I. Ahmad Wani
Deedaar-e-Mahtaab ka shab bhar nahin hua
Roshan mere naseeb ka Akhtar nahin hua
Har dam wahi hua na thi umeed jis ki kuch
Hona jo laazmi tha woh aksar nahin hua
Kashmir has lived inside this couplet for two years. What was promised at election time, statehood, jobs, clean offices, did not come. What nobody had asked for kept arriving instead. On Wednesday it arrived as a police barricade.
Srinagar woke up that morning to two protests. One was called by the ruling National Conference. The other was called by the BJP, the opposition in the Assembly but the ruling party in Delhi. Both had the same right. Both should have got the same treatment. They did not.
The roads to the BJP office in Jawahar Nagar were sealed. NC workers gathering at Gindun Park in Rajbagh found police lines in front of them. The two sides came face to face. A few kilometres away, BJP workers assembled at Ghanta Ghar in Lal Chowk and marched towards the Civil Secretariat with police walking beside them. The picture was complete before noon. One party was stopped. The other was escorted.
Nobody in Kashmir needed a press release to read this picture. Police in the Union Territory answer to the Home Ministry in Delhi, not to the elected government in Srinagar. So every barricade on Wednesday carried a signature. It did not say “law and order.” It said “Delhi.”
This is the real policy failure of the day. Not the protest. Not even the counter-protest. The failure was the decision to treat two political parties by two different rules in the same city on the same morning.
Why this matters more in Kashmir than anywhere else
In most Indian states this would be a small story. The Chief Minister controls the police. If the ruling party gets a smoother road than the opposition, people shrug and blame the local government. In Jammu and Kashmir the arrangement is different. The Chief Minister does not control a single constable. The Lieutenant Governor does. So when the police act unevenly, the blame flies straight to New Delhi.
The National Conference understood this within minutes. Its message writes itself: “Dilli humein kuch karne nahi deti.” Delhi does not let us work. For two years this line has been the shield behind which the elected government hides its own poor record. On Wednesday the Home Ministry handed that shield a fresh coat of paint, free of cost.
Think about what the centre gave up. For weeks the BJP had been building a strong case against the Omar Abdullah government: outsourced jobs, electricity tariff hikes, Panchayat polls delayed, corruption creeping back into offices. These are real complaints. Many ordinary people share them. A march on the Secretariat on those issues could have set the agenda for the coming Assembly session. Instead, the talk in every tea stall and every newsroom is about who was allowed to walk and who was not.
The BJP had a governance argument. The NC had a victimhood argument. The police barricade decided which one won.
Perception is the whole game
Dr B R Ambedkar warned the Constituent Assembly in 1949: “However good a Constitution may be, if those who are implementing it are not good, it will prove to be bad.” The law on protests in India is even-handed on paper. Section 163 of the BNSS, like the old Section 144, allows a magistrate to restrict assembly to prevent a breach of peace. It does not allow him to pick a party. The moment the same rule is applied to one crowd and waived for another, the law stops being law. It becomes a preference.
In Kashmir, preference is remembered for decades. The 1987 Assembly election is still cited by people who were not born then. Nobody remembers the vote count. Everybody remembers the feeling that the result was fixed from outside. That feeling filled the ranks of militancy for a generation. The lesson was not about elections alone. The lesson was that when the state is seen to tilt, people stop trusting the state, not the party that lost.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee understood this better than any Prime Minister before or after him. His three words, “Insaniyat, Jamhooriyat, Kashmiriyat,” were a promise of equal footing. Jamhooriyat does not mean elections once in five years. It means the police stand at the same distance from every party, every day.
Delhi already knows the right way. It used it in July.
Here is the strange part. The centre has already shown that it can get this right. In July, National Conference leaders sat at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi and demanded statehood. Delhi Police also reports to the Home Ministry. Nobody stopped them. The sit-in happened, the cameras came, the speeches were made, and the story died in two days. The BJP even postponed its own Secretariat gherao because of it. That was mature handling. The NC got its platform and got nothing more.
Compare the two mornings. In Delhi, the NC was allowed to protest and gained little. In Srinagar, the NC was stopped and gained a week of headlines. The same ministry took two opposite decisions and got two opposite results. The lesson is not complicated.
There is also the Supreme Court. In the Shaheen Bagh judgment of 2020 the court said the right to protest is real but it cannot be exercised anywhere and at any time, and that public roads cannot be blocked for ever. Fair enough. But the court has never said the right belongs to some parties and not to others. If the police feared a clash, the answer was to keep the two crowds apart, not to keep one crowd at home.
Two clean options, and Delhi picked neither
The administration had two defensible choices on Tuesday evening, when it became clear that both parties would be on the street.
The first option was to stop both. Cite the security review the Lieutenant Governor chaired the day before. Cite the risk of two rival crowds a few kilometres apart. Deny both permissions. Both parties would have shouted. Neither could have claimed it was singled out. The story would have been about the police, not about Delhi versus the elected government.
The second option was to allow both. Give the BJP its route to the Secretariat. Give the NC a defined spot near the BJP office, with a police cordon between the two. Let both sides make their speeches. By evening the BJP would have owned the jobs debate and the NC would have owned the statehood debate. Voters could have judged the two.
The third option, the one actually chosen, was the worst of the three. Allow one, stop the other. It looked like favouritism because it was favouritism, whatever the file said.
Sunil Sharma, the Leader of Opposition, made a fair point on Tuesday when he said the BJP had announced its march a month earlier and the NC jumped in at the last hour. True. But a police force does not decide who gets to protest by checking who filed first. It decides on the basis of public safety. A late announcement is a reason for tighter arrangements, not a reason for a ban.
The cost to the centre’s own case
The centre’s argument on statehood has always been simple: security first, statehood at the right time, and the elected government has enough powers to deliver on jobs, roads and schools. This argument works only if the centre is seen as a neutral referee. The moment it is seen as a player, every failure of the Omar Abdullah government becomes Delhi’s failure in public eyes. Every delayed file, every unfilled post, every hour of power cut goes into the “Dilli ne rok diya” account.
Wednesday’s barricades did not weaken the National Conference. They rescued it. A government with a thin record of two years got a fresh reason to ask for sympathy instead of answering for its performance.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall summed up the liberal creed in a line usually credited to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The Home Ministry did not have to agree with the NC’s slogans. It only had to let them be shouted, from the same distance the BJP was allowed. One rule for both. That was the decision in the centre’s own interest. It chose otherwise, and the elected government will thank it for years.
