletproof rostrum,” he says, referring to his speech in Srinagar three days earlier. “Now you can do that.” The wry smile acknowledges the meagre comfort in this sign of progress: I can talk inpublic without worrying too much that someone will try to kill me.

Lunar Polo

Around 11am, we touch down at Air Force Station Kargil, a dusty airstrip beneath a jagged range of brown mountains. The only other aircraft here are a Lalit Hospitality Group plane and the blue-and-white Bell 407 helicopter that will take us the remaining 60 kilometres to Dras. Local officials greet Abdullah and his wife with garlands,and escort them up a ragged red carpet for a brief cup of tea inside the terminalbuilding. The pale sky seems harshhere; the air too thin and too bright.

There isn’t room for all of us in the chopper, so Abdullah and Payal go on ahead for the first run. Captain Katoch, still protected by his aviators, takes it upon himself to point out the local sights. He gestures at the mountains. “Some of these ridges are theirs, some are ours. This whole area is within shelling range.” He points north-northeast to a triangular grey peak, hazy in the distance. “That’s a Pakistani forward observation post,” he says.

A Pakistani army officer waits there, ready to call in coordinates for artillery strikes. Katoch, an IAF pilot and the Director of J&K Aviation, wasn’t in Kargil for Operation Vijay Divas in ’99; his war was Sri Lanka. “Kargil was worth it,” he says. “Those guys had to be knocked off.”

After 30 minutes, the chopper is back and Katoch, Hussain and I set off on Abdullah’s trail, swiftly passing over the tin roofs and thin fir trees of Kargil, the shadows of the rotors filling the cabin with a cinematic blur. In the centre of the township sits the bright blue dome of a mosque; this is a predominantly Shia Muslim town, population around 1,20,000, with a sizeable Buddhist minority. Then we’re into a valley between the mountains, high over the fast flowing Suru River, which is bordered by tiny hamlets of mud and stone with roofs of bright orange – a local cottage industry produces dried apricots. The valley walls of cracked, barren rock are so close it seems we could almost reach out and touch them.

They open suddenly into a wide expanse of brown and green, and within moments we’re coming in to land. The journey that has taken us 15 minutes would take 90 minutes by road. Inscribed in fresh white paint on the side of a nearby mountain is a huge battalion insignia and the words: “TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF VIJAY DIVAS 1999-2009”. The summit of the snow-streaked Tiger Hill – site of the bitterest high-altitude combat of the Kargil War – looms 15,000 feet above, like a serrated knifepoint.

By the time we arrive, the polo match is halfway through: horses and riders thunder down the field, hooves scudding dirt for fast turns and hard swings at the ball. Despite the alien 10,000-foot altitude, the Delhi players seem unperturbed by the thin air, blocking often, driving hard into scuffles. Twock! The ball skips rapidly out of one tussle, running down the fi eld to be swept up neatly by a Delhi player in red and white; he gallops it back, knocking as he goes, to fire it square into the Drassi goal.

Cheers and applause erupt from spectators on both sides of the field, at the Vishwanathan Stadium in the heart of the sprawling Dras Indian Army camp. On one side sits a raised dais with seats and couches for local National Conference leaders, army officers and Lalit Suri Hospitality Group executives; on the other, a crowd of over 2,000 villagers – about a fifth of Dras’ population – sit above a low border of piled stones. There is a carnival atmosphere; today has been declared a public holiday in Dras so that the town can watch local players take on the Lalit Group’s Delhi visitors for the first-ever Lalit Suri Exhibition Polo. A chill wind is starting to kick up dust and tug at the canopy over the dais; clouds brood darkly overhead. Still, everyone looks happy.

The good mood of the proceedings goes hand-in-hand with a mild sense of the surreal; a bit like taking afternoon tea at the bottom of the Atlantic. Dras would be regarded as barely inhabitable by much of the world; the temperatures here can drop to below -45 Celsius in winter, when it is assailed by frequent snowstorms. The place seems to promise only a hardscrabble existence. The Vishwanathan Stadium stands at the centre of a stark amphitheatre of grey, implacable mountains, as indifferent to social polo as they are to war. Glance up at them, and it’s like a polo match on the moon.

The Dras team, drawn from the best players among the town’s six teams, fight hard, and for a while it looks like they will hold the Lalit team to a 2-2 draw. But the Delhiites manage to break through once more, pulling off a 3-2 victory.

The townspeople are courteous in defeat, applauding heartily. “They’re being good hosts,” Jyotsna Suri tells Abdullah on the dais. “They let the visitors win.” She is Lalit Suri’s widow, and chair and managing director of the Lalit Suri Hospitality Group. The match is her baby, the first of a series of annual polo tournaments to attract tourists to the state. Abdullah, leaning back in his Agent Smith shades, breaks into a grin: just for today, everybody wins.

Somewhere along the way, Abdulla has changed for the event into traditional Ladakhi formalwear, a fl owing brown goncha tied with a green sash. As he steps down from the dais for the postmatch ceremony, you can see that it doesn’t quite go with his black brogues and blue polka-dot socks. The players dismount and line up side-by-side by a table with an impressive gold trophy. The suave, well-built Delhi victors, captained by polo professional Jai Shergill, tower over their wiry, ruddy-faced Drassi counterparts, who good-naturedly collect their awards from Abdullah and Suri. Shergill lifts up his trophy and gives it a passionate kiss.

Abdullah is invited to return to the dais to make a speech. He addresses them in Urdu, his voice booming across the field through a PA system. He thanks the Drassis for their support 10 years ago. “Once, this place was famous for war,” he says. “Now, it should be famous for sports like polo.” He says that past governments have not taken care of the area – but that will change. He wants the private sector to help develop it, and promises the creation of a local tourism development agency – this gets a loud cheer – plus a short list of improvements: computers in schools, electricity in every home, the technologies “needed for the 21st century”. As he speaks, the wind suddenly picks up, whipping up a large dust cloud from the polo field. Above his head, the canopy shakes violently.

He finishes with the mandatory list of thank-yous, before diving gamely into a decent-sized media scrum with assorted national and local news channels and papers. The first question everyone wants answered is: what will happen in the Shopian murders investigation? He assures CNN-IBN that “the chapter will not be closed” on the case, before deftly moving on to sunnier messages, like “corporate India has finally reached Dras” and “Dras is now on the map”. He hopes that in future years of the tournament, Manipuri players, even international polo players, will take part.

“And next time, will you get on a horse?” asks a young female reporter sternly, almost as if she feels a little cheated.

Abdullah looks momentarily at a loss for a positive answer.

“Er… I will seriously consider that possibility.”