A Governor disposes

Wednesday was the night of the long knives in Jammu & Kashmir and brought to culmination a game being attempted for long, particularly after the PDP-BJP alliance broke up. It didn’t work out due to a unity move from the opposition camp, taken at face value by New Delhi that triggered panic dissolution of the state Assembly. A day earlier, PDP co-founder Muzzafar Baig threatened to quit the party. It was meant to be the last push to a tottering PDP whose MLAs were slowly gravitating towards the Ram Madhav corner manned by Sajjad Lone. The game was slipping away from the opposition and a quickly cobbled joint list of the PDP, NC and Congress MLAs staked claim to form the government. Sajjad Lone, flat footed at the last stretch, tried to put up a counter list.

That the opposition was not making an attempt in earnest was revealed later by Congress veteran Ghulam Nabi Azad. And had it worked out, the three-party coalition would have been both unrepresentative, as there was hardly any representation from Jammu, and unmanageable with two dynasts doing backseat driving. This practical unfeasibility that would mar the longevity of any such arrangement was one among the multiple reasons cited by the Governor for the dissolution of the Assembly. But the moot question is: should not have the Governor given an opportunity to this arrangement when the state has already experimented with an equally, if not more, disparate PDP-BJP alliance?

Even assuming the Governor was prescient and the arrangement might have crash-landed, yet another episode of what-could-have-been will get added to Kashmir’s overflowing receptacle of hurts and wrongs. If New Delhi were to do a fact-check of all that went wrong in Kashmir, people’s will not getting reflected at the hustings will top the list, whether it is the vacant Anantnag Lok Sabha seat or the umpteen single nominee urban body seats. The body count of the past four years has also shown no signs of ebbing. While the PDP and NC can hope for a comeback, the Centre’s nominee Sajjad Lone may have been hoisted by his own petard.