When the grammar of politics is reduced to adjustment, ideology is no longer its foundation, it becomes an accessory, worn when convenient and discarded when burdensome.
Dr. Ashraf Zainabi
Haseeb Drabu’s articulation of the Mufti model has re-entered public debate with renewed force. Drabu claims that Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s politics was a coherent doctrine of managed contradiction, governance through calibrated compromise. But this neat formulation, while intellectually attractive, risks turning a deeply unstable political experiment into a retrospective theory of success.
Mufti Mohammad Sayeed was undoubtedly a seasoned and astute politician. His political career was built on reading Kashmir’s shifting electoral psychology with unusual sensitivity. Yet, to elevate this adaptability into a model of governance is to overlook the essential tension that defined his politics, the unresolved conflict between ideological identity and coalition necessity.
The 2014 PDP–BJP alliance was the most ambitious and controversial expression of this tension. It was presented as an “Agenda of Alliance,” carefully drafted to project balance between two radically different political visions. In theory, it was an exercise in bridge-building. In practice, it became an exercise in managing structural incompatibility. The real question, therefore, is not whether Mufti succeeded in forming a government. He did. The question is whether his grammar of politics was capable of sustaining legitimacy under conditions where ideological divergence was not peripheral but foundational.
Mufti’s approach can be described as classical political realism, power is fragmented, mandates are incomplete, and therefore governance requires accommodation rather than confrontation. In a volatile polity like Jammu and Kashmir, this instinct was not only understandable but, in many ways, necessary. However, realism without normative anchoring has its own fragility. When compromise becomes the central principle of politics, it risks detaching governance from moral and ideological coherence. This is where the Mufti model begins to show structural strain.
Unlike transformative leaders who attempt to reshape the ideological terrain itself, Mufti operated within it, negotiating its edges, not redefining its core. His politics was about managing contradictions, not resolving them. And in deeply polarised environments, contradiction has a tendency not to stabilise but to intensify.
The coalition with the Bharatiya Janata Party exposed this contradiction with full force. It was not merely a coalition between two parties; it was an encounter between two competing constitutional imaginations of India and Jammu and Kashmir. Supporters of the alliance framed it as a historic necessity, an attempt to integrate divergent regional aspirations into a single administrative framework. Critics, however, saw it as a profound ideological dislocation, where governance was pursued at the cost of political meaning.
Haseeb Drabu, one of the principal architects of this arrangement, had himself argued for its economic and administrative logic. Yet even the strongest technocratic justifications could not neutralise the political asymmetry embedded in the coalition. What eventually emerged was not synthesis but strain, competing narratives of identity, governance paralysis under ideological mistrust, and a widening gap between institutional functioning and public perception.
“The “Mufti model” of governance, characterized by perpetual negotiation in a divided society, acts more as a survival mechanism than a permanent solution. While Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s approach proved that governance under deep contradiction is possible, the eventual collapse of his arrangements suggests that such endurance lacks a stable normative foundation and offers temporary stability rather than true political resolution.”
The collapse of the coalition in 2018 was not an accident. It was an outcome embedded in its design. Mufti’s politics, by contrast, was not conflict transformation but conflict management within an ongoing ideological dispute. This distinction matters. In that sense, the absence of a rigid ideological stance was not accidental, it was structural. But the cost of such flexibility is that politics becomes vulnerable to being interpreted not as leadership, but as accommodation without direction.
The central flaw in Drabu’s Mufti model lies in its implicit assumption that equilibrium can be politically engineered in a deeply asymmetrical conflict environment. It suggests that governance can function as a balancing act between irreconcilable forces if the negotiating skill is refined enough.But Kashmir’s political reality has repeatedly demonstrated that asymmetry does not settle into equilibrium through administrative design alone. It either escalates, fragments, or reconfigures itself through rupture.In this context, the Mufti model appears less like a stable framework and more like a temporary suspension of contradiction. And suspension, by definition, is not resolution.
To dismiss Mufti Mohammad Sayeed as a failed politician would be analytically shallow. He understood the compulsions of his time more clearly than many of his contemporaries. He recognised that absolute positions in Kashmir politics often lead to absolute deadlock. Yet, recognising constraint is not the same as overcoming it. His legacy, therefore, sits in an uncomfortable middle space, neither a failure nor a success in conventional terms, but an unfinished experiment in coalition politics under extreme ideological pressure.
The real limitation of the Mufti’s grammar of politics is not that it embraced compromise, but that it did not define the boundaries of compromise. In politics, undefined limits eventually become expanding limits, and expanding limits eventually collapse under their own weight.
Conclusion| Beyond The Mufti Model: The debate around the Mufti model should not end in either romanticisation or dismissal. It should instead force a more difficult question; can deeply divided societies be governed through perpetual negotiation without a shared normative foundation? Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s politics offers one answer: yes, temporarily, and at the cost of stability.The collapse of that temporary arrangement does not invalidate his instinct, but it does expose its limits. Haseeb Drabu’s framing is valuable because it systematises this instinct into a model. But models in politics can sometimes obscure more than they reveal. The Mufti model, when stripped of its narrative elegance, appears less like a doctrine of governance and more like a description of endurance under contradiction. And endurance, while politically necessary, is not the same as political resolution.
(The author is a teacher and a researcher based in Gowhar Pora Chadoora of Central Kashmir’s Budgam district. The views, opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”)
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