PDP calls Omar hotel ‘front-office manager’
Calling former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah ‘a hotel front-office manager’, the Peoples Democratic Party Wednesday said the party has a different set of values unlike the National Conference.
Reacting to Omar’s assertions regarding PDP candidates for polls to upper house of Indian parliament, the party’s chief spokesman Nayeem Akhtar said that both Fayaz Ahmad Mir and Nazir Ahmad Laway got more votes than Omar in the recent local government elections. “They have popular base. Our decision is like a breath of a fresh air. This is how you empower people and give them voice. If these persons were good enough to be MLAs why can’t be they sent to Raj Sabha. But NC has developed a political culture which revolves within Abdullah family and some of its close associates over the years,” he said.
Omar on Tuesday had said that PDP has fielded two “illiterates” as its candidates and questioned how they can represent the state in the Indian parliament.
However, Akhtar said, “PDP represents some different set of values and unlike NC where everything starts and ends within Abdullah family. When (late) Sheikh Abdullah appointed his successor he ignored everybody including his closest associates who had sacrificed their lives for the party. He didn’t even consider people like Afazl Beg. When the time to hand over leadership came he handed over it to Farooq Abdullah who had nothing to do with the politics. He was a doctor in London.”
“Same tradition was carried forward by Farooq Abdullah when he didn’t consider senior leaders like Abdul Rahim Rather, Ali Mohamamd Sagar, Mohammad Akbar Lone, Mohamamd Shafi Uri and others and brought his son (Omar) who was an employee in a hotel and whose knowledge revolved around hotel management,” he added.
However, the PDP spokesman, was quick to add that both medicine and hotel management are respectable and dignified professions. “But every MBBS certificate holder or a hotel front office manager isn’t bound to become a CM without ever practicing politics, knowing the local culture, language, religion or walking the roads of that place. What both father and son (Farooq and Omar) made to the politics of state of J&K we don’t want to comment on that? That is why this party (NC) is squeezed from 56 seats in 1996 to 15 in 2014. They have no moral authority to speak of merits,” he said.
On the NC-Congress tie up for RS polls, he said, “Till yesterday they (NC and Congress leadership) would accuse each other. (Ghulam Nabi) Azad was on record to say that Omar gave this state worst ever government. Omar said ‘Azad will lick boots of someone to get a RS seat.’ Now who licked whose boots?”
He alleged that NC-Congress relationship has always been dependent on considerations of power and positions for an elite group of legislators who know how to promote their personal interest whether their party had won or lost and whatever happens to the state and its people.
Questioning the credentials of NC MPs of the past, Akhtar said, “Let Omar quote one example when the Aflatoons they (NC) had sent to Rajya Sabha represented the state. Fact is that they used to charge 20 percent commission every allocation before they would issue a letter to their close agents and relatives while spending MPLAD funds.”
