Police say the alleged attempt to assassinate three-time chief minister Farooq Abdullah was 20 years in the making

By Danish Mohiuddin

At around 10:10 on the night of March 11, the wedding at Royal Park banquet hall in Greater Kailash, Jammu, was beginning to thin into that familiar late-evening rhythm of political gatherings in North India.

Security personnel relaxed fractionally. Guests lingered in clusters beneath decorative lights. Conversations drifted between politics and family. The former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Farooq Abdullah, was preparing to leave.

Then, according to investigators, a man stepped forward carrying a loaded revolver.

Police now allege the moment was not impulsive but the culmination of nearly two decades of grievance, obsession, and intent.

This week, Jammu police filed a more than 600-page chargesheet before the court of the Chief Judicial Magistrate alleging that Kamal Singh Jamwal, currently lodged in District Jail Ambphalla, had carried out a “premeditated” attempt to assassinate Abdullah. According to investigators, Jamwal blamed Abdullah for militancy in Kashmir, the displacement of Kashmiri Pandits, and the destruction of lives and property during the insurgency years.

Police say he had been planning the attack for years.

“His action was not sudden but a pre-meditated one,” the chargesheet reportedly states.

Security personnel assigned to Abdullah overpowered the accused before shots could successfully be fired. A case was subsequently registered under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Arms Act. A Special Investigation Team was formed days later under the supervision of the Deputy Inspector General of the Jammu-Samba-Kathua range.

The investigation, police say, involved forensic examination, ballistic analysis, CCTV footage, mobile phones, handwritten material, witness testimony, and recovery of cartridges and the revolver allegedly used in the attempt.

But beyond the legal case lies another story — one about how unresolved memory hardens over decades in Jammu and Kashmir, until politics ceases to remain political and becomes personal.

To understand the emotional architecture surrounding the alleged assassination attempt, one must first understand the enduring psychic geography of 1990.

In Jammu and Kashmir, the year exists less as history than as rupture.

The insurgency transformed the Valley violently and permanently. Militancy expanded rapidly. Security forces flooded the region. Killings multiplied. Fear reorganised daily life. And amid escalating violence, the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley created one of the deepest and most unresolved traumas in the region’s modern history.

Entire families left overnight. Homes were abandoned. Neighbourhoods emptied. Memories calcified into accusation.

For many displaced Kashmiri migrants, political leaders from that period remain inseparable from the collapse that followed. Anger toward the National Conference leadership — especially toward Farooq Abdullah — has persisted across decades within sections of the displaced community, even as interpretations of responsibility remain fiercely contested.

Jamwal’s alleged motives, as described in the police chargesheet, emerge from precisely that emotional terrain.

Police claim he repeatedly expressed resentment over militancy and displacement, blaming Abdullah personally for historical suffering.

That grievance appears to have evolved beyond politics into fixation.

The detail that unsettles investigators most is the alleged duration.

Nearly twenty years.

In conflict societies, memory often survives longer than institutions.

There is something uniquely disturbing about violence attempting to enter ceremonial space.

Weddings in Jammu and Kashmir occupy an almost sacred emotional function — especially in politically tense times. They are among the few remaining spaces where rival politicians, businessmen, bureaucrats, journalists, and families still gather under the temporary illusion of normalcy.

Banquet halls become neutral ground. Or appear to.

According to investigators, Jamwal allegedly arrived at the Royal Park banquet hall carrying a loaded revolver and waited for an opportunity to approach Abdullah.

Police say the attempt occurred at close range as the former chief minister was leaving the venue.

The attack failed because security personnel intervened quickly enough.

But failure does not diminish symbolic power.

The image alone – a seventy-plus-year-old political patriarch nearly confronted at gunpoint during a wedding – felt deeply unsettling across Jammu and Kashmir because it reawakened an older atmosphere many believed had partially receded.

The atmosphere of political vulnerability.

Few political figures in Jammu and Kashmir provoke reactions as layered as Farooq Abdullah.

