J&K’s Mirage of Fulfilment: How National Conference is Betraying Its Own Promises

In the theatre of politics, words often carry an inflated moral currency, and nowhere is this more evident than in Jammu and Kashmir’s (J&K) post-election landscape. Recently, leaders of the National Conference (NC), including senior figures like Sakina Itoo, declared with remarkable confidence that nearly 80% of their 2024 election manifesto had been fulfilled within a single year. For a region long accustomed to political exaggeration, this claim is audacious even by local standards. It is also emblematic of a deeper malaise in our politics, the ease with which rhetoric is substituted for governance, and illusion for accountability.

The NC’s manifesto of 2024 was not a modest political statement. It was a sweeping charter of promises that appealed directly to the anxieties and aspirations of a people scarred by a decade of democratic void. It pledged to create one lakh jobs, provide 200 units of free electricity, restore Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and statehood, empower women with direct income support, and rebuild the institutions of social welfare and education. To claim that four-fifths of this ambitious agenda has been fulfilled in barely 12 months is to stretch political imagination beyond credibility. It insults both arithmetic and public memory.

Let us, for a moment, test this claim against the lived realities of ordinary Kashmiris. The promise of one lakh jobs was a centrepiece of the NC’s populist appeal, a symbolic restitution for a generation betrayed by unemployment and underdevelopment. Yet, one year later, unemployment remains among the highest in the country. No significant recruitment drive has materialised, no “Youth Employment Generation Act” has been enacted, and no structural reform has been introduced to absorb educated youth into stable jobs. The claim of mass employment is, therefore, not an achievement, it is a mirage.

Equally hollow is the assertion of having provided 200 units of free electricity. Across both divisions, residents continue to suffer erratic power cuts, inflated bills, and collapsing infrastructure. The idea of free power was meant to ease the burden of the poor. Instead, the poor still light their homes with uncertainty while ministers light their claims with self-congratulation. There is little evidence that even 20% of this pledge has been implemented.

The same pattern extends across other promises. The manifesto pledged an income support scheme of ₹5,000 per month to female heads of households belonging to economically weaker sections. No such programme exists. It promised 12 free LPG cylinders per year for poor families; none has been delivered.

The NC vowed to restore the Public Safety Act and repeal unjust detentions but jails remain populated with political prisoners. It spoke of free education up to the university level and the establishment of new skill universities; yet education in Jammu and Kashmir remains in decay, underfunded, demoralised, and directionless.

What we are witnessing, then, is not simply a failure of delivery but a deliberate inflation of success. The NC, much like other entrenched parties in Indian democracy, has mastered the art of symbolic politics: invoking people’s pain, performing empathy, and claiming redemption through words. The promise of transformation becomes a theatre of self-legitimation. When Sakina Itoo or other NC leaders claim that 80% of the manifesto has been implemented, they are not engaging in political accounting, but in political manipulation.

This manipulation rests on two pillars. First, it exploits the erosion of public scrutiny. In a polity where institutions of accountability, the legislature, media, and civil society—have been weakened or co-opted, falsehood travels unchallenged.

Second, it draws upon a historical amnesia cultivated by decades of elite dominance in Kashmir’s politics. The NC has long positioned itself as the custodian of Kashmiri identity and autonomy, but beneath this sentimental appeal lies a pattern of paternalism and inertia. Its leaders speak of dignity while presiding over bureaucratic decay; they invoke the Naya Kashmir manifesto of 1944 while offering no credible vision of governance in 2024.

In truth, the party’s current rhetoric betrays the very moral core of the movement it claims to represent. The promise of dignity, identity, and development, emblazoned across the 2024 manifesto, has been reduced to a performative slogan. Dignity has not been restored—citizens still navigate administrative humiliation and lack of representation. Identity remains contested, not defended, and development remains trapped in the fog of announcements and inaugurations.

This is not merely about one party’s failures. It reflects a larger pathology of political life in Jammu and Kashmir: the colonisation of hope by those who traffic in nostalgia. The NC’s narrative of historical sacrifice is meant to anesthetise the public against contemporary betrayal. It substitutes lineage for legitimacy, and sentiment for substance. Each unfulfilled promise is wrapped in the rhetoric of victimhood, as if the party’s failures were the people’s fate.

For ordinary Kashmiris, this cycle of deception has tangible consequences. It erodes faith in electoral politics, deepens cynicism toward democratic institutions, and normalises mediocrity as inevitability. When promises are so grand and performance so meagre, politics itself becomes a spectacle, one in which truth is the first casualty.

What is required now is a reckoning, not with slogans, but with reality. The NC must be judged not by its lineage or its lyrical manifestos, but by its measurable outcomes. Has unemployment fallen? Have welfare schemes reached the poor? Have electricity bills declined? Has dignity returned to the people? On each count, the answer remains ‘no’.

A year into its tenure, the NC stands exposed, not as the redeemer of Kashmiri aspirations, but as their recycler. Its claim of 80% fulfilment is not an assertion of progress but a confession of contempt for public intelligence. The betrayal is not only political but moral, the betrayal of truth, of accountability, and of the people whose trust has once again been used as currency.

In the end, democracies are not destroyed only by authoritarian rulers; they are corroded by complacent elites who mistake memory for merit. The NC’s claim of success is not just a lie, it is a mirror reflecting everything that ails Kashmir’s political class: self-congratulation without substance, sentiment without service, and power without purpose.

The writer is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Akal University, Talwandi Sabo, Punjab. He writes on democracy, political representation, and state politics in South Asia. He can be reached at waseembhat94@gmail.com. The views are personal.