The Jammu and Kashmir Assembly is in session, meeting for the first time in seven years.

For years, local political leaders, particularly from the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and National Conference (NC), decried the absence of elections as a democratic outrage. They took to the streets, held press conferences, and flooded social media with claims of “disenfranchisement", insisting that the Kashmiri voice was being suppressed.

Yet, when the government ensured peaceful and high-turnout elections in Jammu and Kashmir and the Assembly convened, the spotlight has been on how they are using this platform. Instead of addressing urgent issues like unemployment, education, healthcare, infrastructure, and the economy, certain legislators turned the assembly into a spectacle – a stage for grandstanding rather than a forum for crafting and voting on meaningful policies.

In one recent session, a PDP legislator, Waheed Ur Rehman Para, stood up and declared that “Kashmir is peaceful, but Kashmiris are peaceless." With the tone of an exasperated parent lecturing a restless child, he spoke at length about “repression, alienation, and suffering" – exhausting the dictionary of grievances. His remarks raise a critical question: Who is responsible for this supposed “peacelessness"? Is it the Indian government, as he implied, or the political elite – including his party – that has governed Kashmir for decades, perpetuating strife and aggravating the plight of its people?

Founded in 1999 with the promise of a “healing touch", the PDP once inspired hope that it would bridge the gap between Delhi and Srinagar, end violence, and curb the mismanagement of Kashmir-centric political parties. History, however, tells a different story. Some of the region’s worst security crises happened under the PDP rule.

Between 2015 and 2018, during its rule in Jammu and Kashmir, Kashmir saw a decade-high surge in terrorist recruitment. Stone-pelting protests became an organised phenomenon, with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) reportedly fuelling it as an industry.

Today, the PDP laments the imprisonment of 5,000 Kashmiri youth, conveniently ignoring that during their tenure, many stone-pelters were detained under the Public Safety Act (PSA) – a law they now criticise. For instance,........

© News18