There is a sound Kashmiri politics now makes with grim regularity: the press conference convened not to inform but to wound. In recent weeks, two of Jammu and Kashmir’s mainstream parties have supplied a fresh instalment of this genre — accusation met with counter-accusation, statement answered by insult, until any trace of governance vanishes beneath the noise. Workers are mobilised not to persuade but to protest. Leaders speak not to the undecided but to humiliate the opposed. It would be comforting to call this ordinary political theatre. It is not. What is being staged here is something more corrosive, and an entire generation is being made to watch it.
Political scientists have a name for the thing being destroyed. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, writing more than sixty years ago, described political culture as the pattern of attitudes a society holds toward its political system — not the constitution, not the electoral machinery, but the psychological substrate that makes institutions function rather than merely exist. They distinguished a parochial culture, where citizens barely register the state; a subject culture, where citizens receive government passively; and a participant culture, where citizens can shape outcomes through legitimate means. Democracies need a critical mass of the last. Kashmir’s mainstream parties, whatever their manifestos claim, are actively manufacturing the first two.
This matters because political culture is not inherited, it is taught. David Easton and Jack Dennis called this process political socialisation, transmitted through family, school, peer groups and, decisively now, the visible conduct of public figures broadcast live. A press conference is not an announcement. It is a civics lesson delivered to a watching public, whether the speaker intends it or not. When a party president uses that platform for personal abuse rather than argument, and a rival replies with street protest rather than rebuttal, the lesson is unambiguous: this is what political engagement looks like, this is how one wins, this is how one treats a rival who shares a constituency and a language, and often a family lineage of political involvement stretching back generations. That two parties chose, within days of each other, to teach this same lesson twice should embarrass them more than it appears to.
It does not merely embarrass. It indicts. This is not the ordinary friction of parties that disagree; it is leadership deliberately trading substance for spectacle because spectacle is cheaper and faster than the alternative. Explaining a land policy takes research. Answering a rival’s charge on jobs or investment takes evidence. Insulting them takes a microphone and nothing else. Kashmir’s mainstream parties have, again and again, chosen the path that asks the least of them and offers the public the least in return. Comparative politics offers little comfort here: societies that have watched their leaders normalise contempt for rivals did not drift into that condition by accident. Political cultures curdle through repetition, through leaders discovering that insult draws more attention than argument and deciding, cynically, that attention is the only currency that matters. Kashmir’s mainstream parties are making that same discovery in real time, and making it in a region that can least afford the lesson.
The danger is cumulative, not episodic. A single ugly press conference is a lapse. A pattern of them is a curriculum. Once leaders normalise insult, party workers absorb it as the acceptable register of loyalty. Once workers perform it in the street, ordinary voters absorb it as the acceptable register of politics itself. This is how floodgates open — not through one dramatic breach but through the slow, repeated lowering of what a public is asked to tolerate. Two hostile press conferences within a single week are not an accident of temperament. They are evidence that restraint is being actively dismantled by people who know precisely what they are doing, and who have calculated there is no cost to doing it. That calculation, so far, has been correct — no serious sanction has followed either performance.
“A party that cannot model the restraint democracy requires has no standing to lecture anyone about democracy’s superiority.”
It is worth being precise about what is being confused here, because the confusion is doing real damage. Party competition and political culture are not the same phenomenon, and conflating them is analytically lazy as well as politically convenient. Competition for power is the normal business of democracy: parties are supposed to fight for votes, contest seats, seek office. Political culture is the shared floor beneath that contest — the norms of restraint, procedure and mutual recognition that allow rivals to compete without treating each other as enemies to be destroyed. A healthy system can sustain fierce competition on a stable cultural floor. What Kashmir’s mainstream parties are doing is demolishing the floor while insisting the fight above it is business as usual. It is not. Every round of public insult narrows the space in which future disagreement can be conducted at all.
This failure is compounded by a second one, more damning still. Since August 2019, the political ground in Jammu and Kashmir has shifted, and not only in the ways critics usually list. Law and order has visibly improved. A sense of security now prevails across the Valley in a way it did not for decades. Militancy has declined sharply, and local recruitment into militant ranks has fallen to near zero — a change even sceptics of the post-2019 order concede. This is, by any measure, a rare political opening: a period without the constant security emergency that once crowded out every other conversation. The long-pending questions that occupy the electorate’s mind especially the youth are unemployment, land rights, reservation matrices, and the everyday grievances of governance. Whatever progress has been achieved between August 5 and the date the elected government took office is tangible and real under the LG administration; the ground has been set for political parties to carry it to its logical conclusion through their elected representatives. These are precisely the areas elected representatives are tasked to deliver on; they are not peripheral concerns but the core of the job voters handed them. Statehood, delimitation, domicile rules, a wholly reconfigured investment and administrative regime: these too are live and unresolved. This was the moment for Kashmir’s mainstream parties to offer a genuine alternative discourse, built for a landscape no longer defined by daily violence. Instead, with the space finally available to argue about jobs, land and rights, they have chosen to argue about each other. The real tragedy is what happens when they fail to deliver on these fronts, or wish to avoid accountability for that failure: they retreat instead to high political issues that lie well outside their own domain, matters that fall squarely within the Centre’s remit, which is better placed to decide them in the national interest of the republic. It is, for Kashmir’s mainstream parties, the easier path and they take it often. That choice, made at precisely the moment restraint was possible, says more about the calibre of this leadership than any manifesto does. The insults are not a distraction from that failure. They are the clearest evidence of it.
This should not be treated as a minor stylistic failing. Mainstream parties in Jammu and Kashmir have staked their entire claim to legitimacy on the argument that ballots, not bullets, are the answer. Every insult traded on a public platform undermines that exact claim. It hands ammunition to those who say mainstream politics in the Valley is indistinguishable from any other contest for spoils, conducted with less honour and more theatre than what it claims to have superseded. A party that cannot model the restraint democracy requires has no standing to lecture anyone about democracy’s superiority.
There is a version of Kashmiri political culture worth reclaiming, and it does not need to be imported. The region’s own Sufi and intellectual traditions carry a vocabulary of restraint — adab, a decorum owed to public life regardless of how sharply convictions differ. That inheritance would not require these parties to agree with one another. It would require only that their disagreement be conducted in a register their own grandchildren could be shown without shame. That bar is not high. It is currently, comprehensively, not being met.
So the question worth putting to Kashmir’s mainstream leadership is not which press conference this month was more intemperate. It is this: having chosen, repeatedly and knowingly, to teach a rising generation that politics is conducted through humiliation rather than argument, what do these parties imagine that generation will do with the lesson once it is their turn to lead? And if political culture, not the contest for power, is the true foundation on which any democracy rests, what foundation, exactly, do Kashmir’s mainstream parties believe they are leaving behind them?