In the recently concluded by-elections in Budgam, Mehbooba Mufti’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) has sprung victorious. This must be very unsettling for the National Conference (NC), whose entire 2024 election campaign was built around opposing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and projecting itself as the sole representative of Kashmiri aspirations.

The results of the by-elections, therefore, are doubly significant: i) it punctures the NC’s claim of being the sole credible opponent of the BJP; and (ii) more importantly, it reveals the sense of public disillusionment and despair as people have had to fall back on the very party that the NC accused of enabling the current state of affairs in Kashmir.

Thus, PDP’s win speaks more about the NC than about itself. Above all, I want to suggest that the Budgam election result, in all its absurdity, lays bare the bankruptcy and impoverished state of mainstream politics in Kashmir after 2019, where the discursive space continues to be dominated by the BJP and the local parties’ incapacity to engage in a more creative and generative form of politics beyond merely opposing the BJP.

Historically, Kashmir’s regional parties have defined themselves and their idea of Kashmir in contrast to New Delhi’s vision, grounding their politics in an alternative political imagination of the region. This went far beyond simply opposing the Congress party. Sheikh Abdullah, before his dismissal in 1953, offered a novel conception of Kashmir’s constitutional relationship with India, one that engaged with the Indian constitutional framework without being constrained by it.

Drawing extensively from the Soviet Constitution, as acknowledged in the Naya Kashmir manifesto of 1944, Sheikh arguably envisioned a model that mirrored the semi-autonomous international status accorded to Ukraine and Belarus within the USSR. This would have created a “one country, two systems” (economic, administrative, and constitutional) arrangement, akin to the relationship between Hong Kong and China today, an arrangement that the NC later claimed to inherit when it demanded the restoration of Kashmir’s pre-1953 status.

The PDP’s conception of self-rule extended this model and line of thinking, even as it made significant departures from them. Such was the pervasiveness of this political imagination that even the separatist groups, who otherwise rejected any settlement within the framework of the Indian constitution, publicly supported Article 35A when the provision was challenged before the Supreme Court of India. Even Syed Ali Geelani, despite his long-standing demand for Kashmir’s union with Pakistan, insisted that such a merger would have to be contingent upon the preservation of Kashmir’s autonomy. This was a contradiction and flew in the face of Pakistan’s foundational logic of Muslim mono-nationalism and the negation of regional identities.

The muddled and unprincipled discourse surrounding restoration of statehood

And yet, it was the demand for Kashmir’s autonomy that superseded all other considerations. The Sheikh Abdullah – inflected trajectory of Kashmiri politics, and the political imaginations it produced, drew upon Kashmir’s distinct historical trajectory, grounded in local conditions, and was justified through a framework of constitutional dualism. In other words, Kashmir’s politics could operate beyond the terms set by New Delhi.

Today, however, neither the NC nor the PDP – nor even the short-lived People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration – has been able to articulate what autonomy means in the altered constitutional landscape, beyond invoking nostalgia for an ambiguous pre-2019 status. While the restoration of statehood could have been an important milestone towards the reinstatement of the erstwhile constitutional protections, the discourse surrounding it has remained muddled and unprincipled.

The PDP has framed statehood and Article 370 as mutually exclusive binaries, whereas the NC keeps reminding New Delhi how the restoration of statehood would bolster the Indian state’s security apparatus, rather than as a step towards reclaiming substantive autonomy. Thus, the political terms of engagement continue to be defined by New Delhi with local parties confined to a reactive form of politics.

In Ladakh, in contrast, where it was often said the twain of Kargil and Leh would never meet, the two regions have come together in an unprecedented act of collective resistance against the political marginalisation accompanying the Union Territory status. More importantly, in demanding the Sixth Schedule status, Ladakhis have reframed the meaning of autonomy and belonging, grounding the two in the language of environmental sovereignty.

