SRINAGAR: J&K CM Omar Abdullah slipped into the pyjama row stoked by NC legislator Tanvir Sadiq this week, declaring Thursday that various historical accounts validate his claim about Dogra-governed Kashmir being so poor that an entire rural mohalla would own a single pair of pyjamas for residents to share when they needed to travel.“Even Sir Walter Lawrence (British civil servant and author) has talked about it. Kashmiris were suppressed deeply by landlords. Tanvir is not the first to say it. There was indeed a time when Kashmiris had to collect a pyjama from the local mosque to visit the city,” Omar said. “We have now come out of such poverty. We educate our children now.”The CM’s defence of his colleague and party spokesperson came a day after BJP workers burnt effigies of the latter over his Sept 8 remark, coinciding with the death anniversary of NC founder Sheikh Abdullah.“Our elders say Kashmiris didn’t have pyjamas to wear and one pyjama was shared by an entire mohalla during Dogra rule,” Sadiq had said, crediting Sheikh Abdullah’s land reforms in the 1950s with transforming the lives of Kashmiris.BJP accused Sadiq of insulting Kashmiri women, terming the remark an attempt to “glorify Abdullah through NC propaganda at the cost of Kashmir’s dignity”.

PDP also demanded an apology, with senior party functionary Naeem Akhtar saying NC’s stand betrayed its allegedly feudal views. “They convey that progress was possible because of one party and one man, irrespective of the fact that similar reforms took place in other parts of the world at the time,” he said.Sadiq refused to apologise, citing references in Lawrence’s book The Valley of Kashmir. Lawrence, who arrived in J&K in 1889, wrote that he found the people “sullen, desperate and suspicious”.“They had been taught for years that they were serfs without rights…Pages might be written by me on facts which have come under my personal observation, but it will suffice to say that the system of administration has degraded the people and taken all heart out of them,” the NC legislator quoted from the book.Gul Wani, former head of the political science department at University of Kashmir, said the references should be read “as a metaphor for conditions in an agrarian society crushed by extreme poverty and excessive landlordism”.