A Satirical Requiem for Kashmir’s Political Inheritance
Peerzada Masarat Shah
In Kashmir, political slogans are like seasonal almonds: they bloom with great noise, look beautiful for a week, and then disappear, leaving only the bitter shell. Parties that were once born in blood and barricades now survive on birthdays and death anniversaries. And no anniversary is milked with more theatrical gusto than the birth anniversary of Sher-e-Kashmir Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah — the man we are told was half prophet, half lion, and wholly infallible.
On his 120th birth anniversary (5 December 2025), the ritual unfolded with clockwork precision. National Conference flags fluttered, press releases rained, and every MLA who ever warmed a chair in his shadow queued up to call him “beacon”, “architect”, “eternal guide”. Leading the chorus was Ali Mohammad Dar, MLA Chadoora, who tweeted: “Sher-e-Kashmir remains the brightest star in our sky of hope and justice.” Touching. One almost forgets that the same sky is currently overcast with unemployment, power cuts, and a Lieutenant Governor who signs more files than all our elected representatives combined.
But let us, for a moment, peel away the garlands and look at the actual inheritance.
Sheikh Abdullah’s political journey is a masterclass in ideological parkour.
1931–38: Fiery plebiscite warrior. “We want freedom from Dogra monarchy!”
1938–47: Muslim Conference becomes National Conference. “Secularism is our creed!”
1947–53: “Accession with India is final, but autonomy is non-negotiable!”
1953: Arrested for dreaming too loudly of independence.
1953–75: From prison to Plebiscite Front to “Naya Kashmir Banega!”
1975: The Indira–Sheikh Accord. Suddenly autonomy shrinks to whatever Delhi feels like giving that week.
As the great lion himself thundered in 1948 at the UN: “We have taken a firm stand that we shall decide our future with our own free will.” Thirty years later, in 1975, he told the J&K Assembly with equal conviction: “The chapter of confrontation is closed. A new era of co-operation has begun.” One sentence for every U-turn; one roar for every compromise. The people were merely asked to applaud louder each time the script changed.
The cost? Article 370 and 35A the very “special status” he swore to protect with his life were reduced to bargaining chips. When they finally vanished in 2019, the heirs of the lion could only issue press statements and update their Twitter headers with black dots.
And the heirs ah, the heirs! The grandson who now sits in the throne once occupied by the Sher-e-Kashmir recently discovered that restoring his grandfather’s birth anniversary as a public holiday is “legally complicated”. Yet shifting the entire Darbar Move to Jammu every winter because Srinagar is “too cold” is apparently a matter of life and death. As Omar Abdullah tweeted in November 2024 after a particularly chilly cabinet meeting: “Can’t run a government wearing shawls and kangris.” The same week, thousands of daily-wagers in Kupwara were clearing snow with bare hands for ₹300 a day.
Farooq Abdullah, the son, once famously declared in 1990: “If India does not want us, we will go to Pakistan; if Pakistan does not want us, we will declare independence.” In 2019, when Kashmir actually needed that fire, he was under house arrest, later telling reporters: “I am an Indian first, Kashmiri later.” Consistency, it seems, is a bourgeois virtue.
Even the opposition joins the farce with enthusiasm. Mehbooba Mufti, whose PDP once sold the dream of “self-rule” and healing touch, spent 2024–25 warning that “Kashmir is slipping into darkness”. One struggles to remember the difference between her darkness and the 18-hour power cuts under her own chief ministership in 2016–18.
Meanwhile, the common Kashmiri has learnt to treat politics like weather: something to complain about but never expect to change. A shopkeeper in Sopore told me last week: “Sheikh Sahib fought the Maharaja, his son fought Delhi, his grandson fights the cold. We are still fighting for electricity.”
The National Conference manifesto of 2024 promised restoration of Article 370, statehood “within months”, and land & job protection. One year later, statehood is still a “process”, 370 is a museum piece, and non-local officers decide who gets a government job. The only promise kept? The holiday on Maulid-un-Nabi was retained. Small mercies.
Sheikh Abdullah once said: “Power is like wine; those who taste it never want to give it up.” He was more prophetic than he knew. The wine has stayed within three families for nine decades while the vineyard — the people — remains parched.
So when the next anniversary comes, expect more garlands, more tweets, more claims that the lion’s roar still echoes. But walk into any village in south Kashmir and you will hear a different echoes: of promises broken, of slogans that turned to dust, of a legacy that illuminates marble mausoleums but leaves homes in darkness.
The real tribute to Sher-e-Kashmir would be to bury the dynasty along with the hypocrisy. Until then, Kashmiris will keep their single surviving weapon: a bitter laugh and the faint, foolish hope that someday leadership will mean more than a surname.
Because history is not written in “perhaps”. It is written in the choices leaders make — and in the winters the people are left to endure.
