Tihar to Parliament, Baramulla MP Rashid engineers a new identity

Rap icon Eminem famously sang, "Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?", when his fictional alter ego seemed burdened by the weight of an image defined in the public imagination.
The persona of Sheikh Abdul Rashid, aka Engineer Rashid, stands at the cusp of a similar identity conundrum.
So, who is this 1967-born Kashmiri incarcerated at Tihar since 2019 in a terrorist-funding case, who went head-to-head with Omar Abdullah and Sajad Lone in an election in J&K's Baramulla, and polled more votes than the two of them combined?
Rashid's story begins at Mawar village in Langate tehsil of Kupwara at a time when Pakistan-backed terrorism was still to inflict wounds that would fester.As a teenager growing up in the 70s, Rashid was drawn towards the separatist sentiments brewing in his neighbourhood and beyond.
He wouldn't have known then of the turmoil that would tear J&K asunder in the decades to come. But it was those early impressions that drove the trajectory of a life and career shaped by strong political convictions, marred by controversies, and riddled with ironies.
Along the way, Rashid got a BSc degree in 1988 and, subsequently, a civil engineering diploma that helped him land a job in the state-owned Jammu and Kashmir Projects Construction Corporation.
When he transitioned from construction sites to the political arena full-time in 2008, the epithet "Engineer" became Rashid's first name. That very year, he won an election for the first time as an Independent candidate for north Kashmir's Langate assembly seat.
"I am the most misunderstood MLA in India," Rashid was quoted as saying on October 20, 2015, a day after he had his face sprayed with ink by intruders at Press Club of India in Delhi.
Earlier that month, he had been slapped inside the J&K assembly for hosting an alleged "beef party" at a govt guesthouse. Rashid was then in his second term as MLA of Langate and laying the building blocks for his fledgling Awami Ittehad Party.
In the public eye, Rashid often sought to debunk perceptions of the ideology his politics was anchored to. He would question why the media portrayed him as "a secessionist masquerading as an MLA" while separatists in J&K purportedly disliked him for "embracing the Constitution".
Between these twin images at either end of the perception periscope possibly lies Rashid's truth.
The newly elected Baramulla MP cut his teeth in politics when he joined slain separatist Abdul Gani Lone's J&K People's Conference in 1979. He went on to contest the Langate seat on a Muslim United Front ticket in 1987, making an unremarkable debut in an election that opponents of the then CM, National Conference's Farooq Abdullah, said was stage-managed.
Rashid's first brush with the law came in 2005, when the Special Operations Group of J&K Police arrested and charged him with supporting terrorists. He was jailed under the Public Safety Act for three months and 17 days.
Before his arrest by NIA in the ongoing case under UAPA, 2019 had been a windsock in some ways for Rashid as a politician. He unsuccessfully contested the Baramulla Lok Sabha seat that year as an Independent, but fetching over a lakh votes and finishing only 800-odd behind People Conference's Sajad Lone showed him where he stood.
This time, contesting as an Awami Ittehad Party candidate with a call to "progress, prestige and protection", Rashid left it to his sons Abrar Rashid and Asrar Rashid to drive an emotive campaign that swept away Sajad Lone — the son of his former mentor — and former ex-CM Omar of National Conference as well as the other 19 candidates in the fray.