To supporters, he represents continuity, charisma, secular politics, and the last surviving generation of old-style Kashmiri mass leadership. To critics, he embodies dynastic politics, institutional compromise, and the failures of the pre-insurgency political order.

But regardless of ideology, Abdullah remains symbolically enormous.

He has governed Jammu and Kashmir through some of its most volatile periods — insurgency, elections, militancy, coalition politics, central intervention, constitutional upheaval.

His political career stretches across generations.

And in conflict regions, long-serving leaders inevitably become repositories for collective blame.

That is partly why the alleged motives in this case resonate beyond one accused individual.

Because the anger described by investigators is not entirely isolated.

It exists in fragments across the political memory of Jammu and Kashmir — among communities who experienced the insurgency differently and who continue to narrate responsibility differently.

The difference is that most grievances remain rhetorical.

Police allege Jamwal crossed into action.

Jammu and Kashmir has spent decades normalising extraordinary security arrangements around political figures.

Convoys. Escorts. Bunkers. Perimeter checks. Metal detectors. Quick reaction teams.

The attempted attack in Jammu is a reminder that even in periods of relative decline in militant violence, political threat perception never fully disappears.

Violence in Kashmir mutates rather than vanishes.

Sometimes targeted killings. Sometimes lone-actor radicalisation. Sometimes personal grievance shaped by historical trauma.

Police investigators appear especially focused on disproving any suggestion that the incident was accidental or impulsive. The chargesheet reportedly argues repeatedly that the accused acted deliberately and with preparation.

That emphasis matters legally. But it also matters politically.

Because premeditation transforms the incident from disturbance into narrative.

And narratives in Jammu and Kashmir spread quickly.

The alleged case also exposes a deeper phenomenon increasingly visible across conflict zones globally: the weaponisation of unresolved memory.

In ordinary political systems, time gradually diffuses grievance. In conflict societies, time sometimes intensifies it.

Especially when historical trauma remains publicly unresolved.

The danger emerges when politics stops functioning as mediation and begins functioning as permanent emotional reactivation.

Investigators say Jamwal carried resentment for decades. That detail feels less like criminal trivia and more like a diagnosis of the region itself.

Jammu and Kashmir remains a place where many people are still psychologically negotiating the unfinished business of the 1990s.

After the incident, Farooq Abdullah publicly dismissed familiarity with the accused.

“I don’t know that man,” he told reporters. “Neither I know him nor aware about his antecedents.”

The statement carried an almost tragic irony.

Public figures in Kashmir are often burdened by people they have never met but whose lives became politically entangled with decisions, eras, or symbols associated with them.

Meanwhile, police moved rapidly.

The SIT reportedly collected digital evidence, CCTV recordings, forensic material, and witness testimony. The resulting chargesheet now attempts to construct a narrative of deliberate intent extending over years.

Yet beyond the courtroom, the incident has already entered the larger emotional archive of Jammu and Kashmir.

It joins a long chronology of near-misses, assassinations, attacks, insurgencies, retaliations, and unresolved grievances that continue shaping political life in the region long after formal conflict statistics decline.

Officially, contemporary Jammu and Kashmir is often described through the language of transition: development, tourism revival, investment, infrastructure, post-Article 370 normalisation.

And parts of that narrative are visibly real. Tourists crowd Srinagar’s Boulevard. Roads expand. Markets remain busy. Political violence has statistically declined from its peak insurgency years. But beneath that surface, older emotional structures remain intact.

Fear. Memory. Resentment. Humiliation. Loss.

These forces rarely disappear simply because public discourse changes.

The alleged assassination attempt against Farooq Abdullah is disturbing not only because a former chief minister may have narrowly escaped harm.

It is disturbing because it reveals how deeply the past still breathes beneath the present.

A man allegedly carrying twenty years of grievance entered a wedding hall with a revolver.

And for a brief moment, Kashmir’s old ghosts walked in with him too.

 

About the Author

A postgraduate in Convergent Journalism, the author approaches storytelling as a visual and narrative craft. With a strong interest in cinematography and filmmaking, his work often lingers on the human dimensions of news. Drawn to stories that matter to people, he writes with an eye for both movement and meaning.