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• 30 Mar 2026

Kashmir's Political Class Has Mastered the Art of Promising Without Governing

Every coalition has signed the same register. Every mandate has been exchanged for the same managed inaction. The electorate has been left to absorb the cost.

Kashmir has not suffered from a scarcity of political vision. It has suffered from vision deployed as theatre announced with precision, administered with deliberate ambiguity, and eventually archived without accountability. That pattern is not accidental. It is structural. And every major political formation in J&K's post-partition history has contributed a chapter. The 2008 Amarnath land row deserves more honest historiography than it has received. The PDP's withdrawal from the Congress-led coalition, triggering months of curfew, civilian deaths, and Governor's rule, was not principled opposition. It was electoral positioning, dressed in the language of identity grievance. The lesson that political disruption yields more electoral capital than governance was absorbed, carefully, by every formation that followed. That calculus has never been formally repudiated. It has only been repeated under different slogans. The 2015 PDP-BJP coalition will eventually be examined by serious political historians as among the most ideologically incoherent governing arrangements in post-independence India. A party that had built its

entire identity on dialogue, reconciliation, and the constitutional architecture of Article 370 entered government with a partner that considered each of those positions a civilisational error. The Common Minimum Programme was not a governing document. It was a deferral mechanism — a text designed to postpone the irreconcilable rather than resolve it. By June 2018, the inevitable had occurred, and J&K entered a constitutional vacuum whose dimensions became fully visible in August 2019. Now Mehbooba Mufti, returned to the Assembly gallery, levels a charge against the National Conference that carries uncomfortable credibility: that an elected government, holding a genuine democratic mandate after a decade of central administration, is governing as though political courage requires statehood as a prerequisite. It does not. Daily wager regularisation, land rights legislation, reservation rationalisation, and administrative reform none of these awaits a constitutional upgrade. They await will. That resource has been J&K's most chronic shortage across every government, every coalition, every managed transition.

The question worth asking of every party simultaneously is structural: why does J&K's political culture consistently produce governments that diagnose their own failures with precision and then govern as though the diagnosis belongs to someone else's term? Kashmiris have demonstrated, repeatedly, an electorate's most demanding quality: patience that borders on the philosophical. They have voted through conflict, uncertainty, and institutional ambiguity, expecting that democratic participation would eventually produce democratic governance. What they have received instead is a rotating cast of administrators, each inheriting the unresolved architecture of the last, each explaining their own inaction through the convenient language of constraint. The genuine political emergency in J&K today is not external. It is this: that the gap between electoral mandate and governing courage has been normalised to the point where low expectations have become the electorate's rational adaptation. That normalisation, not any single government's failure, is the true measure of how much ground remains to be recovered.