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The simmering differences within the National Conference (NC) between its Srinagar MP, Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi, and the party leadership have now entered an unprecedented phase. Following a public challenge from NC president Farooq Abdullah, Ruhullah has announced that he will resign not only from the party but also from his Lok Sabha membership. He has stated that he will formally submit his resignation on November 3, the 26th death anniversary of his father, Aga Syed Mehdi, who was killed by militants in 2000. The announcement transforms what had until now been an increasingly visible intra-party disagreement into an open political confrontation.

Farooq Abdullah’s challenge was itself unusually direct. In response to Ruhullah’s continued public criticism of the NC leadership, particularly chief minister Omar Abdullah, Farooq Abdullah argued that Ruhullah’s political standing had been built through the NC and its organisational support and if Ruhullah believed that his political standing was independent of the party, he should leave the NC, resign from his Lok Sabha membership and seek a fresh mandate from the electorate without the party’s support.

In effect, Farooq Abdullah converted an argument about party discipline into an electoral test of political legitimacy by posing the question – whether the massive mandate that Ruhullah got during the 2024 parliamentary election was his personal mandate or an NC mandate?

Ruhullah has now accepted that challenge. In doing so, he has taken an unusual and potentially consequential step. 

Dissent within the NC is not unprecedented in its long history, but the present episode is unusual in the post-2019 period because a sitting NC MP not merely disagreed with the party leadership internally, he has repeatedly and publicly challenged the political line of his own party, criticised the chief minister and participated in protests against the government led by his own party. His proposed resignation therefore has significance beyond the fate of one MP. It raises questions about the ideological direction of the NC, the ownership of its electoral mandate and, ultimately, the political future of the party itself.

The origins of the confrontation

The differences between Ruhullah and the Omar Abdullah-led government became publicly visible within months of the formation of the NC government following the 2024 assembly elections. One of the earliest and most striking instances was Ruhullah’s intervention on the reservation issue.

The protest outside the residence of Omar Abdullah, led by NC MP Ruhullah Mehdi, demanding quota reforms. Photo: Ubaid Mukhtar.

In December 2024, he led a protest outside Omar Abdullah’s residence in Srinagar, demanding rationalisation of the reservation policy. The demand had come against the backdrop of a steep increase in the overall reservation quota, largely following the extension of Scheduled Tribe status to new categories.

Importantly, this increase had taken place before the formation of Omar Abdullah’s government. The protest was nevertheless significant because it was an unusual instance of a NC parliamentarian publicly protesting against his own government and sharing the platform with opposition leaders. Prominent opposition figures, including Waheed-ur-Rehman Para and Iltija Mufti of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Sheikh Khursheed of the Awami Ittehad Party, were also present.

The reservation controversy, however, was only the beginning. What increasingly set Ruhullah against Omar Abdullah was not merely his criticism of individual government policies, but his interpretation of the mandate received by the NCe in the 2024 assembly election. Ruhullah’s central argument has been that the NC did not merely receive a mandate to form a government, it received a political mandate to seek the restoration of Jammu and Kashmir’s constitutional position as it existed before August 5, 2019.

In his reading, restoration of Article 370 and its associated constitutional guarantees lay at the heart of that mandate. The government’s subsequent emphasis on restoration of statehood, therefore, appeared to him as a narrowing of the agenda for which the electorate had voted. Ruhullah has pointed to the NC’s 2024 manifesto, which explicitly promised to strive for the restoration of Article 370, Article 35A and statehood, while also pursuing implementation of the 2000 Autonomy Resolution.

Article 370 versus statehood?

The emerging difference within the NC is not as much over its stated commitment to restoring Jammu and Kashmir’s........

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