There is a particular cruelty in watching a political marriage end in public, especially when both parties insist the other has broken faith with something larger than themselves. That is the spectacle Jammu and Kashmir has been offered this August, as Srinagar’s Lok Sabha member Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi and National Conference president Dr Farooq Abdullah traded accusations that go well beyond personal pique. Mehdi has now announced he will resign his seat on 3 November, the anniversary of his father’s assassination. Abdullah, for his part, has told him to go and test his standing with the electorate, warning him darkly to remember what happened to the “14 people” who once conspired against his own government in 1984. Beneath the theatre lies a genuine and consequential argument about what the National Conference’s 2024 mandate actually meant, and about whether a party can keep its soul while running a government inside a diminished constitutional shell.

A QUARREL WITH A LONG FUSEIt is tempting to read this as a sudden combustion, but the rift has been smouldering for nearly two years. Mehdi joined a student agitation over reservation policy as early as December 2024, after which he says the party leadership effectively stopped speaking to him. Through 2025 he pressed, in public and at party forums, for the National Conference to treat restoration of Articles 370 and 35A as a live commitment rather than a rhetorical inheritance, walking out of a working-committee meeting in May after a sharp exchange with Chief Minister Omar Abdullah. By December he was warning of a sit-in over reservation rationalisation and questioning what he called selective demolitions in Jammu. The party’s defeat in the Budgam Assembly bypoll this year appears to have hardened positions on both sides, removing whatever incentive existed for a patched-up truce. What has changed in August 2026 is not the substance of the disagreement but its openness — Farooq Abdullah’s decision to publicly demand resignation, and Mehdi’s decision to answer with a........

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