A government barely a year and a half old, sitting atop the Treasury benches in Srinagar, is preparing to march to Jantar Mantar on the opening day of Parliament’s monsoon session. That the National Conference should choose street protest over the business of governing is, on its own, a contradiction worth examining. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has held this course even after a meeting with the Prime Minister at which the Union Territory’s finances, development and the long-pending question of statehood were reportedly discussed. The stated objective is to hold the Centre to its own word — promises made in the Supreme Court, in Parliament, and on public platforms about restoring full statehood. The optics, however, tell a different story: of a ruling party reaching for the theatre of opposition because the harder arithmetic of delivery has not added up.
There is a legitimate case to be made against this protest, and it has little to do with sub judice technicalities or accusations of stagecraft. It rests on record. The regularisation of daily-wage workers, an old and oft-repeated promise, remains mired in committees and phased timelines rather than resolution. Movement on jobs, on administrative responsiveness, on the systemic reforms promised during the campaign has been halting at best. Within the party itself, the visible pull toward high-visibility spectacle over the grind of administration has not escaped notice. These are the grounds on which an opposition — or indeed any serious commentator — should be pressing the National Conference: what, precisely, has been done with the relative calm and the enhanced central support of recent years to improve daily life in the Valley and in Jammu?
That case has not been made with the rigour it deserves. Much of what has come instead from sections of the BJP in the Valley has settled for dismissal rather than argument — protest as “gimmick,” strategy session as “picnic,” objection on procedural grounds that the matter is before the courts. There is truth buried in some of this; a protest staged at a moment when tourism is still recovering from the shock of the 2025 Pahalgam attack does send an unhelpful signal to visitors and investors alike. But truth asserted is not the same as truth demonstrated, and a critique that skips the demonstration cedes ground it need not cede. Where the rebuttal is thin, the protest fills the space left behind, allowing the National Conference to cast itself as the lone voice of Kashmiri aspiration against an indifferent Centre — a posture that finds an audience wherever older grievances still linger.
A sturdier response would lean on what has actually changed. Tourist arrivals crossed 2.3 crore in 2024, a record even as the sector dipped through 2025 before its current rebound — numbers that matter directly to hoteliers, houseboat owners, pony-wallas and artisans across Anantnag and beyond. Security data tell a similarly unambiguous story: 2025 recorded 92 terrorism-related deaths, among the lowest tolls in decades, with local recruitment into militancy now reduced to a trickle from the hundreds once seen each year. Sustained counter-narcotics operations, continued central funding beyond original budgetary allocations — acknowledged by the Chief Minister himself — and the quieter normalcy of festivals observed without the old shadow of fear together describe a Union Territory materially different from the one that existed before 2019.
None of this settles the question of statehood, which remains, as it should, conditional on sustained normalcy and rests with the Centre to decide in its own time. But it does settle a narrower and more immediate question: whether a government that holds power ought to be marching on Delhi or governing in Srinagar. Statehood is a process to be earned through demonstrated stability; daily governance is a duty owed regardless of that timeline, and it is on the latter that this government’s record invites scrutiny — not on whether it has chosen the right venue for its grievances.
The job of an opposition, and of a free press, is to make that case so clearly that protest needs no rebuttal beyond the facts already on the ground. Labels and dismissals do the opposite: they let symbolism pass for substance and grievance pass for governance. Kashmir has had enough of both. What it is owed now is a government that governs and an opposition that argues — not theatre answered with theatre.
