The death of Dr Sheikh Mustafa Kamal on July 14, at a Srinagar hospital after a long illness, closes a chapter that reached back to the founding decades of the National Conference. He was 83. Younger son of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, brother of Farooq Abdullah and uncle of Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, he belonged to the family that has shaped, and been shaped by, the politics of Jammu and Kashmir more than any other. Yet within that dynasty he cut a distinctive figure, and it is worth appraising his life honestly rather than only reverently.
Trained as a physician — an MBBS from Jaipur in 1962 — Kamal practised medicine in the Tangmarg area before politics claimed him in the early 1980s. He entered the Legislative Council in 1983, won the Gulmarg seat in 1987 and held it until 2002, and served as a cabinet minister in the National Conference governments of 1983, 1987 and 1996. A lifelong bachelor of modest personal habits, he was widely remembered as accessible, unpretentious and willing to walk ordinary constituents through the corridors of officialdom. That reputation for approachability was not manufactured; even critics conceded it.
His political identity rested on an uncompromising demand for the restoration of Kashmir’s pre-1953 constitutional position and the autonomy promised in the party’s “Naya Kashmir” vision. He pressed this case insistently, sometimes to the discomfort of his own colleagues, and was for a period relieved of party posts after remarks that strayed from a coalition’s line. Here judgment must be balanced. To his admirers, this marked him as a keeper of the party’s original faith in an age of expedient compromise. To others, his positions were maximalist and, after the constitutional changes of 2019, overtaken by events. Both readings deserve a hearing; neither should be the last word delivered as though settled fact.
That the tributes have come from across the spectrum — from the Lieutenant Governor to the Mirwaiz to political rivals — reflects a respect for the man’s sincerity that survived disagreement with his politics. It is a distinction increasingly rare, and instructive. Public life in the Valley remains sharply divided over questions of autonomy, statehood and the region’s future, and Kamal was a partisan in those debates, not a neutral. Honouring him need not mean endorsing every stance he took.
What can be said without qualification is that he gave decades to public service and held to his convictions when it cost him. As Jammu and Kashmir navigates its present transition, the more durable lesson from his career may be the value of consistency and candour in leaders, whatever cause they serve. He will be remembered, and argued over — as he would perhaps have wished.
