The people of J&K watch quietly. They have seen this play before. They know its rhythms. The five-year term will pass
AZHAR HUSSAIN
In the mountains of Kashmir, a cloudburst is rarely announced. It simply arrives. But on May 6, addressing a gathering in Tangmarg, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah telegraphed his own political storm. “Trust me,” he told the audience, “I want to burst like a cloudburst.” After Eid, he would speak freely.
The metaphor ricocheted across J&K’s political circles. Speculation mounted. What was the CM holding back? In a Union Territory where every utterance by the Chief Minister is parsed for sub-text, the promise of a downpour was enough to set the punditry mills grinding.
Eid arrived on May 28 and passed quietly. Then, just as the political calendar began to exhale, the valley’s leaves began to rustle. It was not from the direction of the CM’s office, but from an unexpected quarter.
On June 2, PDP president and former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti dispatched a volley of letters to a wide spectrum of political and civil society leaders. The recipients were carefully curated — Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, Leader of Opposition Sunil Sharma, JKPCC President Tariq Hameed Karra, CPI(M) leader Tarigami and several others including civil society figures.
The message was singular that the time had come for a united political initiative to engage with Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah for a sustained dialogue on Jammu and Kashmir.
Drawing a parallel with Ladakh, where the Leh Apex Body and Kargil Democratic Alliance had reportedly made progress with the Centre, Mehbooba argued that only dialogue delivers results. She urged the Chief Minister to convene an all-party meeting, insisting the exercise must transcend score-settling.
“This cannot become a matter of appropriating political credit,” she wrote. “It must become a moment of unification.”
In tone and aspiration, the initiative evoked nostalgia for the People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration — that ambitious coalition formed in 2019 after the abrogation of Article 370. But what raised the most eyebrows was the inclusion of BJP’s Leader of Opposition Sunil Sharma among the recipients. The major regional parties have kept a studied distance from the BJP since August 2019, routinely criticising the party over the downgrading of J&K and the prolonged denial of statehood.
For Mehbooba Mufti, whose party suffered electorally partly due to its earlier alliance with the BJP, to now extend an olive branch to the BJP’s LoP was, at minimum, a startling diplomatic gesture. Whether it was pragmatism, structural necessity or simply good optics depended entirely on which political address one came from.
The initiative might have proceeded quietly to its predictable end had Mehbooba not added a charge that brought everything into sharp public focus. She publicly claimed that she had been persistently calling Omar’s office seeking an appointment but had received no response. The implication was clear — the sitting Chief Minister was keeping her at arm’s length.
Omar Abdullah moved quickly. “We spoke on Saturday when you asked to meet,” he replied on social media. “I told you I was in Pahalgam on Sunday and would get in touch on Monday or Tuesday. Your letter gives the impression that I’ve kept you waiting for weeks, which is clearly not the case.”
The CM was not just correcting a timeline, he was publicly labelling the assertion as misleading. He then added that his formal reply would come only after consulting senior party colleagues, effectively placing the proposed all-party meet in a procedural waiting room from which it has not yet emerged.
Congress, meanwhile, has stayed conspicuously silent. This is not without logic. The Party’s president Mallikarjun Kharge and Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi had already written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, pressing for the restoration of full statehood to Jammu and Kashmir.
Furthermore, JKPCC Chief Tariq Hameed Karra has been leading the “Humari Riyasat Humara Haqq” campaign for over a year now, demanding restoration of full statehood through grassroots outreach across J&K.
When Congress launched that campaign, it invited all political parties to join. None did — not the PDP, not even its own ally the National Conference. Why, then, should Congress now honour PDP’s call for unity when their own call was met with silence? The question answers itself. Also, it is the quiet confidence of a party that had already moved on this issue at the highest level.
Also conspicuously absent from the core of this initiative were Awami National Conference’s Muzaffar Shah and Altaf Bukhari’s Apni Party. Muzaffar Shah even held a press conference where he grilled both PDP and NC for washing dirty linen in public and expressed dismay that major stakeholders had been excluded.
He alleged that PDP might have been deliberately cautious about not inviting voices too independent to be managed. It was a pointed charge. A genuine all-party platform requires precisely the willingness to accommodate unpredictable voices.
What has become increasingly clear is that this PAGD 2.0 — if one can even call this loosely conceived letter campaign by that name — did not survive long enough to see the light of the first morning.
In the meantime, the people of J&K watch quietly. They have seen this play before. They know its rhythms. The five-year term will pass. The Assembly will go back to the voter. And in that reckoning, which is quiet, slow but ultimately sovereign, no letter campaign or alliance announcement will carry more weight than the accumulated record of what each party actually did, or failed to do, when the occasion demanded.
(The Author is a Columnist and can be reached at: azharsahussain@gmail.com)
