The man in the picture above is possibly the most notable person ever born in our district. But few people here would recognise him.
To explain who he is, and his importance, we need to provide some background…..
The two nations of India and Pakistan have had a very difficult relationship ever since they became independent from Britain. One of the reasons for conflict has been the region of Kashmir, a mountainous area on the frontier between the two countries:
Kashmir is an anomaly ; a mainly Muslim area that has mostly remained with Hindu India rather than joining with Muslim Pakistan. One man involved in that process was a man called Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah – “The Lion of Kashmir”. Sheikh Abdullah was born in great poverty, struggled hard to get an education (walking ten miles to and from school !) and became the leader of Kashmir’s first political party, the Muslim Conference (this was when Kashmir and the rest of India were under British rule). Significantly he later changed the name of the party to the “National Conference” in 1939 because he wanted to avoid religious divisions.
Sheikh Abdullah went on to became the Chief Minister of Kashmir, roughly the equivalent of being the First Minister in Scotland. His story is almost unbelieveable – if you tried to write this as fiction, you’d be told the story was too far-fetched.
To quote wikipedia:
“A poor orphan boy, set to work by his stepbrothers embroidering shawls and selling groceries, allowed to go to school only on the pleading of a kind hearted barber, nearly dying of malnutrition and overexertion, getting his applications for grant of scholarships rejected time and again by a heartless aristocracy … had been appointed to an office to which only the most powerful landlords of the Maharajah or the highest ranking mandarins of the British administration would dare to aspire “
As mentioned previously, Sheikh Abdullah wanted to unite people across different religions and it may have been significant that his wife Begum Akbar Jehan had a European grandfather (and apparently she had previously married Lawrence of Arabia when he was posted to India!)
This seemed to have set a trend in the Abdullah family for marrying across religious lines because his son, Farooq Abdullah, spent many years working as a doctor in England…. and married a British, Christian, nurse, Molly.
Now, Farooq and Molly had a son, Omar , who was born in Rochford in 1970 – and that’s his photo at the top of the page.
Family connections play a big role in Indian and Kashmiri politics and Farooq succeeded his father as Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir in 1982. He had a very troubled time of things when Islamic militants were opposing Indian rule. To quote one writer:
During the late nineties (during the height of militancy in Kashmir) when in the assembly Farooq Abdullah while giving a speech became so emotional that he began to cry, saying that the Kashmiri people are between a rock and a hard place. If they side with the security forces, the militants make their lives hell- if they as much as give food and water to the militants the security forces haul them up. The loud crying by Farooq Abdullah saw his party men begin to cry with him. When the opposition saw the NC members wailing, they too joined in. Finally, the whole house was crying and wailing. It bemuses me no ends when I think of that instance. The king was crying and slowly the whole house was wailing and crying in an unprecedented show of grief at the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Farooq, though did make a point and this incident did mirror the travails of the ordinary Kashmiri.
Anyway, young Omar got into politics as well, and now , he is Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. Here he is winning an award- he seems to be very much the new ‘bright young man’ of Indian politics:
Incidentally , Omar has carried on the family tradition of marrying across religous lines, as his wife is a Sikh lady. As a result, he has been banned from going on religious pilgrimage to Mecca.
So now someone born in Rochford is the leader of Jammu and Kashmir , a place with a population of 10 million people, and with a history of political violence. If he gets things wrong, it increases the risk of war breaking out again between two nuclear powers – India and Pakistan. But if he does well, he is young enough to become even more powerful. Maybe India’s prime Minister one day?