“Abdullah and his ilk like marde-e-mumin are a classic case of how colonial projects are run to create a false consciousness and install stooges to run the settler programmes. No matter how loyal these proxies may turn out to be, they will always be thrown out once they are irrelevant. This photo is an apt illustration of what a native-collaborator is eventually reduced to- from a high profile chief minister to a prisoner reduced to mere nothingness. Though it might be deliberately that he has adopted this look to gain more public sympathy in the form of adopting cultural cum religious markers like beard and topi, it nonetheless serves an apt example of a supposedly empowered native reduced to irrelevance.
That smile does at least give some idea that if released he can think of being useful through other ways to run the colonial machinery.”
–Kashmiri Ashaq Hussain Parray