The outrage over Tanvir Sadiq’s yazar remarks and the National Conference’s defense of historical poverty reveal a deeper paralysis: a political class trading outrage over the fabric of the past while ignoring unemployment, corruption, and the crises of today.
I. Ahmed Wani
Walk into any mohalla in Srinagar today. The signs are still there. Quiet, hand-painted, unapologetic.
In Goneknan Gali, the board says it plainly: lehnga on rent, all bridal jewellery included. Next door: sherwani and mahraj suits, also on rent. In 2026, these shops are not an isolated anomaly, nor are they unique to the valley. Step into Chandni Chowk in Delhi, Commercial Street in Bangalore, or the bazaars of Lucknow and Patna, and you will see the exact same storefronts doing brisk business.
Renting high-end attire for a single evening has become standard urban economics across India. It is considered practical, smart, and cost-effective. But in our lanes, the practice carries an older, heavier shadow.
Decades ago, before wedding planners and commercial rental outlets took over the market, borrowing was not a transaction. It was a social instinct. Across Indian towns and Kashmiri mohallas alike, the neighborhood collected razai, mattresses, and heavy copper degs from house to house for every wedding feast. Today, the commercial market does the collecting. The act has simply moved from neighborly solidarity to a commercial counter. We rent what makes little sense to own, but we do so against the long historical memory of having to borrow just to get by.
That was the delicate nerve touched when National Conference chief spokesperson Tanvir Sadiq spoke of the yazar.
He remarked that ordinary Kashmiris once had to share a single pair of trousers. Suddenly, a seasonal political squall broke loose. The BJP declared it an intolerable insult to Kashmiri dignity. The PDP attacked the ruling party for an arrogant cultural disconnect. Effigies were set on fire. Social media erupted with mocking sketches and furious monologues. The political class plunged headfirst into what can only be called the Great Pyjama War.
Not that Kashmiris never wore clothes. Of course they did. The pheran was never the only garment in the wardrobe. But the presentable yazar—the clean, tailored pair fit for the city, the tehsil court, or an official gathering—was often scarce. It was shared among brothers. It was borrowed from a neighbor with steady work. Sometimes it was taken from the village mosque for the duration of a journey and returned by dusk.
Omar Abdullah called it an undeniable historical fact. It is. But focusing the lens solely on the last monarchy leaves out a much longer and more ruthless ledger of history.
Centuries of Extraction: Mughals, Afghans, Sikhs, and Dogras
The crushing poverty of the Kashmiri cultivator was not born overnight under the Dogra Maharajas. It was the accumulated residue of centuries of relentless imperial extraction, where regime after regime treated the valley as an orchard to be stripped and its people as laborers to be taxed.
The historical sequence tells an unbroken tale of common misery.
It began when the Mughals annexed Kashmir in the late sixteenth century, ending local sovereignty and reducing a proud land to a northern pleasure retreat for imperial courts. Beneath the royal gardens and summer pavilions, the imperial tax collectors took half the produce of the soil directly from the cultivator. The cultivator was stripped of surplus, tied down by revenue demands that enriched Delhi and Agra while leaving the village bare.
Then came the Afghans in the mid-eighteenth century, ushering in decades of unbridled brutality. Under the Durrani governors, taxation ceased to be an administrative process and became outright extortion. The dagh-i-shawl tax squeezed the master weavers until their fingers bled, while rural peasants were subjected to arbitrary levies, physical torture, and open plunder. The common Kashmiri was reduced to pure survival, stripped of both produce and personal security.
The Sikh rule that followed in the early nineteenth century brought no economic relief to the peasantry. The rulers viewed the province through the cold calculation of revenue extraction. High taxation on agricultural yield continued unabated, monopolies on grain were routinely enforced, and the terrible famines of the era were compounded by an administration that prioritized revenue quotas over human starvation. Travelers like William Moorcroft documented ruined villages and an impoverished population fleeing across the mountain passes in sheer desperation.
Finally, the Dogra period consolidated this inherited architecture of misery. The Amritsar Treaty had treated the territory and its people as property transferred for cash, and the administrative system reflected that foundational reality. Sir Walter Lawrence documented the crushing weight of forced labor—the dreaded begar—where villagers were rounded up like cattle to haul military supplies over treacherous passes without wages. Prem Nath Bazaz wrote unflinchingly of peasants clad in rags, their bodies bent under the weight of zaildars, chakdars, and state monopolies.
