Omar Abdullah (born March 10, 1970, Rochford, Essex, England) is an Indian politician and government official and the chief minister (2024– ) of Jammu and Kashmir union territory in northwestern India. He previously served as chief minister (2009–15) of Jammu and Kashmir state before its bifurcation into Jammu and Kashmir union territory and Ladakh union territory.
Omar, whose mother is British, was born into a politically distinguished Kashmiri Muslim family. His grandfather, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah (the “Lion of Kashmir”), was the founder of the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (JKNC) party and served first as prime minister (1948–53) and later as chief minister (1975–82) of Jammu and Kashmir. Omar’s father, Farooq Abdullah, served three times as the state’s chief minister between 1982 and 2002. Omar received a business-related bachelor’s degree from a college affiliated with the University of Bombay (now Mumbai) and did some graduate coursework in business administration at a university in Scotland.
Omar’s privileged pedigree facilitated his rapid rise in politics. In 1998, at the age of 28, he was elected to the Lok Sabha (lower house of the Indian parliament) as a member of the JKNC. He was reelected to that chamber one year later and became a minister in the Commerce and Industry Ministry in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government. In 2001 he was named minister for external affairs in the NDA government, the youngest to hold that portfolio. His tenure lasted only 17 months, however, as he resigned from the post in December 2002 to concentrate on the JKNC’s preparations for the state assembly elections.
In June 2002 Omar had become president of the JKNC, replacing his father, and he remained in that office until 2009. His political career at the state level started badly, however: in the 2002 elections, the ruling JKNC lost more than half of the 57 assembly seats it had garnered in 1996; Omar contested and lost his seat to the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate; and the PDP, with the Indian National Congress (Congress Party) and smaller parties, formed a coalition government. In 2004 Omar was reelected to the Lok Sabha.
In the 2008 state assembly elections, Omar won his constituency, and the JKNC, with 28 seats and the support of the Congress Party, formed the new government in 2009. At the age of 38, Omar became the youngest chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir state. He resigned from the presidency of the JKNC and was replaced by his father. In July 2009, after the opposition PDP linked Omar to a 2006 sex scandal (in which underage girls were coerced into prostitution with the complicity of a variety of public officials), he submitted his resignation, but his offer was turned down by the state’s governor.
Omar’s tenure as chief minister was subsequently marked by other upheavals, especially by a number of allegations focused on human rights violations by the security forces fighting separatist militancy in the state. Omar is known to be critical of such excesses and has asked repeatedly that the powers of the army be curbed and that the controversial Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which he feels facilitates unjust harassment of Kashmiri youth, be repealed.
Omar continued to uphold the Abdullah family’s long-standing support for Jammu and Kashmir’s presence within the Indian union. However, he also sought ways to end the dispute between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region, including meeting with Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan, in 2006. He stated his belief that a grant of autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir would strengthen the bond between the state and India. Although Omar won one of the two seats that he was contesting in the 2014 state legislative elections, the JKNC lost its plurality of members in the chamber to the PDP. He announced his resignation as chief minister in late December and stepped down from office in early January 2015.
Omar, his father, and other political leaders in Jammu and Kashmir were placed under house arrest in August 2019 when the Indian union government abrogated the state’s autonomy and passed legislation to downgrade it to a union territory and split it in two. He was one of a handful of leaders who refused to agree to refrain from political activity and remained under detention beyond October. In February 2020 he was formally charged with disturbance to the public order, but he was released in late March.
After losing the Baramullah constituency in the country’s 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Omar led the JKNC back to power in the assembly elections of Jammu and Kashmir held in October that same year. He thus became the chief minister of the region for the second time. The 2024 assembly elections were the first polls held in the union territory since the 2014 elections and the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status in 2019. The JKNC won 42 seats out of a target of 46 (the seat strength in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly is 95, and the elections were held for 90 seats). However, four independent candidates who won their seats pledged their support to the JKNC, making up for the shortfall. The party’s allies, the Congress Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), won six seats and one seat, respectively.
Omar won two constituencies—Ganderbal and Budgam—and subsequently gave up the Budgam seat while retaining that for Ganderbal, which he had also won in the assembly elections of 2008. Soon after being sworn in as chief minister on October 16, 2024, Omar led the first cabinet meeting, in which the Jammu and Kashmir government passed a resolution calling for the central government to restore statehood to Jammu and Kashmir.