Mehbooba Mufti: Time To Do Her Homework

The deed done, J&K’s first woman chief minister needs to get down to the task of effective governance

- Asit Jolly And Naseer Ganai

For the second time over the course of 12 completely unpredictable months, things finally appear to be looking up in Jammu & Kashmir. The people of India’s most troubled frontline state, deeply fissured along religious, political and ideological lines, prepare for yet another historic tryst with their collective destiny.

Twelve months after her father Mufti Mohammad Sayeed cobbled together an arduous alliance—variou sly described as ‘antithetical’, an ‘impossible-to-sustain coming together of magnetic opposites’ or ‘a coalition between the north and the south’— with the Bharatiya Janata Party, 56-year-old Mehbooba Mufti, firebrand chief of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), assumes the mantle as J&K’s chief minister. Happily, she is the first woman to land the top job in the state’s long and troubled history.

And though this comes her way in the wake of a great personal tragedy— the untimely demise of her father at Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences on January 7 morning— Mehbooba faces a decidedly daunting set of challenges.

Amid summers in Fairview Cottage in Srinagar and winters at the sprawling CM House along Jammu’s Wazarat Road—her designated official residences as CM—Mehbooba will be called upon to embark on precarious balancing acts: between Srinagar and New Delhi; between the picturesque Kashmir Valley and an increasingly restive Jammu region; between her predominantly Muslim PDP long fed on a diet of ‘soft separatism’ and the primarily Hindu nationalist BJP rearing to make inroads into the Valley.