This new register of seeking autonomy covers within its ambit local citizens’ rights, preservation of local economy, employment guarantees, land protection with control over natural resources including lakes and minerals, thereby moving beyond the conventional administrative dimensions of autonomy. Within this framework, the perennially abused logic of national security must necessarily be reoriented to account for local environmental conditions and ecology.

In Kashmir, neither a unity of purpose nor a shared sense of belonging has been fostered across its diverse regions, as the reservation debate often reveals. Article 370 and the protections it once afforded have been systematically excised from contemporary political discourse.

Even when referred to, discussions around it tend to remain singularly focused on the superficial aspects like the erstwhile titles of Prime Minister and Sadr-e-Riyasat, rather than on the substantive vision that underpinned its protections. It is, therefore, unsurprising that army camps, hotels, and other constructions have proliferated over the years across ecologically fragile zones, even as the CRPF seeks to acquire additional ecologically sensitive land around Dachigam Park, and the recent amendments to forest laws further enable this assault on local ecology by allowing wholesale diversion of forest land for projects concerning ‘national security’ within a distance of one hundred kilometres along the Line of Control.

The earmarked 100-kilometre zone would encompass vast tracts of land across the Kashmir valley, Poonch, and Rajouri. While Ladakh’s generative form of politics translates autonomy into environmental sovereignty and control over natural resources, Kashmir politics and its discursive space continues to be dominated and defined by the BJP where national security trumps environmental concerns.

Instead of articulating a positive vision of autonomy that takes into account the present realities while remaining anchored in its historical context, political groups have resigned themselves to a reactive form of politics defined primarily by opposition to the BJP. While this may seem sensible, it ultimately proves counterproductive as the BJP and its policies gain the political centre-stage, making it an integral part of Kashmir’s political discourse.

The debate around the restoration of statehood is a case in point. The result is the near-total colonisation of the discursive space by the BJP, which dictates the very terms of political engagement, leaving regional parties trapped in a perpetual cycle of reactions rather than creating the conditions for a generative form of politics along the lines of Ladakh’s demands for autonomy. This, in turn, facilitates the BJP’s deeper incursions in the Kashmir valley. It is telling, therefore, that the BJP has appointed a Kashmiri-speaking leader of the opposition who engages with the people in the local tongue, something that even the scions of the NC and PDP cannot do.

The apparent abandonment, if not negation, of the historical legacy that Kashmiri politics has inherited, coupled with its resigned acceptance, even subservience, to the BJP’s discursive framework, has created conditions in which the NC, within the span of a single year, has been displaced by the very party held responsible for the current state of affairs in Kashmir.

A vicious cycle

This reactive form of politics contains within it the conditions of its own repudiation i.e., one opposition actor can be supplanted by another who appears more credible or legitimate in performing the task of opposing the BJP. This is a vicious cycle, and while political parties register transient victories and losses, in the ultimate analysis it is the erstwhile permanent resident that is dispossessed, just as the region’s environment and ecology remain ever more at risk.

When Sheikh Abdullah returned to power in 1975 after signing the Kashmir Accord with Indira Gandhi, he was asked in an interview whether he was satisfied with what the Accord had granted Kashmir. He replied that in politics there is no such thing as “absolute satisfaction”, adding that politics is “the art of the possible”. This old adage is originally attributed to Otto von Bismarck, who had also added that politics is “the art of the next best”, which Sheikh Abdullah notably omitted.

While the restoration of the pre-1953 status was the original demand, settling for a diluted version became, in his view, the next best thing. Even in the tragedy of the Kashmir Accord, Sheikh could claim a measure of victory, as the Accord’s first clause affirmed that the constitutional relationship between Kashmir and India would continue to be governed by Article 370.

This clause, at the very least, preserved the discursive conditions necessary for a distinct Kashmiri political imagination. Post-2019, however, that discursive space has been obliterated and the terms set by the BJP reign supreme ushering in a brand of politics that is devoid of meaning. To conclude in the famous words of Karl Marx, history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.

Zaid Deva is a lawyer and a DPhil Candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford.

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