Srinagar, Aug. 25 -- By Farooq Ahmad Khan

I served under three chief ministers of Jammu and Kashmir across a career spanning more than three decades, and I have spent years trying to name what those postings had in common.

It was trust, handed to me at moments when I had done little to earn it, and the responsibility that trust forced on me afterward.

My first encounter came in 1980, when I was twenty-four and had just become Company Secretary of the Jammu and Kashmir State Forest Corporation. Truck drivers went on strike, afraid that the conversion of a government lumbering undertaking into a corporation would cost them their pensions.

Senior officers available that morning hesitated to face Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah in place of our a...