His Healing Touch Got Blown Apart
Farooq did resign, even refusing to remain as caretaker, the night before Jagmohan landed in the state—a state that was about to erupt in ways that would stain his record. The unfortunate irony is that Jagmohan wasn’t even responsible for what happened on the couple of days after he took over.
In fact, on arriving in Jammu, the winter capital, he had announced placatingly that he had come as a ‘nurse’. The term was a precursor to what Mufti would call ‘healing touch’ when he finally became chief minister in 2002.
It just so happened that Kashmir’s first cordon and search operation took place in Srinagar’s Chota Bazar area a few hours after he had taken over as governor in Jammu on 19 January 1990.
As explained in my book ‘The Story of Kashmir’, the operation had been planned earlier, but the top officers in charge of the police and the CRPF (which conducted the operation) had rushed to Jammu to salute Jagmohan after he took the oaths of office.
In Chota Bazar that night, hundreds of men were picked up from their beds in the dead of night and taken to the lawns of an interrogation centre not far from Srinagar’s Raj Bhawan, to squat on that lawn in the freezing cold.
Some were selected by invisible ‘spotters’ for interrogation. The rest returned to stoke the hysterical shock, resentment and anger in their part of Srinagar.