I Ahmad Wani
As the shutters began rattling open again by March 8, a fresh wave of headlines and screenshots flooded phones across the Valley. Two names surfaced first: former Srinagar Mayor Junaid Mattoo and National Conference MP Agha Ruhullah. Both booked under the same FIR for “promoting enmity” and “public mischief.”
Agha Ruhullah’s posts were raw, unfiltered grief. The Shia cleric-turned-lawmaker wrote on X: “The blood of Ayatollah Khamenei will not go in vain. Iran’s resistance is our resistance. From Srinagar to Qom, one Ummah bleeds today.” Straight from the heart of a man whose community has looked toward Tehran for decades. No one questioned his sincerity.
But Junaid Mattoo? That was different. The same man who had spent his mayoral term posing with Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha, cutting ribbons at Centrally Sponsored projects, suddenly discovered revolutionary fire. His X thread went viral: “This assassination is an attack on every Muslim soul. We stand with Iran till our last breath. Boycott every symbol of American-Zionist imperialism.” The irony stung. This was the rolling stone who had migrated politically from north Kashmir’s PC pastures to central Kashmir’s Apni Party flirtations, finally landing in the mayor’s chair as the LG administration’s favourite “nationalist face.” When his term ended and the photo-ops dried up, the mask slipped. The Valley has seen dozens like him—quick to switch jerseys the moment the crowd shifts. Yesterday’s darling of the administration, today’s sudden champion of the street. People recognised the pattern instantly.
Then came Mehbooba Mufti’s spectacle. On March 3 she posted a video: her supporters burning cut-outs of Netanyahu and Trump outside her residence. Flames licked the cardboard faces while she narrated in the caption: “The murderers of Ayatollah Khamenei will be answered by the Muslim world. Today we burn their symbols; tomorrow history will burn their legacy.” The post racked up thousands of shares before the algorithms even noticed.
One couldn’t help but ask: which platform exactly was she using to broadcast her rage? The very X that belongs to an American company whose government she was cursing. The same Instagram and Facebook owned by Meta—another American giant. Both countries she wanted to “boycott” had handed her the megaphone that kept her relevant. The contradiction was glaring. After more than six years of relative calm, was this the moment to re-ignite raw emotion? To push already frustrated youth back toward the old cycle of stone-pelting and lathi charges?
Not one leader—from Mirwaiz to Mehbooba to the newly vocal ex-mayor—stood up and told the young men clearly: our protest must remain symbolic. Show solidarity, yes. Close shops for a day, yes. But do not wound our own streets with the blood of our own brothers. Omar Abdullah, Manoj Sinha, even the police on the ground—none of them can pick up the phone and order Washington or Tel Aviv to stop. America and Israel will not cancel their airstrikes because a few buses stayed off the roads in Srinagar. The only people we can actually help are our own—Kashmiri students stuck in Tehran, businessmen in Isfahan, families waiting for evacuation. That was the real duty: send a joint memorandum to the Prime Minister and External Affairs Minister demanding safe passage home. Instead, the energy was spent on posters and FIRs.
On March 4, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah did something different. He called a meeting—not the usual all-party affair, but one that included prominent Ulmas. The message that emerged was measured: “We all condemn the aggression against Iran. We have every right to curse the aggressors in our hearts and prayers. But we also have a duty to keep our children in school, our shops open, our buses running. Streets are not battlegrounds.”
Critics pointed out that the room was packed more with NC MLAs than independent clerics; it looked like a party huddle dressed in religious clothing. Yet the intent was visible. For once, governance tried to rise above the noise. In a situation tailor-made for chaos, Omar Abdullah chose restraint over rhetoric. That deserves credit.
Even more credit belongs to the security grid. Every intelligence input screamed the same warning: vested interests were waiting for exactly this trigger. After the abrogation of Article 370, after the ban on Jamaat-e-Islami, after the elimination of top militants, some forces still believed one spark from abroad could drag Kashmir back to 2016. They wanted fresh blood on the roads to prove that “only killing terrorists is not enough.” They wanted to show Delhi that the old rhetoric could be revived with a single foreign headline.
Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha’s team refused to give them that opening. Vigilant deployment, quiet back-channel talks with community leaders, and zero tolerance for violence kept the lid on. No major casualty. No curfew that stretched into weeks. No viral video of a dead child that would have been played on every global channel. The Valley bled less because someone at the top stayed awake.
In the end, the hartal has already faded into memory, just another black-flag day in a long list. The rockets between Iran and Israel continue. Khamenei’s successor is already speaking from Tehran. And here, shopkeepers are counting losses, parents are rescheduling exams, and young men are nursing bruises from lathis swung by men who share their bloodline.
Feeling pain for distant brothers is human. Lighting candles for them is decent. But turning our own valleys into theatres of rage while the real war stays untouched—that is neither resistance nor wisdom. It is simply handing tomorrow to the same cycle we claim to hate.
The choice was never between loving Iran and loving Kashmir. The choice was between symbolism that heals and symbolism that wounds. This time, the wound was self-inflicted—again. Let the lesson not be forgotten before the next foreign headline arrives.
In a moment thick with symbolism and contradiction, outrage played out on the very platforms owned by those being condemned. Effigies burned, slogans echoed, and familiar political theatre returned to the streets. Yet the real paradox lay elsewhere. While mainstream politicians hurried to reclaim relevance through revolutionary posturing, it was the unelected administrative machinery—often dismissed as mere bureaucracy—that acted with the restraint of statesmanship. In choosing stability over spectacle, they revealed an uncomfortable truth: real leadership is not measured by the loudness of protest, but by the quiet responsibility of protecting one’s own people.
