Having no fight to win is a diagnosis, not a destination.
Here is where the National Conference’s crisis of nerve actually goes.
Meer Yassir Ahmed
The first part of this column (A War to Win) argued that Omar Abdullah’s difficulty is not administrative failure so much as narrative collapse — a government that promised confrontation and has delivered explanation, and a party now fighting its own most committed voice, Aga Ruhullah, more visibly than it fights Delhi. That diagnosis, however, is only half the job of a column. The more useful question, six years into the Union Territory experiment and fifteen months into this government, is where this actually goes. Three paths present themselves, and they are not mutually exclusive so much as sequential possibilities, each foreclosing or enabling the next.
The first path is managed absorption — the most likely, and the least dramatic. Farooq Abdullah’s public rebuke of Ruhullah was not, on close reading, an expulsion notice. It was a challenge phrased in exactly the language party elders use when they want a dissenting voice to either fall in line or discredit itself trying to leave. “Resign and seek a fresh mandate — we will see how many votes you get” is not the language of a man trying to force someone out; it is the language of a man confident the other side will not actually jump. Ruhullah, for his part, has been equally careful to keep the door ajar: his resignation, he says, is not conditional, but he would reconsider it if Farooq Abdullah “wants the matter resolved,” a formulation that leaves the outcome squarely in the party president’s hands rather than his own. This is the choreography of two men who both understand that an actual split serves neither of them. Ruhullah outside the NC is a moral voice without an organisation; the NC without Ruhullah loses its only nationally audible articulation of the Article 370 demand, delivered from the floor of the Lok Sabha itself, which no Assembly resolution can replicate. The most probable resolution, therefore, is some negotiated formula — a more visible role for Ruhullah’s constitutional-status campaign within the party’s own machinery, perhaps a reshuffled cabinet subcommittee, perhaps simply Farooq Abdullah’s public blessing for Ruhullah to keep raising 370 in Parliament without being read as freelancing. Ruhullah gets to say he forced a course correction without technically forcing anything; the NC gets to say unity was never in doubt. Kashmir’s press, this newspaper included, will have spent a fortnight covering a crisis that both principals always intended to defuse.
The second path is the one Ruhullah himself has floated and the one the NC’s leadership will resist hardest: an actual leadership change, with Omar Abdullah stepping back from the Chief Minister’s chair and returning to Parliament. It is worth taking this seriously rather than dismissing it as posturing, because it maps onto a real structural logic. Omar Abdullah’s own defence of his government’s non-delivery has consistently been that the office of Chief Minister in a Union Territory is largely ceremonial next to the Lieutenant Governor’s authority over land, police, and public order — that the real fight for Kashmir’s political status is fought in Delhi, not Srinagar. If that diagnosis is sincerely held rather than merely convenient, its logical conclusion is exactly what Ruhullah is pushing: that the NC’s most capable communicator should be where the fight actually matters, in Parliament, articulating the statehood and 370 case on the national stage, while someone else manages the daily administrative business of an office that, by the CM’s own account, cannot deliver much regardless of who holds it. This is not a fanciful scenario — it was Farooq Abdullah’s own model between 2009 and 2014, when he sat in the Union Cabinet in Delhi while his son ran the state government in Srinagar. The obstacle is not logic but appetite. Omar Abdullah has spent a political lifetime working toward the Chief Minister’s chair and has occupied it, across two terms, with visible personal investment; there is little indication he wants to trade it for a backbench role in a Parliament where the NC holds barely a handful of seats. And any transition would have to survive the optics of appearing to reward an internal revolt — a precedent no party wants to set with three and a half years still left in its term.
The third path, and the one that should worry the NC leadership most, is drift into irrelevance on the ground even as the party retains its Assembly numbers. This is not a split scenario; it requires no resignations, no leadership change, no dramatic headline at all. It is simply the compounding of what has already been visible for fifteen months: unemployment holding near 17-18 per cent among the young, welfare guarantees unmet, statehood repeatedly “renewed” as a request rather than won as a fact, and a public that has begun, by every available account from student protests to the muted response to government press conferences, to stop treating National Conference statements as consequential. A party can hold 42 of 90 Assembly seats and still lose the thing that actually makes a mandate meaningful — the belief among its own voters that the mandate is being used for something. Kashmir’s political memory is long, and the NC of 2024 was elected substantially as a rejection of the Union Territory dispensation, not an endorsement of Omar Abdullah’s individual administrative competence. If the next Panchayat, DDC, or By-poll cycle registers falling NC vote shares even without any organised alternative gaining commensurately — protest voting, low turnout, spoiled ballots, independents — that is the drift scenario materialising without needing a single resignation to mark it. It is also, perversely, the scenario in which Ruhullah’s current posture looks most vindicated in hindsight and Farooq Abdullah’s caution looks most costly, regardless of how the immediate stand-off resolves.
What determines which of these three paths actually plays out is not, in the end, anything internal to the National Conference. It is the pace, or absence of pace, of movement on statehood from New Delhi. Every one of the government’s public defences of its own non-performance — the Lieutenant Governor’s veto, the finance secretary’s dual loyalty, the Cabinet subcommittee gathering dust — ultimately terminates in the same sentence: none of this changes until Delhi decides it should. Omar Abdullah’s first-anniversary appeal to the Prime Minister to honour the promise of statehood “within the first year” — an appeal made, tellingly, in the passive, hopeful register of a request rather than a demand — has already gone unanswered for months beyond that self-set deadline. If the Centre moves on statehood in the coming months, even partially, the managed-absorption path becomes trivially easy: Omar Abdullah gets his deliverable, Ruhullah’s campaign has achieved its stated object, and the internal argument about tactics dissolves because it no longer needs resolving. If the Centre continues to hold the line — “at an appropriate time,” the formulation Delhi has favoured for six years now — then the pressure currently expressing itself through one MP’s threatened resignation will not disappear; it will simply migrate to a different pressure point, because the underlying grievance was never really about Ruhullah’s seat.
This is, ultimately, the same observation with which the first part of this column closed, restated in sharper form: Omar Abdullah’s government does not have a personnel problem or even, principally, a communications problem. It has a dependency problem, structurally built into the Union Territory architecture it inherited and was elected, in some part, to overturn. Every path this crisis can take is a variation on how visibly that dependency gets managed rather than a route to escaping it. The National Conference is not breaking down in the sense of splitting; what is breaking down, slowly and in public view, is the party’s ability to keep asking its most committed cadre and its exhausted electorate to be patient about a fight it has not yet found a way to actually wage. Managed absorption buys the party months. A leadership swap, unlikely as it remains, would buy credibility at the cost of comfort. Drift buys nothing at all — and it is, historically, the path Kashmiri politics has taken more often than either of the other two, not because it is chosen but because it is what happens when nobody chooses.
I have sat in enough party working committees, in enough decades, to know that the men who threaten resignation most publicly are rarely the ones who leave, and the men who least expect to be asked to step aside are, more often than not, the ones eventually asked. Kashmir’s political class would do well to remember both halves of that sentence before treating this week’s headlines as either crisis or theatre alone. It is, as these things almost always are in the Valley, some uneasy measure of both.
Yassir Ahmed is an Indian journalist and analyst specialising in national security, defence, and strategic affairs across South Asia and West Asia, examining the intersection of intelligence, diplomacy, and regional power, can be reached at yassirahmed001@gmail.com
…to be continued
