Whenever Kashmiri dynasts invoke “unity,” they conveniently distort history to mask self-serving political sellouts. Today’s PDP-NC monarchs howsoever hard they might try, to fabricate righteous narratives around their tenuous alliances, completely gloss over the fact that J&K’s history is littered with disastrous pacts - right from the 1947 Sheikh-Nehru and 1953 Bakshi-Nehru arrangements to the 1975 Indira-Sheikh Accord, the infamous 1986 Rajiv-Farooq Accord and eventually the Mufti’s own PDP-BJP/RSS “North Pole South Pole” alliance — all of which while pitched as being in “Kashmir’s interests” actually worked entirely against the interests of ordinary Kashmiris. While the current generation widely nurses the perception that the National Conference alone was responsible for the catastrophic, rigged elections of 1987, the stark reality is that the Congress party, of which Mufti Mohammad Sayeed was then the original Napoleon, was equally complicit. The genesis of that foundational electoral fraud also lay precisely in a manufactured “accord” between the Abdullahs and the Gandhis, packaged deceptively as a move in “Kashmir’s best interest.”

Though the electoral excesses unfolded in March 1987, the groundwork was laid a year prior when Rajiv Gandhi successfully placated both dynastic factions by doling out their respective shares of Kashmir’s political bounty. Under this unholy arrangement, Mufti Sayeed - then the local Congress president and Farooq Abdullah’s chief challenger - was quietly nominated to the Rajya Sabha, abetted by a cloak-and-dagger NC abstention that was to clear the decks for his induction as a Union Minister in Delhi in 1986. With Mufti comfortably rewarded at the Centre and Farooq returned to the Chief Minister’s chair, this self-serving “unity” set the stage for the Rajiv-Farooq Accord and the subsequent farce of the 1987 elections. Suitably rehabilitated within the power structure, Mufti Sayeed offered not a single murmur of protest against this betrayal of the democratic process, remaining an active beneficiary of the 1986 Rajiv-Farooq accord until he was later forced out of the Congress alongside V.P. Singh. Beholden to PDP any elected PDP MLA speaking half-truths on 1987 rigging needs to go back........

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