The recent effort to revive Mufti Mohammad Sayed’s “grammar of governance” as a guiding template for contemporary Jammu & Kashmir reflects a persistent tendency in Indian political commentary: the elevation of individual political style over structural analysis. By contrasting Mufti’s incremental pragmatism with Omar Abdullah’s more publicly assertive posture, such accounts reduce a complex political struggle to questions of temperament and technique. This framing is not merely incomplete, it is misleading. A more grounded analysis would shift focus from personalities to structures of power and the changing nature of BJP-led New Delhi’s relationship with the Jammu and Kashmir.

Any attempt to generalise from Mufti Mohammad Sayed’s tenure between 2002 to 2005 to the present must confront a basic fact: the institutional context has undergone a qualitative transformation. The Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act significantly curtailed the powers of elected institutions, concentrating authority in the office of the Lieutenant Governor and, by extension, the central government.

To describe the current arrangement as one of “dual power” is analytically imprecise. No such equilibrium exists in Jammu & Kashmir today. The asymmetry is decisive, with the central government retaining overwhelming administrative control. In this context, the invocation of Mufti’s methods serves less as a viable roadmap and more as a nostalgic abstraction, detached from present realities. The argument that Mufti would have handled post-2019 Jammu and Kashmir with greater finesse assumes that the current constraints are merely administrative. They are not. The abrogation of Article 370 and the bifurcation of the state into Union Territories represented a structural rupture, one that no amount of “back-channel understanding” or bureaucratic co-optation could have softened. The comparison to Mufti’s earlier tenure ignores that the rules of the game have fundamentally changed.

The anecdote about converting a “blatantly partisan” Deputy Commissioner rather than transferring him is presented as evidence of Mufti’s realpolitik. But this approach has costs. A governance model built on co-opting rather than holding accountable produces a civil service that is neither loyal nor competent—only opportunistic. The dual-reporting structure that now plagues Jammu and Kashmir’s bureaucracy is, in part, a legacy of decades of such “conversion” strategies, which prioritized short-term political management over institutional integrity. It reminds me of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony: power maintained not only through coercion but through the incorporation of potential opposition into the dominant order. However, this strategy carries clear limits. By privileging negotiation and bureaucratic alignment, it reduces politics to a series of closed-door transactions among state actors and intermediaries. Such an approach may yield short-term administrative stability, but........

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