Farooq Abdullah’s Life Through the Eyes of a Spy

I have known Amarjit Singh Dulat for over three decades. He was a longtime officer in the Intelligence Bureau (IB), heading the K-group, credited with bringing Kashmir back from the brink in the 1990s. He then headed the Research and Analysis Wing, which runs our spies abroad. Afterwards, he worked in Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s office (PMO).

A decade after Vajpayee lost and after Dulat inexplicably turned down successor Manmohan Singh’s offer to continue in the PMO, the former spymaster began writing books. The first two I helped on: Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years and, along with former ISI chief Asad Durrani, The Spy Chronicles. 

Since then, Dulat has published three more; the latest, being launched this week, is The Chief Minister and the Spy (Juggernaut, pp. 289). It is about his profoundly deep relationship with former Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Chief Minister, Dr Farooq Abdullah, whom he met when he was posted in Srinagar in 1988. That was when militancy reared its head in Kashmir.

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Incidentally, the first book I published was a biography of Farooq Abdullah, Kashmir’s Prodigal Son (1996). I covered Kashmir intensely in the 1990s, thanks to the late Vinod Mehta and the late Padmanand Jha, my bosses at The Pioneer, an exciting newspaper until they left to launch Outlook. My frequent visits and high-profile reporting brought me into contact with Dulat.

Therefore, I read his latest book with great interest. I also read his previous book, A Life in the Shadows, which felt like re-reading his earlier books, with an extra line here and an extra one there. It was only the final chapter on current National Security Advisor Ajit Doval that roused my interest. However, besides a coy hint or two, the narrative got cold feet in spilling the beans about Doval, a self-styled legend. The 2024 attempts to bump off Khalistani supporters in the West show Doval is little more than cops-and-robbers.

He is mentioned in passing in this book as well. When Farooq Abdullah became Chief Minister (CM) for a third time in 1996, the IB posted Doval to Srinagar; Dulat took his junior colleague to meet Farooq. It is telling that the CM did not repose much faith in Doval ever. Decades later, in the months after the August 2019 abrogation of Article 370 (snatching away J&K’s special Constitutional status, or “fig leaf”, as Dulat puts it), the Delhi bosses needed to get Farooq to align with their plans. They had to pull the nearly 80-year-old Dulat out of retirement to go up to Srinagar and meet Farooq. It’s all here in this latest book.

Brothers in arms

It is one of the episodes that makes The Chief Minister and the Spy an interesting read. The book no doubt works because it follows a single thread, of how Farooq, the man key to India’s most sensitive State, was befriended by a Central intelligence official. Spies preceded and succeeded Dulat in Srinagar, and all needed to interact with Farooq. Yet it was only to Dulat that Farooq says, at a particularly tense juncture: “You’re like my younger brother”.

It is neither a biography nor a memoir, but a stream of reminiscences that collectively do a good job of mining Farooq’s psyche, based on whatever Dulat saw and heard. Such empirical evidence is compelling, especially in clarifying Farooq’s complexity. He understood Kashmir like no other Kashmiri, even his own legendary father, National Conference founder Sheikh Abdullah, and certainly far more than the flash-in-the-pan separatists and terrorists that have come and gone.

Yet from the beginning, Farooq declared he would not spend years in jail like his father, and that he would always be on the right side of Delhi. This is not, as it gets clearer and clearer, the same as being on the side of Delhi. Delhi, always ham-handed, thinks that if you’re not with Delhi, then you’re against it. A misjudgment of epic proportions, because Kashmir is Farooq’s uppermost concern; he wants Kashmir to be on the right side of Delhi because, as he has seen since 1947, this was the only way forward for the sensitive border State.

The book is a breezy and worthwhile read despite it being often repetitive and at times so saccharine as to stick in your throat. Yes, Farooq is a nice guy and a sweet guy and a great guy, but as any writer knows, “show, don’t tell”. Nonetheless, Dulat has written the best books of any ex-spook, most of which are tripe.

There is a chapter that ought to have been a book by itself. It is titled, simply, “Father and Son”, and talks about the relationship between Farooq and the current CM, his only son, Omar. They are different in temperament and their political depth. Dulat does mention early on that Farooq was always deeply attached to his family, whether it was his mother, his siblings, his wife Mollie (whom he met in England as a young physician), or his four children.

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This explains why Farooq is never, or can never be, critical of Omar – even if, in the 2002 Assembly election, Omar went around campaigning and mentioning his “Dadaji” (Sheikh Abdullah) without mentioning his father, who still happened to be CM. It was a terrible year for Dr Farooq. He was promised the vice-presidency of India by both Vajpayee and Home Minister LK Advani, but in the end, he was left with nothing, not J&K, and not even a bungalow in New Delhi.

I suppose one will have to wait for a well-known TV journalist’s in-the-works book on the Abdullahs for a juicier father-son drama. She is a former NDTV colleague of Nidhi Razdan, who, for long, was rumoured to be Omar’s girlfriend (I got an earful from Omar for writing about it in the late 2000s) and whose photo at Omar’s 2024 swearing-in is included in Dulat’s book. She is said to now be the majordomo at the Abdullah household. But that sort of salacious gossip you will not find in The Chief Minister and the Spy.

Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.