When a civilisation is summoned to refute a factoid, the aim is neither to enlighten nor to engage. It is to turn a claim about scarcity into a slight upon dignity—by stealth. The agenda is political. It is also ahistorical.The real being of Kashmiris is ancient, spiritual, aesthetic and evolved. Their economic conditions are neither incidental nor accidental. They belong to the same society as a structure. For Lal Ded, a civilisational icon, the stone under the rice was hunger dressed as a heap.

A National Conference spokesperson, speaking on Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s death anniversary and quoting old-timers, recalled Kashmiris “not having pyjamas to wear,” a pair shared across a village or a mohalla. The reference was to Dogra-era poverty, and to the land-to-the-tiller laws the National Conference treats as its founding miracle.“One pyjama for a village” is not invented fiction. It is living folklore generations of Kashmiris grew up with as a shorthand for mass destitution. It compresses class, inequity and scarcity into one picture. The image works because other evidence records the same condition; thin retained harvests, wages in annas, a dress system in which the pheran often did the work of a whole wardrobe.

I do not recall anyone ever being offended by the recital. This time it was resented, amplified on social media, and followed by an apology from another spokesperson.Forget the Bharatiya Janata Party, which took out processions with effigies; it has no sense of this history. Did the People’s Democratic Party hear something new? A party ideologue accused the ruling party of confining a “5,000-year-old civilisation” to trivia and of humiliating a people it still regards as a hereditary flock. Recalling rural destitution was treated as a way of belittling Kashmir itself. The criticism sounds like........

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