In the soft, blurry light of a fall day in Kashmir, Saqib Ahmad’s hands are occupied with the earth, but his head is wrestling with an abstract world of promises. Working on his apple orchard on the mild slopes outside Wailoo, in north Kashmir’s Baramulla, he is speaking not as an ideologue but as a practical man measuring time not in agricultural cycles but in terms of governments. He knows that the soil does not lie; it produces what is demanded. As for politics, he has learned it might often be different.

“People voted with hope, but what they got was disappointment," he is steady, but his voice carries a wisdom that years of working may not have given him. “Whether it is jobs for young people or infrastructure improvement, all that has been promised is just talk."

Saqib’s complaint is not an individual grievance, but rather a widely shared refrain, a cacophony of disillusionment that is reverberating across the villages and towns of Kashmir. A year after the National Conference (NC) led by Omar Abdullah came to power, and with a populist manifesto trumpeting a wide range of promises, local sentiments, rather than feasting, have been expressed in terms of a ledger being tallied. The columns, for many, simply do not add up. As this is recalibrated, the story of the previous administration – the time of the Governor’s rule and then the Lieutenant Governor’s rule – is being recalled not as a “golden" time, but a time of effective, albeit quiet, administrative delivery. The gap between the lofty political rhetoric of the elected administration and the technical, bureaucratic delivery of an administration led by the centre is at the heart of Kashmir’s contemporary and profoundly intellectual political discourse.

Often, in the town of Pulwama, the hum of generators often competes with the call to prayer. Zubair, a small business owner, whose shop, as irony, sells the happiness of consuming electrical goods but also hears the pain of having to endure power cuts, especially in winters, lives this dissonance and tension every day. Zubair pulls out a big pile of paperwork, not the paper that is often a sale receipt, but a large pile of unpaid electricity bills, out from under his countertop. This, all of this, is a personal collection of a breached contract.

“Great fanfare, free 200 units of electricity and 12 LPG cylinders to EWS for free. For weeks this was headline news," he remarks, opening his arms at the same time referencing his dimly-lit shop and the street outside. “But in reality, this is not visible. The bills still come and are sometimes higher. The subsidies, do they even exist at all? We heard the speech; we never got the relief," he said.

Muskan Shafi develops this theme of unfulfilled promises, of a divide between announcement and action, in a rented room above a garage in Srinagar’s Bemina area. A university graduate in History, Muskan is on the rotation of coaching jobs. For her and her peers, the most powerful, and painful, broken promise has been obtaining stable employment. The spectre of one lakh jobs looms over their daily lives.

“Women paid Rs 5,000 a month, one lakh jobs, none of this happened," she lists, the acronyms and the numbers rolling off her tongue as a bitter, repetitive mantra. “They were supposed to give us a future. We got a ghost. The only thing that bred was a lineup of unemployed, furious young people. A political promise ought to be a social contract instead of a campaign ruse," Muskan said.

“When you tempt the promise of dignity and employment in front of a generation and then take it away, you are left with a deep-rooted scepticism about not only employment, but much deeper; you are eroding the fabric of society," she said.

The change is not merely economic, or just relegated to the kitchen. But people do remember how LG Sinha stood as a saviour to the people, for students with grand aspirations and dreams of becoming meaningful role models, learned about free career counselling camps presented by the district administration during the LG’s tenure. “They told us about different courses, how to apply for scholarships, things we may never have known," Muskan declares. Every time we had the faculty available at the institutions, but that is no more a reality now, “that never happened before. No one from any previous government came to our village to tell our children about their future."

The criticism goes far beyond providing immediate economic relief, it is also an expression of the more meaningful accounts of social contracts that have gone unfulfilled. In the village of Wahibugh, Gh Rasool, a respected elder of the community with a long enough view of the political landscape, weighs in. He recalls other promises, other manifestos.

“They promised a monthly ration of 10 kgs of rice or atta for everyone to combat hunger. They were impassioned about implementing WADA: The War Against Drug Abuse so our sons could, at a minimum, be spared generational abuse that is worse than violence. They promised a Minority Commission, not just as an honorary body of elected officials but in protection of our very identity," he states while sipping a mug of noon chai (Salted Tea). “Which programmes were rolled out? A government is not a club for monthly speeches. They are judged on what they are doing, not what they are saying. The social fabric requires a consistent stitching of focused implementation rather than the colourful stitching of nothing. The silence is deafening."

However, to fully understand the governance narrative of Kashmir in complexity, one can take a village to assess political realities, and walk through the doors of some who voted – vote on the party most would be more ideal professional agreement. Politics may not often become a topic of a heated discussion at Mohallas now, however, the quality of life comes with different........

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