Every generation in Kashmir produces a politician who mistakes applause for arithmetic. Agha Syed Ruhullah Mehdi, Member of Parliament from Srinagar, is the latest to conflate the two in public. He styles himself a “rebel for a cause,” accuses his own National Conference leadership of ideological drift, and insists the party is reneging on a mandate it once campaigned to secure. It is theatre of a high order, but not, by itself, a strategy for political permanence. Before Kashmir anoints another custodian of its conscience, it is worth interrogating what such dissidence actually purchases and what history has done to everyone who attempted it before him.

Dissent without departureRuhullah’s censure of his own party has been unusually indiscreet for a sitting MP within a ruling coalition. He has accused the National Conference of normalising the post-2019 status quo, claimed the party is abdicating a mandate for constitutional restoration and complained openly of exclusion from internal deliberations. He has demanded that coalition allies apologise for their complicity in the abrogation. This is a rebuke landing as forcefully on his own alliance as on the opposition. This is not the idiom of a contented party man.

It is, however, the idiom of a man who has never once threatened to leave. That omission is the entire story, since Kashmir’s political ledger is crowded with ambitious men who spoke like insurgents and discovered what insurgency without institutional scaffolding is worth.

The graveyard both parties builtIf we begin with the National Conference itself. When Ghulam Mohammad Shah engineered his 1984 defection with Delhi’s blessing and briefly occupied the chief minister’s chair, it appeared, momentarily, to herald a genuine challenge to Abdullah hegemony. It collapsed within two........

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