Gunman held after attempt on Farooq Abdullah.
Security personnel overpower gunman Kamal Singh Jamwal.
The bullet missed my father by less than a foot.
My name is Omar, and I am writing this from a room that smells of anxiety and old carpet, my hands shaking so badly I can barely type. The call came at 11:47 p.m., a number I don’t recognize, a voice I’ll never forget. “Sir, there has been an incident. Your father is safe. He is safe.”
Those three words—he is safe—have played in my head on a loop for the past eight hours. He is safe. He is safe. He is safe.
But safe is a fragile word now. Safe is a lie we tell ourselves to get through the night.
My father, Farooq Abdullah, is 88 years old. He has spent his entire life in public service, walking among crowds, shaking hands, kissing babies, attending weddings. He believes, with a stubbornness that has always driven me crazy, that the people of Jammu and Kashmir are his family. That no one would hurt him because he has spent decades trying to help them.
Last night, he went to a wedding. A celebration. A boy getting married, a family’s joy. He went to bless the couple, to smile for photos, to do what he has always done. He wore his best kurta, I’m told. He was in good spirits.
And a man in his 70s was waiting outside with a loaded pistol.
Kamal Singh Jamwal. Son of Ajit Singh. Resident of Purani Mandi. Believed to be in his 70s. But facts don’t explain how a man that age, with a weapon, got within point-blank range of my father. Facts don’t explain how he managed to fire a shot before anyone stopped him.
The bullet didn’t hit anyone. Thank God. Thank the two police personnel, an Inspector and a Sub-Inspector whose names I don’t know yet but will spend the rest of my life being grateful for. They moved. They acted. They saved my father.
But the bullet didn’t miss by much.
I keep imagining it. The wedding venue, lights strung up for celebration, guests in their finery. My father stepping out, perhaps tired, perhaps smiling, perhaps already thinking of the next event, the next hand to shake. And then the sound. A gunshot at close range. The chaos. The shouting. The men in black moving, tackling, securing.
My father is 88. He moves slower now. He needs help with stairs. He is an old man who should be sitting in a garden somewhere, watching birds, telling stories about the old days. Instead, he was a target.
The NSG protects him. Z+ category, the highest in the land. Trained professionals, sophisticated protocols, layers of security designed to prevent exactly this. And still, a 70-year-old man with a pistol got close enough to fire.
What if the shot had been better aimed? What if the security personnel had been a second slower? What if my father had taken one more step forward instead of one step back?
I cannot live in these what-ifs. But I cannot escape them either.
My mother called at 2 a.m. She was calm, because she has spent 45 years being calm while the men she loves walk through crowds. But I heard the tremor beneath her words, the thing she doesn’t say. “He’s fine, beta. Don’t worry. He’s fine.”
He’s fine. He’s fine. He’s fine.
I think of the wedding party. The groom, whose celebration will now forever be associated with an assassination attempt. The bride, who probably heard the shot from inside. The guests who dove for cover instead of dancing. An entire family’s happiest night, shattered by one old man with a grudge.
What grudge? What could justify this? What could make a 70-year-old man spend his final years planning to kill another old man at a wedding?
I don’t know. The investigation will tell us, perhaps. Or perhaps it won’t. Perhaps some hatreds are too old and too deep to be explained by any investigation.
My father issued a statement this morning. He thanked his security personnel. He said he would not be deterred from serving the people. He sounded tired. He sounded old. He sounded like a man who has spent his whole life believing in goodness and just had that belief tested in the most violent way possible.
I am angry. Not just at the attacker, but at a world where my 88-year-old father needs armed guards to attend a wedding. Where celebrations become targets. Where old men with pistols wait outside to end lives instead of living their own.
I am the Chief Minister. I have a state to run, a people to serve, a father to protect. I will do all three, because that is what he taught me. That is what the Abdullah name means.
The bullet missed. My father is alive. Today, that is enough. Tomorrow, we figure out how to make sure it never happens again.
Allah is kind. But Allah also expects us to protect what we love. And I will protect my father. Whatever it takes.