The armed men look stern as they pat me down. I am at the main gate of the high-security seat of government in Srinagar, the summer capital of strife-torn Jammu and Kashmir.

I step inside and approach chief minister Omar Abdullah’s office. A five-minute walk from the main gate, it is sealed off from the rest of the secretariat. I hit another checkpoint and get frisked again. When I reach the entrance to a tall building that houses the chief minister’s office, security men, with automatics at the ready, stop me. My bag is turned out, the tape recorder turned on and the camera clicked before I am waved in.

I take the stairs and pant my way up to the chief minister’s office only to face yet another bout of body search.

Inside his dim rectangular office, chief minister Omar Abdullah, 40, scion of Kashmir’s first family, looks secure amidst the layers of security thrown around him. Only, he isn’t.

This I learn later — halfway through our conversation. Ironically, my innocuous comment on his apparent composure sets him off much the same way a tiny spark touches off a conflagration in unpredictable Kashmir.

“It’s easy for you to talk about my equanimity,” Kashmir’s youngest chief minister blurts out. “But this crisis is taking a heavy toll on me.”

As Kashmir hurtles into an abyss of anarchy, Abdullah, a former minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, is clearly feeling the heat. But though he cannot afford to show it or talk about it, the façade’s started to crack.

Wearing a cream suit, Abdullah looks composed when I enter his room. The tech-savvy chief minister — whose BlackBerry keeps pinging with the arrival of emails — has finished reading the “national” papers on his Apple iPad, which sits on his table in front of him.

With violent protests against his government escalating in the streets of Srinagar and neighbouring towns and the death toll in police firing mounting, the news on Kashmir is grim. Each time his phone rings, Abdullah says he crosses his fingers, hoping the caller will not bring yet another piece of “bad news”.

At night, he can’t get to sleep easily. He worries constantly about “what’s going on, what could happen and how one could deal with it.”

To be sure, the Centre is backing the National Conference-Congress coalition government. But no matter how many platoons of paramilitary forces Delhi sends to Srinagar to quell the violence, Abdullah says he knows “fully well that there are forces far beyond your control that want to keep the pot boiling” in Kashmir.

A sense of helplessness “gnaws at” him. Some may be “immune to this sort of situation” but he says he is “not one of them”.

His outpourings could be fodder to his detractors, who accuse him of being soft and incompetent. They blame the current spate of incidents on his administration or the lack of it. Even his father, Union minister and former chief minister Farooq Abdullah, said in a recent television interview that Omar needed to “get a grip” on the state administration.

Clearly, there is a growing disconnect between him and several of his senior party leaders, who accuse him of relying on a coterie. Congress leaders, too, accuse him of ignoring them.

Some call Abdullah a rank outsider. After all, he was born in the English town of Rochford outside London, schooled in Himachal, worked as a executive in Calcutta, Bangalore and Hyderabad and then served as a member of Parliament and junior minister in Delhi.

“He has been parachuted into Kashmir,” says People’s Democratic Party leader Mehbooba Mufti, who accuses Abdullah of “demonising” the entire Opposition for “his own political ends”.

Abdullah denies the charge and stresses that Kashmir’s problems are not economic or administrative but political.

His National Conference party, Abdullah adds, doesn’t support the separatist call for azadi or freedom for Kashmir. Nor does it think that it’s “feasible” to have a referendum on Kashmir’s future. “The most realistic set of proposals for a political solution to Kashmir has not come from India but from Pakistan,” he says. Embracing former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s four-point formula is the only way out of the current impasse, he feels — “the only way forward”.

The Musharraf formula entails a phased withdrawal of troops by India and Pakistan; no changes in the border or the line of control; local self-governance and a joint supervision mechanism in J&K involving India, Pakistan and Kashmir.

He says the National Conference has always demanded autonomy for the state and adopted a resolution to that effect in the state Assembly nearly a decade ago. But the Centre has been “less than forthcoming” about granting the state autonomy.

Abdullah accuses Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of going back on his commitment that “short of azadi”, the sky was the limit for Kashmir. “Where is that sky? Our feet are yet to leave the ground. Don’t make a commitment you cannot keep,” he says.

“Vajpayeeji said from the ramparts of the Red Fort that the previous mistakes in Kashmir would not be repeated. But they are still being repeated. The Centre must recognise that J&K is essentially a political problem and it needs a political solution,” he fumes.

In some ways, Abdullah’s belligerence is understandable — he is fighting a lone battle in Kashmir with his back to the wall. And he is mincing no words today, no matter whether they make him appear a weakling or a hawk or a bit of both.

But then Abdullah, the eldest of Farooq and Mollie Abdullah’s three children — and their only son — is articulate and his love for plain speaking is well known.

That’s the way he says he was raised — to call a spade a spade — by his dad and mum who were a doctor and a nurse respectively at a hospital in the UK when he was born. He was put in a girl’s convent — much to his embarrassment now — in Srinagar when he was barely five, but was later moved to Burn Hall, a boys’ school.

When his parents learnt that teachers in Srinagar were “slipping” question papers to the fifth grade student to curry favour with Kashmir’s first family, they shifted him to Lawrence School, Sanawar, in Himachal Pradesh, from where he graduated in 1989.

After a failed tryst with Delhi’s St Stephen’s College — which did not quite match his idea of a college where “you are supposed to spend more time in the canteen than in classrooms,” he says — he moved to Mumbai’s Sydenham College, earning a degree in commerce in 1992.

Two years later, he took up a job as a marketing trainee with Oberoi Hotel. But he soon moved to ITC and began shuttling between different cities. He remembers fondly his month-long stint in Calcutta in 1996 when he worked out of the ITC headquarters. He stayed at the Calcutta Club and commuted by Metro.

“It was great fun. Nobody knew me in Calcutta, so I had no security men trailing me. I walked daily to the Rabindra Sadan station and took the Metro to Park Street,” he says, his eyes twinkling.

It all changed in 1998 when he quit his job and an MBA course he had enrolled for, and followed his father and late grandfather Sheikh Abdullah, who was also chief minister of Kashmir, into politics.

Abdullah won the Lok Sabha elections in 1998 and 1999, and became the Union minister of state for commerce and then for external affairs in the Vajpayee-led NDA government. “It was an amazing learning experience,” he says.

But he soon realised that the National Conference was a regional party and that the Abdullahs were “essentially state players”. So he moved back to Kashmir. He fought and lost the 2002 assembly elections in J&K.

After he survived an attempt on his life in July 2007, the junior Abdullah won the 2008 assembly elections with his party bagging the maximum number of seats. He took oath in January 2009 as chief minister, heading a coalition government. But he says the 2008 victory was “not a mandate for me to rule the state, but for my party”. The National Conference had projected his father, and not him, as the chief ministerial candidate in the assembly elections.

But once the results came out, Farooq Abdullah declined to don the mantle, considering the pressures and demands of a coalition government. The party then went into a huddle and picked his son instead.

Not that Abdullah regrets his decision to accept what has turned out to be a crown of thorns. He stresses that he “won’t quit” just because he is going through a “rough patch”. For, he knows how to pick himself up, dust himself off and go back to his job. “The day I regret assuming the responsibility of this office, I should get into my car, drive to Raj Bhavan and hand in my resignation,” he says.

In the midst of the biggest crisis of his life, Abdullah says he draws strength from his family, his wife Payal and his two sons, Zahir and Zamir.

But what keeps him going, the embattled Kashmir chief minister says, is the three-word motto of his school in Sanawar: Never Give In.