Farooq Abdullah’s decades-old friendship with former RAW chief Amarjit Singh Dulat appeared to unravel on Wednesday with the latter’s claim that the Kashmiri politician had in a “private conversation” told him that he would have helped abrogate Article 370 if the Centre had taken him into confidence.

Speaking to a news agency, Farooq, three-time chief minister and National Conference president, denied the claim but added that “recollections may vary”.

Dulat, whose friendship with Farooq goes back to his days as the head of the Intelligence Bureau in Kashmir, has made the revelation in his latest book The Chief Minister and the Spy, which is to be released on April 18.

“The National Conference could even have the proposal passed in the Legislative Assembly in Jammu and Kashmir. We would have helped,” Dulat quotes Farooq as telling him when the two met in 2020. “Why were we not taken into confidence?” Farooq had purportedly asked.

In an interview with journalist Karan Thapar against the backdrop of the impending book release, Dulat was asked whether Farooq was opposed to the scrapping of Article 370 in public but might have been willing to facilitate it in private.

Asked repeatedly about his claim, Dulat said it meant that had the National Conference been taken into confidence, the party could have found ways of handling the situation without having to send extra troops time and again, “scaring everybody” and making it difficult for Kashmir to accept the decision.

Prodded further on whether Farooq was willing to facilitate the implementation of the decision to withdraw Jammu and Kashmir’s special status, Dulat accused Thapar of putting it “very bluntly”.

“Obviously, he was against the abrogation of 370. Every Kashmiri was against the abrogation. It’s just that, what he was saying at that point of time, is that we could have helped in doing it more smoothly if it had to be done,” Dulat said.

In other words, Thapar asked, Farooq would have nonetheless been helping and facilitating. “Yeah, yeah, in a way, yeah,” Dulat replied.

Farooq told PTI in Srinagar that there were many mistakes in the book. “I regret that if he calls me a friend, the friend does not write such things,” the former chief minister said.

“It is full of inaccuracies that, after a while, I thought I was reading a fiction and left it,” he said when asked if he had read the book.

“The benchmark of common sense should have been adopted by the author while penning the so-called memoirs. He should have remembered that there was no Assembly in 2018 (it was dissolved that year),” he added.

Farooq said it was “absolutely wrong” that the National Conference would have gone with the BJP even after the abrogation.

“If we had to betray Article 370, then why did I pass it (apparently a resolution for greater autonomy in 2000) with a two-thirds majority?” he said. “We were detained (in 2019) because our stand against the abrogation of special status was well-known.”

The NC chief accused Dulat of wrongly taking credit for everything, including Farooq’s decision to contest the elections in 1996, which took place amid an unprecedented rise in militancy.

Farooq suggested he contested polls at the bidding of then US ambassador Frank Wisner.

Farooq, however, quoted Queen Elizabeth and said “recollections may vary”. The Queen had in 2021 used the expression to counter the allegations of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle about their experiences within the British royal family. It was seen as diplomatically acknowledging differing perspectives without directly denying the account.