From ghoulies and ghosties
And long legged beasties
And things that go bump in the night
Good Lord, deliver us.
Before I get to the part about things that go bump in the night, let me start by how I came across the "ghoulies and ghosties".
I'm a closet aviation buff with a lifelong fascination for all things related to flight.
Long before I became a politician, I dreamed of becoming a pilot. While I never learned to fly planes, my fascination with them never ended. I often spend time in the airport lounges wondering about the flights arriving and departing, the places they have come from or may be going to. The advent of flight tracker apps on smart phones has made this easier and a lot more informative. Now I just point my phone up to the sky, and my screen is filled with a virtual radar of flights overhead.
Last night I was sitting at a particularly long traffic light and happened to chance upon a flight heading North at a height, speed and vector that could only have meant it was headed to Srinagar. I'm well aware that after watch hours, landings and take offs aren't readily given by the Air Force in Srinagar, which meant that it wasn't some rich tourist flying in to enjoy the snow. But what I didn't know was that Ram Madhav, the BJP General Secretary and point person for his party's negotiations with Mehbooba Mufti's PDP, was on board that flight. I hazarded a guess when I tweeted that something seemed to be cooking between the two parties and I could very easily have been completely off the mark.Things go bump in the night when you don't know they are there and in this case, clearly we weren't supposed to know about this rendezvous and that begs the question - why? Why was the need felt by both constituent parties to hide the fact that this meeting was happening? The fact that the PDP and BJP continue to be allies has been acknowledged by both parties, so Ms. Mufti meeting Mr. Madhav is hardly going to be an earth-shattering news event. Unless, of course, both parties are embarrassed by this association and that may well be the case.
The handling of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) protests has been an unqualified fiasco. In the ordinary course, had the university been allowed to deal with the protestors and slogan-shouters, this would have been a single news-cycle story. Once the Government goose-stepped in to the campus, wearing their shiny jackboots of nationalism, the story assumed a life of its own. Insult was heaped on injury by the actions of lawyers when they physically assaulted members of the media in the Patiala House court complex not once but twice.
Meanwhile, the PDP and Mehbooba Mufti have been strangely quiet about the way Kashmiri students are being profiled, targeted and hounded in Delhi on the pretext of the Government's crackdown on the JNU. Easy targets are being rounded up and habeas-corpus is being thrown out of the window. Let's make the arrests and we'll find the charges and evidence to detain them later seems to be the order of the day. And if the suspects happen to be Kashmiri students who fit the institutionalized stereotype - what could be better? Despite this open, generalized crackdown on Kashmiri students in the national capital, the PDP is understandably quiet.
So in all this, it's no surprise that the PDP and BJP played their cards so close to their chests. Almost no one knew that this meeting was in the offing. Reading some of the newspaper accounts has been a revelation today. When asked about Mr. Madhav's location, his colleagues insisted he was in Delhi where, in fact, he was closeted with Ms. Mufti just up the road from my home in Srinagar. Mr. Madhav is reputed to be a very approachable guy, happy to speak to the media both off and on the record, so it was unusual to see him leaving the meeting without stopping to speak to the gaggle of reporters that had assembled outside the Mufti residence once cover was blown off the Madhav-Mehbooba meeting.
In fact, the cold in Srinagar was apparently so severe that a tightly-wound muffler was in order to keep him from catching a chill.
Life would have been so much easier if he'd just been able to come and go without anyone knowing. Which brings me to another question that has arisen from the accounts in today's newspapers - the role of the Intelligence Bureau in this "secret" operation. It has been reported that Mr. Madhav was received at the Srinagar Airport and driven to the meeting in a vehicle belonging to the IB with none of the usual
bandobast that accompanies a senior politician's visit to the Valley.
Clearly, the usual channels of protocol were not to be activated for this visit, but since when did the IB get into the business of organizing meet-and-greet services for political discussions between two political parties? If this isn't the misuse of State machinery for political purposes, what is? The CBI was famously called a caged parrot and now the IB is a glorified Uber service. The old habit of misusing institutions to achieve political ends in J&K continues unabated.
We've seen this with the dismissal of legitimately elected governments, the support given to the creation of parties like the PDP, and now the active involvement of the IB in trying to find a face saver for Mehbooba Mufti paving way for her taking over as Chief Minister.
Like the Scottish poem I used right in the beginning says - may the Good Lord deliver us from ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night.
(Omar Abdullah is National Conference leader and former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.