NEW DELHI: Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah scaled the boundary wall of the Mazar-e-Shuhada graveyard in Srinagar on Monday to offer prayers after alleging that security forces had tried to prevent him from doing so for two consecutive days.Abdullah, 55, claimed he had been under house arrest on July 13, observed as Martyrs’ Day in the region, and was stopped again on Monday when he attempted to pay homage to those buried at the graveyard. In a video shared by news agency ANI, Abdullah was seen climbing over the wall to gain entry, bypassing security barricades that had been placed outside the graveyard.“It is unfortunate that by the orders of those who claim their responsibility is to maintain law and order, we were not allowed to recite the Fatiha yesterday. Everyone was house-arrested since the morning. When I told the control room that I wanted to come here… bunkers were installed outside my house within minutes,” Abdullah told reporters before the prayer.

“Today, I came here without informing anyone. Today, too, they tried to stop us… I want to know under which law I was stopped… They say that this is a free country, but they think that we are their slaves. We are nobody’s slaves. We are only the slaves of the people here,” he said.He accused the government of attempting to erase the memory of the 1931 martyrs and suppress public remembrance. “They stopped us on July 13, but for how long can they continue to do so? We will come here whenever we want and remember the martyrs,” he said.Abdullah also criticised local newspapers for allegedly downplaying or omitting coverage of the house arrests of elected leaders. “Shame on the sellouts who buried the story. I hope the size of the envelope was worth it,” he wrote on X.Martyrs’ Day, once an official holiday in Jammu and Kashmir, was removed from the calendar following the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019.