STATE TIMES NeWS
Srinagar: Former chief minister Farooq Abdullah on Saturday hoped for the return of peace in Jammu and Kashmir so that all communities could live without fear.
The National Conference (NC) president recalled the communal bonhomie that existed in the erstwhile state before the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley in the 1990s.
“There was a time we were together and then a wave came and we separated,” he said.
Abdullah was speaking after releasing a book, ‘When the Heart Speaks – Memoirs of a Cardiologist’, written by renowned heart specialist Dr Upendra Kaul, a Kashmiri Pandit. The function was also attended by NC vice president and former chief minister Omar Abdullah.
The NC president said he found the book engrossing. It gave an insight into the journey of Dr Kaul’s life and the communal bonhomie that existed before the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley, he said.
“The sadness expressed in the book is the tension between religious communities,” Abdullah said while referring to the situation before and after the eruption of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir in the 1990s.
Abdullah said Kashmiri Muslims were silent spectators at the time of the exodus of Pandits “because we were scared ourselves”.
“Those relations have not been restored yet. When these will be restored, I don’t know. We pray for the return of those days when we all lived without fear,” he said.
Abdullah also referred to author Salman Rushdie’s controversial book ‘The Satanic Verses’.
He said he could barely read a dozen pages of ‘The Satanic Verses’ before he abandoned it and that he never finished it.
But Dr Kaul’s book, he said, was engrossing and he finished it in one-and-a-half days.