By the time the mid-twentieth century arrived, the Kashmiri tiller was not poor by accident. He had been thoroughly, systematically, and chronologically bled dry by four successive imperial regimes.
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s historic Big Landed Estates Abolition Act of 1950 broke that long, feudal spine. The transfer of land to the tiller without compensation to landlords was a radical rupture. It returned basic human dignity to families who had spent generations under the whip. That landmark achievement altered the valley’s destiny and must never be diminished.
Yet Kashmir was not the only state in the Indian Union to dismantle landlordism. West Bengal carried out sweeping redistributions through Operation Barga. Kerala executed profound land and tenancy reforms that reshaped its social fabric. Tripura followed a similar path. In those states, land redistribution was understood as an essential beginning—a foundational chapter within an ongoing journey toward modern economic development.
It was never turned into a perpetual political annuity.
In Srinagar, however, the 1950 land reforms were transformed into an eternal moral receipt. For eight decades, the National Conference has pulled that receipt from its pocket, waving it before the electorate to demand loyalty for all time. The unspoken premise has always been the same: Because we gave your ancestors their land, you owe our dynasty your political allegiance forever. As if governance concluded in 1950. As if nothing further was ever owed to the children and grandchildren of those tillers.
Shared Blankets to Rented Lehengas: Scarcity and Commerce
The reality of sharing and borrowing has never been an exclusive Kashmiri condition. Across the entire subcontinent, mutual borrowing was the great social glue of the pre-industrial town. When scarcity is widespread, communities survive through informal pooling.
In every Indian mohalla, whether in Old Delhi or Downtown Srinagar, households routinely shared what was expensive. You borrowed your cousin’s tailored coat for an interview. You gathered bedding from neighbors for visiting relatives. You shared cooking cauldrons for community feasts. It was not humiliation; it was social cohesion making up for a lack of cash.
Today, that collective sharing has modernized into a commercial rental economy found in every corner of the country. Renting wedding attire, jewellery, and vehicles is considered smart living from Mumbai to Srinagar.
The tragedy lies in how our political class weaponizes this everyday reality. When political figures bring up the historic yazar, they are not talking about common social history or modern rental economics. They are using an ancient memory of scarcity to belittle the present, or using modern outrage to distract from their own governance failures.
The year is 2026. The monarchs and imperial governors are long gone, but the modern threats to common Kashmiri life have multiplied unchecked.
Today the real enemy is unemployment. It leaves young men and women holding university degrees and professional certifications with zero economic avenues. It is the epidemic of synthetic drugs, quietly destroying homes and tearing through mohallas street by street. It is systemic corruption, which turns every routine administrative task into an exhausting bribe negotiation. And it is terrorism, accompanied by the violent fanaticism that seeks to hijack Kashmiri identity only to destroy its future.
These are the immediate, terrifying battles of our time. They cannot be defeated by waving old revenue records from the Dogra era or quoting poems about the Mughals.
The Safe Refuge of Symbolic Outrage
Yet the moment the yazar comment hit the news channels, all discussion of modern reality dissolved.
The entire political ecosystem retreated into the safe terrain of fabric and trousers. The BJP found an easy target: staging protests over damaged Kashmiri honor allowed them to dodge hard questions about local industry, administrative delivery, and job creation since 2014. The National Conference found an equally comfortable trenches: defending the 1950 reforms allowed them to play the role of historical saviors without having to present a credible roadmap for contemporary youth distress.
It is an old, tired arrangement. Both sides prefer fighting over dead kings and borrowed garments because historical theater is free. It requires no policy work, no fiscal discipline, and no structural reform.
The emotional cost of this theater is paid entirely by the young.
A new generation is growing up watching elderly politicians exchange insults over their grandfathers’ pyjamas, while their own resumes gather dust. The wedding shops in Goneknan Gali will continue to rent out lehengas and sherwanis, serving families who are navigating high costs with practical sense. Outside those shops, the real issues—unemployment, drug rehabilitation, administrative rot, and regional peace—remain completely unaddressed.
The history of Kashmir is neither an unbroken fairy tale of royal majesty nor a flat tale of unmitigated squalor. It is the story of master craftsmen who produced world-renowned art alongside cultivators who endured centuries of extraction under Mughals, Afghans, Sikhs, and Dogras. Both realities are true.
Land to the Tiller answered the past. It was an essential foundation, but it cannot serve as a permanent excuse for contemporary paralysis.
The real work does not belong to the squabbling politicians or their manufactured cultural wars. It sits out on the pavement, completely untouched, waiting for a leadership that looks forward instead of back.
