2025: Hope to hardship |
The year 2025 will be recalled as the year of the murder of innocents in the meadows; the April 22 gruesome terrorist attack in the Baisaran Valley of Pahalgam. But it will be remembered for integrating the Kashmir Valley with the rest of India. The mass transportation link established being the single biggest transformative force ever unleashed on Kashmir. The rail links and freight trains from Budgam to Delhi will far outweigh all other integrative measures, including constitutional ones of 2019. The tracks crisscrossing the Valley represent the crossroads of transformation: integrating society, homogenizing culture and opening the economy. In 2025, remoteness of Kashmir was replaced by proximity to the mainland. The long-held notion that “across the tunnel” lies another world has changed for good.
So too the political belief that electoral victory begets political power and confers democratic legitimacy and the authority to govern. The year 2025 was a master class in Machiavellian realpolitik: how to reduce an electoral majority to a governance minority. Right through the year, democratic empowerment was disenfranchised by ensuring that a representative majority government does not have the final say.
The National Conference-led government under Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, formed after the 2024 assembly elections, the first since 2014, grappled with constrained powers and stifling elbowroom limiting operational and administrative autonomy. The year brought to the fore a chilling reality: Kashmiris, the demographic majority, may still have the electoral might. But being a political minority now, their votes lack the institutional weight to deliver the electoral promises and legislative pledges made by the elected representatives, be it the ministers or the MLAs.
For the union government the core issues of statehood restoration, a key electoral promise of the elected government (as also of all other national and regional parties), was not even on the agenda let alone be under any serious discussion. This left the elected government facing the daunting task of balancing public expectations with the realities of limited autonomy. In 2025, they........