Jammu and Kashmir Police on Wednesday blocked two separate protest marches in Srinagar — one by the ruling National Conference toward the BJP’s Jawahar Nagar office, another by the BJP toward the civil secretariat — with barricades stopping NC leaders including ministers and sitting MLAs near Rajbagh police station before they could even reach their destination. Both parties are, notably, on opposite sides of Jammu and Kashmir’s still-unresolved statehood question, yet both found their marches physically foiled by the same security apparatus on the same afternoon. NC’s Sakina Itoo has vowed “every day is a day of protest” until statehood and Articles 370 and 35A are restored; the BJP, in turn, has accused the ruling party of using the issue as cover for governance failures. The politics are genuinely adversarial. The policing response, apparently, was not selective.
That evenhandedness is worth noting rather than dismissing, because it complicates the easiest reading of the day’s events. This wasn’t a case of one party’s assembly rights being protected while a rival’s were suppressed — both marches were stopped. But evenhanded restriction is still restriction, and the more important question is why an elected state government, now years removed from the special status revocation both parties are arguing about, still requires this scale of barricading and security deployment simply to prevent its own ruling party’s ministers from marching to a rival party’s office.
Jammu and Kashmir’s political narrative since 2019 has rested heavily on the claim that normalcy has returned — elections held, an elected government installed, Omar Abdullah governing as chief minister. Wednesday’s standoff sits awkwardly against that narrative. A functioning democratic normalcy doesn’t typically require police to physically prevent a sitting Education Minister and multiple MLAs from walking to a political rival’s office. Whatever the specific security calculus behind Wednesday’s decision, the optics work against the very stability the region’s political leadership, across party lines, has spent years trying to project.
None of this resolves the underlying statehood dispute, which remains a legitimate and unresolved question this newspaper has covered before. It does suggest that the mechanics of ordinary political contestation — marches, counter-marches, rival rallies — remain constrained in Jammu and Kashmir in ways unusual for any other Indian state with an elected government. Readers should watch whether Wednesday’s standoff becomes an isolated security decision or a recurring pattern every time Kashmir’s parties take their disagreements to the street.
DA Editorial Desk