Kashmir today is ruled less by governance and more by timelines. Its loudest politics unfolds not in secretariats, power stations or employment offices, but on Twitter/X – a space where outrage is cheap, slogans are abundant, and accountability is permanently offline. Otherwise, how would someone’s dropping of a title from X generate so much noise? Hurriyat was an ideology; it didn’t work, it died; so did the title. What is so great or not so great about it? Kashmir’s leaders, pseudo-leaders, and media love to be a cesspool of stagnation.
Still, every morning, a familiar ritual plays out. A Kashmiri politician tweets. Another reacts. A third “clarifies.” A fourth accuses. Supporters amplify. Opponents counter. By evening, hashtags trend. By night, electricity disappears in half the villages. Nothing else changes. And those villages do not even know what is happening around on X. They don’t even know what is X. And still the nonsense has been played over and over and again and again.
Unfortunately, this is the age of Kashmir’s Vella Twitter Birds – hyperactive online, absent on the ground. In mainland India, a vella is someone who has time for everything except real work – someone who reacts to everything but builds nothing. In today’s Kashmir, politics has increasingly adopted this vella temperament: endlessly vocal, constantly reactive, and spectacularly unproductive. Everyone of them is unproductive. A burden on a common Kashmiri. Being a vella is typically that; not actually an abuse but a diagnosis of useless busyness. And Kashmir’s tragedy is that its politics has slowly drifted into this condition: full of sound, fury, and performance, but empty of outcomes.
Take the most visible political figures of the Valley: Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Sajad Lone, Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi, Waheed Para, Omar Abdullah, and a growing ecosystem of party spokespersons and ideological commentators. Each has mastered a distinct Twitter tone – moral outrage, ideological resistance, sarcasm, grievance, or constitutional lament. Their feeds are active. Their words are polished. Their engagement numbers are healthy. Media sides with either one, or all, since most are a fuel for accredited or unaccredited journalists.
But here is the uncomfortable question no one wants to answer: How do these tweets help a common Kashmiri get a job, electricity, or basic civic dignity?
Twitter Is Not Governance
Scroll through the timelines of Kashmir’s political class and you will find endless commentary on Delhi vs Kashmir, democracy vs authoritarianism, identity, dignity, autonomy, arrests, statements, condemnations, and symbolic resistance
What you will not find are sustained, solution-driven engagements on why transformers burn every winter, why entire villages face 10–14 hours of power cuts, why recruitment processes remain opaque, why reservation distortions go unaddressed, why youth migrate or rot in uncertainty, and why local administration escapes scrutiny
Tweets have replaced files. Threads have replaced policy. Hashtags have replaced homework. It is a rot, and it sucks.
Speaking vs. Working for People
Let us be blunt: Speaking about people is not the same as working for people.
A common Kashmiri does not wake up wondering what Mirwaiz tweeted today. He wakes up wondering whether electricity will stay long enough to heat water. He does not refresh X to read ideological battles. He refreshes his phone hoping for a job notification that never comes.
Reservation – now a daily curse in government job circles – is debated emotionally online, but no serious political figure has produced a clear, data-backed, legally workable roadmap to fix distortions. Everyone tweets. Nobody drafts.
Electricity? Every winter, the same outrage. Same statements. Same assurances. Same darkness. Bloody darkness.
Employment? Everyone agrees unemployment is a “serious concern.” Yet no one explains why recruitment calendars collapse, why selection lists stall, or why accountability never travels upward.
The tragedy is not ideological difference. It is political laziness disguised as activism.
Many Kashmiri politicians today behave like commentators, not administrators; influencers, not reformers; and moral judges, not problem-solvers.
They react faster to a tweet from Delhi than to a transformer exploding in a village.
They issue statements within minutes on national controversies but remain silent for months on local administrative rot. This is not resistance. This is convenience.
Twitter Politics vs Real Life Kashmir
On Twitter:
- Everyone is brave
- Everyone is principled
- Everyone is morally correct
- Everyone speaks for “the people”
On the ground:
- The people stand in queues
- Students wait endlessly
- Villages sit in darkness
- Families run generators they can’t afford
- Youth grow cynical, not radical – cynical
The real Kashmir does not trend. It is bursting at its seams.
In Short
Kashmir does not suffer from silence. It suffers from noise without substance. The Valley does not need more tweets. It needs fewer statements and more responsibility.
Until Kashmir’s political class learns that governance cannot be typed in 280 characters, the common Kashmiri will continue to live between power cuts, broken promises, and perfectly worded tweets floating above his reality.
