The picture of a smiling President Pratibha Patil with an AK-47 during her visit to forward posts in north Kashmir has become more than a photo-op here. So much so that National Conference president and MP Omar Abdullah took aim at it in his blog on the party’s official website.

“Yesterday my newspaper had a photograph prominent on the first page of this country’s First Citizen the President. The photograph was of President Patil brandishing an AK-47 and smiling. Somehow the two things didn’t seem to go together,” the blog says. “I know she’s the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces but the photograph reminded me of a rather forgettable Sylvester Stallone movie Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot”.

The media had not been invited to cover Patil’s visit to the forward posts and this picture was taken by a photographer in the President’s entourage who then distributed it to the media.

Sources in the Army said that when discussing infiltration on the Line of Control (LoC), Patil asked officers about the “quantity of weapons” that militants carry with them. Army officers, sources said, told her that a militant “generally carried around 30 kg of weapons.” It was then that Patil asked about the weight of a Kalashnikov and, in reply, an officer handed it to her.

Abdullah puts his critique in context. “They say a picture speaks a thousand words and I’d have been thrilled to see a photograph of the President talking to kids, as a grandmother would, in some far flung hamlet about the promise of a better future rather then this reminder of the one object that has caused so much death and destruction over the last eighteen years,” he writes.

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