It is Lonely at the Top

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah faces rebellion from within the National Conference. Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha is breathing down his neck. His political rival, Mehbooba Mufti, is sharpening her attack

- Ishfaq Naseem

ON the morning of May 29, Waseem Ahmad, sporting a cropped beard and wearing a black coat and skinny jeans, was waiting outside the Civil Secretariat in Srinagar—a six-storied whitewashed building—along with others. It had been five months since he wrote a test for the job of a police constable, but never received any call for the physical test. He wanted to go inside the building—where Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and other senior ministers and officers sit—and bring the matter to their notice.

There, however, was a complication—he had done a course in dialysis, but since the post of a dialysis technician was never advertised, he applied for the job of a constable. “I am planning to write an application to the health secretary and ask him why jobs of dialysis technicians are not being advertised,” said Ahmad.

After a long wait, he was finally allowed in. After navigating through the bureaucratic maze for hours, he could finally write an application to the health secretary. And then there was another complication. “They are saying that for the police constable job, I need to write to the Lieutenant Governor's (LG) office,” he says.

The dual control of administration in Jammu and Kashmir—the power tussle between the CM and LG Manoj Sinha—is leading to confusion and impacting governance in the Union Territory (UT).

The CM-LG frictions have been frequent and the spats public. The latest jibe was thrown on May 6, when the CM shared the stage with LG and Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the flagging off of the Katra-Srinagar Vande Bharat Express. “The LG got promoted, I got demoted,” said Abdullah, while referring to the 2014 inauguration of the Katra Railway station when the three shared the stage. “While the then MoS Railways, Manoj Sinha, got promoted to the post of J&K LG, I got demoted from CM of a state to CM of a UT,” he added. He then quietly slid in the issues of normalcy and statehood.