Mehbooba Mufti risks losing her popularity and irking her party ranks by using New Delhi’s rulebook to deal with the unrest in Kashmir.
Among the main-stream leaders in Valley, often locally referred as pro-India politicians to some-times distinguish them from their separatist counterparts, Mehbooba Mufti had a widely acknowledged claim to some redeeming difference. But this is a distinction which now stands irreparably blurred by her response to the latest burst of mass anger over the death of the Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8.
Around 60 people have lost their lives in more than a month of ferocious ferment; over 5,000 are injured, some of them critically; around 100 stare at a complete or partial loss of eye-sight; another 50 look set to be maimed by bullet or pellet injuries.
The mass revulsion and the anger that simmers as a result has left Mehbooba’s painstakingly built political standing in tatters and unravelled her image as a soft-separatist pro-Kashmir leader who once mourned the deaths of militants at their homes.
Though like Omar Abdullah, her political opponent, Mehbooba also comes from a privileged political background — she is the daughter of Congress stalwart and the former J&K Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed — her path to power was not easy. She had to pave it cobblestone by cobblestone after beginning her political journey by contesting and winning 1996 Assembly election from Anantnag on a Congress ticket. She later floated PDP in 1999 with her father to take on the decades old political monopoly of National Conference — albeit then reeling from its roughneck rule rife with corruption and human rights abuse.
It was a time when separatists exercised a comprehensive grip on the life in Valley. Then undivided Hurriyat shaped the Valley’s news cycle, set the political agenda and was the by-and- large exclusive go-to leadership for New Delhi and the diplomats from around the world to seek resolution to the Valley’s problems.
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