It is not yet a month since Omar Abdullah took over as chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, amid much hope and expectation; and yet it appears the honeymoon is over. In his haste to stitch up a coalition with the Congress he gave up a massive chunk of the new cabinet. With 17 legislators, Congress has 13 ministries, while the NC gets 12. The Congress, meanwhile, seems to have forgotten the lessons of the past; it was hoped that the party had moved beyond its tradition of using every weapon in its arsenal to ensure its direct influence over the seat of power in J&K — the reason that Sheikh Abdullah was toppled and jailed in 1953 and his son Farooq’s government was dismissed three decades later when he didn’t concede enough space to the Congress.

For the country’s oldest and biggest political party, J&K should have been a much larger issue than routine electoral politics. It has an insignificant number of Lok Sabha seats and thus very little impact on the electoral tally at the national level; so, for a national party, there are many more important things at stake than simple electoral gain. It is ironic that narrow thinking led the Congress to be pivotal in creating a regional and communal divide within the state to gain local political mileage — which divide now benefits the BJP, which has played such dangerous and opportunistic politics that it swept the recent polls through Jammu’s Hindu heartland. The Congress, meanwhile, has already started playing soft Hindutva in Jammu to try and regain its base.

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