Riyaz Ul Khaliq
Praise thy Lord! With the demise of former Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, the ‘North Pole-South Pole’ alliance of two ideologically diverse unionist parties in Jammu and Kashmir has apparently concluded. It hasn’t been a year yet that the PDP-BJP government is no more. It died with the death of its own principal architect.
Mehbooba Mufti’s reluctance to put on the shoes of her late father speaks volumes about the uneasiness of the two partners of J&K governance. It is public now—as how would the members of the former coalition government engage with themselves. It is not far past that the coordination committee of the PDP-BJP government met only once which had its important members missing. What then! They rule, and with a fist.
Given the situation Mehbooba is in (not her party), she has no option but to follow the suit and embrace ‘agenda of alliance’ – PDP’s holy script. If the former ruling coalition would have meant what they had put in to their common script, then the situation for PDP would have been far better. At least, Mehbooba would not have maintained a cryptic hush over her future plans.
Since the day, late Mufti bear-hugged PM Narendra Modi in Jammu, PDP’s fall from grace started. The ‘grace’ which they had tried to generate playing the card of “healing touch”, promising release of innocent youth, and what they had said, “restoring peoples’ faith in democracy”. However, all fell flat. The Mufti, who is being called as ‘Kashmir’s Man in Delhi’, too stood in the line of those who played in to the hands of New Delhi.
