by Tawheed Sheikh
The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) is once again trying to present itself as the conscience-keeper of Jammu and Kashmir. Today, its leaders speak with dramatic intensity about land laws, constitutional identity and people’s rights. But the people have not forgotten how deeply PDP itself shaped the very political reality it now claims to resist. No amount of emotional speeches can erase the record of their own decisions.
It was during the tenure of the late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed that Jammu and Kashmir witnessed the first political use of bulldozers against its own citizens, a dangerous precedent that others later amplified. That moment altered the relationship between the state and its people in a way that cannot be brushed aside. These were not accidental administrative decisions; they were deliberate political choices that cracked open the constitutional framework long before anyone else touched it.
Yet today, PDP suddenly wakes up with a heightened sensitivity toward the land bill, a bill they fully knew carries no constitutional validity in a Union Territory. The intention was not protection of the people but construction of a narrative, an attempt to play victim after helping engineer the very vulnerability they now lament. If there had been genuine political conviction, it would have surfaced at the crucial moments, not after the damage had already been made irreversible.
Mehbooba Mufti’s own public statements are a reminder of this moral inconsistency. When innocent youth lost their lives, she casually remarked that they had simply gone out to “collect milk and coffee,” reducing a tragedy to an explanation that shocked the conscience of the people. Today the same leadership positions itself as the ultimate protector of the populace, a performance that collapses under the weight of its own history.
PDP’s political journey has been defined by a pattern of contradiction: speaking one language in Delhi and another in Srinagar, softening or hardening its stance depending on what kept them in power. Their alliance with the BJP was not forced upon them; it was embraced, even celebrated, at a time when the social fabric of Jammu and Kashmir was fraying. They gave political legitimacy to forces that later dismantled every constitutional safeguard of the state. And when the consequences of those decisions unfolded, they retreated into emotional rhetoric, hoping the people would forget who opened the door in the first place.
Today, when PDP talks about land, identity or the rights of the people, the public listens but without trust. The memory of the last two decades is too vivid and too painful. Kashmir has learnt the cost of leaders who change positions like costumes, who practise selective outrage and who enter alliances not for the people but for power.
This moment in Jammu and Kashmir’s history demands sincerity, clarity and courage, qualities that cannot be performed or manufactured. What the people need is principled consistency, not theatrics from those who helped sow the seeds of the very crisis they now pretend to mourn.
Author is a political analyst. He can be mailed at mlabandipora@gmail.com
