Former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has decided not to contest any assembly elections till the time Jammu and Kashmir remains a Union Territory. This comes almost a year after the revocation of Article 370 that granted special status to the then state, which was also bifurcated into two union territories — Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir.

Home Minister Amit Shah, while introducing the bill changing the status of the state on August 5, 2019, had clearly said, “Full state status will be restored to Jammu and Kashmir at appropriate time, when normalcy returns.”

National Conference leader Omar Abdullah, in an opinion piece written in The Indian Express on Monday, wrote, “As for me, I am very clear that while J&K remains a Union Territory I will not be contesting any Assembly elections. Having been a member of the most empowered Assembly in the land and that, too, as the leader of that Assembly for six years, I simply cannot and will not be a member of a House that has been disempowered the way ours has.”

Last year, after the abrogation of Article 370, Omar Abdullah and his father, Farooq Abdullah, and Mehbooba Mufti were detained or arrested as part of the Centre’s split Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories.

On the reasons given by the government for its big move in the region last year , the 50-year-old leader said “none stands the test of basic scrutiny”.

The former CM wrote, “With almost all of my senior colleagues still detained in their homes, the NC is yet to meet to decide its next political course of action and I will work diligently to strengthen the party, carry forward its agenda and continue to represent the aspirations of the people while we fight against the injustices heaped on J&K in the last one year.”

Abdullah was released from detention after nearly eight months on March 24. Days before that, his father and former Union Minister Farooq Abdullah was also released from house arrest. Mehbooba Mufti is still in detention.

In the piece, the NC leader has also written about his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi days before August 5 move. “It’s not a meeting I will forget in a hurry. One day I may write about it but propriety precludes me from saying more than that we left the meeting with a completely different impression about what was going to unfold in the next 72 hours. In one fell swoop, everything we had feared came to pass,” he wrote.

“It’s still impossible to come to terms with what I saw being rolled out on my television set that morning. Hours earlier, at the stroke of midnight, I had been placed under house arrest, and would be shifted to a government guest house by the end of the day,” he wrote in the beginning of his piece.