J&K Poll Players | Omar Abdullah: Aiming For Another Comeback

National Conference leader and former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah is often portrayed as the face of Jammu and Kashmir's dynastic politics, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP often targets.

The 54-year-old Abdullah is the grandson of Sheikh Abdullah, the founder of the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (JKNC) party and son of Farooq Abdullah. Both his grandfather and father have served as Chief Minister of J&K in the past. 

With a commerce and economics degree from Sydenham College in Mumbai, Abdullah worked with the ITC group before he entered politics in 1998. At the age of 28, he won from the Srinagar constituency in the general elections and became a part of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government. He also served as the Union Minister of State for External affairs from July 2001 to December 2002.

In October 2002, he resigned from his position to focus on his party and became the president of Jammu and Kashmir National Conference. In the 2002 J&K Assembly elections, the party lost more than half of the seats it previously held. Omar Abdullah who contested from Ganderbal constituency, known to be the Abdullahs’ home turf, lost to his PDP rival. In the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, however, Abdullah was re-elected from the Srinagar constituency.

In the 2008 state assembly elections, Omar won from his constituency and at 38 went on to become the youngest Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir and the third member of the Abdullah family to hold the position. He resigned from the position of the party president and was replaced by his father.

In 2014, although Abdullah won his Beerwah Assembly seat, the National Conference lost its majority and the PDP-BJP alliance formed the government.

Omar Abdullah was the last Leader of the Opposition in the J&K Assembly before the Centre abrogated Article 370 and the state was bifurcated into two Union Territories in 2019.

Abdullah was placed under house arrest ahead of the abrogation and later, in February 2020, booked under the Public Safety Act--charges that were dropped in March 2020.

He was released nearly eight months after being kept in detention.

“232 days after my detention today I finally left Hari Niwas. It’s a very different world today to the one that existed on 5th August 2019,” he had tweeted right after his release.

In the 2024 general election, Abdullah was reluctant to participate in the INDIA bloc, an alliance of Opposition parties. As a result, NC fielded its own candidates in the Kashmir region. In June, Abdullah conceded defeat to independent candidate Engineer Rashid, who was at the time in jail on terror charges.

Speaking to the media earlier this week, Abdullah said he would approach the Supreme Court if J&K’s statehood was not restored.

"Initially, the powers of the Chief Minister will be a lot more limited than we'd like to see. But as I said, we believe it is going to be a very temporary phase, because statehood and full statehood has to be restored to Jammu and Kashmir. If we don't get it willingly, we'll go to the Supreme Court," he said on TV.

Starting September 18, Jammu and Kashmir goes to Assembly polls in three phases, with results slated to be announced on October 8. These will be the first Assembly polls in J&K in a decade, and the first election Abdullah and others will fight since the August 5 2019 abrogation of Article 370.