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Srinagar: A four-day visit by the 13-member Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs to Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh has stirred a political debate.

While the delegation met several influential people including J&K Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha and chief minister Omar Abdullah, the focus has shifted on those who the delegation didn’t meet.

The multi-party delegation, led by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, was in the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir to “review border security, foreign policy-related issues and conditions in frontier areas”.

“We are not here to look at domestic matters; that is not our mandate. We are the External Affairs Committee,” Tharoor told reporters. Tharoor explained that the delegation was assigned to assess issues related to Indo-Pak relations, Sino-Indian relations and the functioning of passport services in Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

But as the visit continued, critics started to raise questions about whether the delegation tasked with understanding one of India’s most strategically sensitive regions could afford to hear only from those in positions of power, without listening to the grassroots politicians and common people. For many political leaders in Jammu and Kashmir, these exceptions became the defining feature of the visit.

Government officials often point to improvements in security indicators, infrastructure development and administrative functioning. Political parties, rights activists and residents, meanwhile, continue to raise concerns about democratic representation, statehood and political engagement. Those concerns are unlikely to have been heard by a delegation that limited its meetings to official corridors.

The ‘normalcy’ debate

The debate intensified after Tharoor described “encouraging progress towards normalcy” in the region after........

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