John Dewey argued, nearly a century ago, that democracy is not primarily a system of government. It is a form of associated life, practised daily, not activated once every five years and left dormant in between. On his account, democracy lives in habits: in the ongoing willingness of citizens and their representatives to communicate, adjust, and answer to one another, continuously, not only at the ballot box.
That distinction should shape everything else. A mandate, properly understood, is not a five-year contract, banked at one election and cashed out at leisure until the next. It is a daily obligation. It should show in how a government treats the electorate’s aspirations between elections. It should show in how politicians deal with the very people who gave them power, not only on the campaign trail, but in the ordinary, unglamorous conduct of office.
Measured against that standard, a harder truth follows. A democracy can survive broken promises. What it cannot survive is a political class that has stopped expecting to keep them.Jammu and Kashmir has reached that point. Not through any single scandal. Through repetition. Election cycles. One consistent gap between what is promised and what is delivered. The gap has become the system. A mandate, in theory, is a transmission mechanism: the electorate’s aspirations, translated with reasonable fidelity into governing action. Here, the mechanism has been replaced by something else, a filter. Aspirations go in. What comes out is whatever best serves the political class’s own survival.
Two kinds of promise
Every manifesto here mixes two very different things. The first is grounded: roads, jobs, water, electricity, local governance. Achievable. Measurable. Failure can be named. The second is different: high political issues carrying real geopolitical weight. These claims are contested, not just locally, but nationally. Whether they can ever materialise is itself uncertain. Not this decade. Perhaps not the next. Not even the government in Delhi can .
Both appear in the same manifesto. Same font. Same confidence. Voters are rarely told which is which. That is not an oversight. It is marketing. An honest manifesto would flag the difference, with delivery timelines on the achievable promises and a clear label, long-term position, on the aspirational ones. Almost no party here does this.The second kind of promise is cheap. It costs nothing before an election. It speaks to real grief, and answers real historical injury. No party pays a price for raising it. There is a structural incentive too, separate from sincerity: cornering the current government costs an opposition nothing, and it costs the government everything, at least in the news cycle.
The dilemma every winner inherits
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah now lives this dilemma in real time. His party spent years opposing the post-2019 order. In office, it governs within that order. There is no legal route around it. There is no numerical one either.
This is not a personal failure. It is structural. Any mainstream party that wins power here inherits the same arithmetic. What follows is corrosive. A party abandons, quietly, what it once shouted loudly. No one explains the reversal. The next campaign simply repeats the claim, as though the last term never happened. High turnout, cycle after cycle, is not proof that voters believe the maximalist claim. It may simply be proof that they keep hoping, against the evidence, that this time will be different.
The ground itself has shifted, and the dilemma is sharper for it. Law and order has visibly improved. A sense of security now prevails in daily life that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. The threat of violence and terror, while never entirely absent from public memory, has become negligible as a lived, everyday reality for most people. This is precisely the moment for mainstream parties to move toward new, pragmatic realities, rather than continuing to hold the electorate hostage to sentimental appeals. Sentiment may still fetch votes today. It has already proved counterproductive once in office, as the same Abdullah government now demonstrates, governing within an order it once built its opposition around.
Climbing down, without climbing out
Parties do not need to abandon the big political question. They need to climb down from it. There is a difference. A party can still argue for high politics ,in courts, in Parliament, in public debate. That is legitimate. That is democracy working as intended.
What it cannot do is make that claim the precondition for everything else. It cannot raise the bar so high that governing becomes impossible. There is a sharper version of this discipline worth naming. Politics here should be conducted, in the main, over issues that are achievable within the reach of a UT set up government, or at most a determined national one. It should not be conducted, as though routinely winnable, over questions that even the national Parliament, with a working majority behind it, may not be able to resolve. Sovereignty questions, treaty-adjacent foreign policy, matters lodged in constitutional courts, sit beyond ordinary legislative reach, regardless of which party holds Delhi. Campaigning on them as a UT election issue misrepresents to voters the structure of the federation they live in.
