Srinagar: The turf war between the saffron party and the ruling National Conference (NC) over the Hazratbal shrine in Jammu and Kashmir’s capital Srinagar spilled out into the open on Friday (September 5) after the Waqf board chairperson and senior BJP leader Darakhshan Andrabi demanded the arrest of a Srinagar legislator.In a hurriedly called press conference, Andrabi also trained her guns at the ruling party, resorting to personal attacks on Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah and his father Farooq Abdullah after Tanvir Sadiq, the party’s legislator from Srinagar’s Zadibal constituency, took offence to the presence of the national emblem on a plaque in the shrine.The plaque was inaugurated by Andrabi earlier this week to mark the reopening of the Hazratbal shrine, which was recently renovated by the Jammu and Kashmir Waqf board. The leaders of the ruling party, for whom the shrine has been a traditional centre of power, were conspicuously absent from the event on Wednesday.The controversy broke out after it came to light on Friday that the granite plaque that bore the name of Andrabi, Waqf board members Syed Mohammad Hussain and Ghulam Nabi Haleem, board tehsildar Ishtiyaq Mohi-ud-Din and engineer Syed Ghulam-e-Murtaza, has been damaged by unknown persons.A video accessed by The Wire shows a middle-aged, bearded man surrounded by dozens of men repeatedly smashing a brick into the top left corner of the plaque where the national emblem featuring four Asiatic lions had been engraved, creating a rough hole in it amid massive slogans of ‘yehan kya chalega, nizam-e-mustafa’ (‘We want the establishment of Islamic rule’).A photo showed that the Waqf board logo that has been engraved on the top right of the plaque and the first verse of the Quran, ‘Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim’ in Arabic in the centre, were intact along with the names of those who attended the reopening ceremony on Wednesday after the act of vandalism.Soon after the photo circulated on social media, Sadiq took to X, saying that “idol worship” was “strictly forbidden” in Islam and is “the gravest of sins”.“The foundation of our faith is Tawheed. Placing a sculpted figure, at the revered Hazratbal Dargah goes against this very belief. Sacred spaces must reflect only the purity of Tawheed, nothing else,” Sadiq, former political advisor of the chief minister, said.Hitting back, Andrabi alleged that those involved in the vandalism were workers of the ruling party while appealing to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union home minister Amit Shah and Jammu and Kashmir’s director general of police to take action against them.“Militants aren’t hiding in forests. They are not coming from across [the Line of Control]. These are the terrorists who broke the emblem with stones. Find them and book them under the PSA. They are disrupting peace. We opened the dargah without any politics. If Omar Abdullah’s name was mentioned in the plaque, would they have acted differently?”The PSA or the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act is a controversial legislation that Amnesty International has described as a “lawless law” under which a person can be held in preventive detention for up to two years.Accusing the ruling party of orchestrating the vandalism, Andrabi alleged that NC leaders were “unable to digest” the work done by the Waqf board for the restoration of shrines and mosques in Jammu and Kashmir.“An FIR should be filed against the assembly member [Sadiq] also who posted the tweet. It clearly suggests that they [the culprits] were his sidekicks,” she said, adding that she’d had apprehensions about the vandalism and had conveyed them to the police ahead of the incident.The Wire could not immediately reach the Srinagar police about whether any security measures were taken to prevent the incident. It was also not known whether any case has been registered so far.Srinagar Lok Sabha MP Syed Aga Ruhullah criticised the Waqf board chairperson over her “dangerous attempt to play with religious sensitivities for self-glorification”.The tussle between Andrabi and the NC has brought out into the open the struggle over the control of the historic shrine in Srinagar that has been a traditional power centre of the ruling party. NC founder Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, known for his oratory skills, frequently delivered speeches from its pulpit featuring a mix of religion and politics.Political historians trace the roots of the NC’s links with the Hazratbal shrine to the early 1960s mass uprising that was sparked by the theft of the holy relic. Sheikh is believed to have cashed in on the historical moment to the advantage of both his party and his persona as a politician to fall back on.The Hazratbal assembly segment of Srinagar has remained a stronghold of the NC, where the party has majorly won successive elections, including the assembly election of 2024. The regular visits by the NC president and his son to offer Friday prayers at the revered shrine are considered by many NC supporters as a potential factor that helps the party keep a grip on its traditional base.However, the politics surrounding the Hazratbal shrine ran into rough weather after 2019, when the BJP-led Union government read down Article 370. In its aftermath, the party found itself at loggerheads with the present Waqf administration headed by Andrabi.In 2024, Andrabi removed the shrine’s head priest, Kamal-ud-Din Farooqui, accused of being close to the ruling party, and debarred him from leading the prayers following a row over the conversion of a Hindu man who accepted Islam in the presence of Farooqui.Even though the convert deposed before a court in Srinagar that he was not pressurised by Farooqui or other religious figures to accept Islam, the former head priest continues to face accusations of forcible conversion, a charge he has repeatedly denied in multiple interviews.Recently, the NC-Waqf tussle grabbed headlines after the chief minister was allegedly disallowed from visiting the main sanctum of the shrine in Andrabi’s presence while renovation work was going on.Although the ruling party denied the incident, locals in Hazratbal maintained that plyboards were erected on the shrine walls to stop Abdullah from checking the redeveloped sanctum that was inaugurated by Andrabi on Wednesday.