The National Conference’s decision to hold large rallies in Srinagar and Jammu on July 11, followed by a protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on July 20, returns the party to familiar terrain. Led by Farooq Abdullah and Omar Abdullah, the NC has cast these mobilisations as an exercise in building civil society consensus around the restoration of full statehood to Jammu and Kashmir. The demand itself is neither novel nor unreasonable: the downgrading of a State to a Union Territory in 2019 was an extraordinary act, and the case for reversing it enjoys support well beyond the NC’s own ranks. Yet the party’s choice of the street and the capital, rather than the ward and the panchayat, invites a fair question about where it believes its strength truly lies.
The timing sharpens that question. Electoral rolls for panchayats are under revision, and urban local body polls appear improbable in 2026. The result is a persistent vacuum in grassroots governance, with no elected sarpanches or municipal councillors to take up the everyday concerns of water supply, rural infrastructure, public health and anti-drug efforts. A party that governs the Union Territory in alliance with the Congress, and that won the 2024 Assembly election on a platform of normalcy and governance, might be expected to press for these elections as a matter of course. That it has not done so — and that the NC boycotted the 2018 panchayat polls — leaves it open to the charge of selective engagement.
Local body elections are, after all, the closest measure of grassroots support. They test whether a party’s appeal extends beyond its traditional bastions and into the daily transactions of governance. Statehood is a legitimate and important cause, but it is contested largely in Parliament, the courts and the national conversation. Panchayat and municipal contests are settled in the neighbourhood, and it is there that claims of popular backing are most directly validated or found wanting. To emphasise the former while remaining reticent about the latter is to leave the impression, however unintended, of an unwillingness to be tested at close quarters.
None of this diminishes the substance of the NC’s grievance. The manner in which J&K’s special status and statehood were altered remains a genuine constitutional and political wound, and peaceful protest is a wholly legitimate instrument of democratic expression. The Centre, for its part, has repeatedly promised to restore statehood without committing to a timeline, and that ambiguity is itself a provocation the NC is entitled to challenge. The party’s rallies cannot fairly be dismissed as mere theatre.
But the two arguments need not be in tension. A party confident of its standing can pursue statehood in Delhi and welcome local elections at home, treating the ballot in the panchayat as an ally of its larger cause rather than a threat to it. The people of Jammu and Kashmir, having endured decades of disruption, are entitled to functional local governance now, not at the end of a longer political negotiation. The National Conference would do well to demand both — and to trust the verdict of the grassroots as readily as it seeks the attention of the capital.