This applies to opposition as much as to power. An inflated promise today becomes an inherited failure tomorrow, once the roles reverse. Political scientists studying party democracy elsewhere describe a similar hollowing-out: parties retaining the outward form of representation while the substantive link between promise and delivery quietly disappears. What is unusual here is the intensity. The gap between manifesto and government is often visible within a single term, not across a generation.
A leadership problem, first
Responsibility for keeping political discourse within a civilised civic register does not sit with the electorate. It sits with mainstream political leadership. Comparative work on party systems draws a useful distinction here: an institutionalised party system is one where elite competition, however fierce, observes shared norms of restraint, because leaders understand that the system’s own legitimacy depends on those norms surviving any single contest. A de-institutionalising system is one where that restraint erodes, contest by contest, until personal attack substitutes for policy argument as the default register of competition.
Jammu and Kashmir’s mainstream parties have drifted visibly toward the second condition. Verbal spats between leaders have escalated into personal mudslinging, with families, including mothers, drawn into exchanges that have nothing to do with governance. This is not a minor breach of etiquette. It is a leadership failure with a measurable cost. When leaders normalise personal attack as legitimate political currency, they corrode public trust in mainstream leadership as a category, making it harder for any leader, including future, more disciplined ones, to be taken at their word. A political culture cannot ask citizens to trust institutions while its own leadership models contempt for the civility those institutions depend on.
What waits while parties argue
Jammu and Kashmir’s unemployment rate has stayed above the national average through 2024 and 2025. Urban youth unemployment sits near 32 per cent, close to double the national figure. Government data for 2025-26 puts unemployment among educated youth near 46 per cent. Over three lakh educated young people remain registered as unemployed. Tens of thousands of sanctioned government posts sit vacant.
An unemployed graduate does not need these numbers explained. They live inside them. What they were promised was a plan. What they receive, too often, is a speech about the statistic they already carry. Recruitment exams get delayed for years; a twenty-eight-year-old waiting for a government post turns thirty-five before the exam is even held.
There is a quieter cost too. Decades of proxy warfare, sustained from across the border and marketed as indigenous sentiment, thinned the everyday networks of trust that healthy politics depends on. Past nepotism and patronage practices compounded the damage from within. Institutions loaded, term after term, with political favour rather than public service have become, for many, objects of anger rather than trust, generalising over time into a broader suspicion of institutions as such.
A long game, and a governance that cannot wait
The big political questions are not five-year questions. They are generational. They may never resolve. Either way, they remain legitimate. Contesting them is healthy, and always will be part of Indian democracy.
But everyday life cannot be hostage to that long game. Rising unemployment, a worsening drug crisis, social stagnation, and the anxieties that come with them do not wait for history. A villager waiting for a road does not wait for a constitutional settlement. They wait for the road. Let the big debate run on its own timeline. Let governance run alongside it, not behind it.
Jammu and Kashmir’s democracy functions mostly as an event. Elections happen, turnout is often high, results are respected. The everyday discourse Dewey described, sustained between elections, barely exists. A mandate is issued once, then forgotten until the next campaign repeats it. This is close to what the World Bank’s own definition of governance implies: not just the capacity to design policy, but the practice of carrying it out with citizens, continuously, in ways that keep institutions answerable between elections, not only at them.
What would actually change
Closing this gap does not require settling Kashmir’s deepest disputes. It requires smaller, harder discipline. Parties should separate achievable promises from aspirational ones, explicitly, on the page. Institutions should be insulated from patronage. Leaders should hold each other, and themselves, to a civic register that does not require voters to choose between rival camps of insult.
None of this ends the larger political argument. It only stops that argument, and the theatre around it, from swallowing everything else. Jobs. Roads. Water. Dignity. These cannot wait for history to conclude.
A common man in Jammu and Kashmir suffers, quietly, between two grand claims. One he can never quite believe. One he never quite receives. The measure of a healthier politics will not be whether the big question gets resolved. It will be whether governance, finally, stops waiting for it.
The author is a Research Scholar and can be reached at Samoonduri@gmail.com.
