How political habit replaced political thinking in J&K.
Jammu and Kashmir may be one of the few places where political surnames travel faster than political ideas.A child here may not fully understand constitution, fiscal policy, or federalism, but can often identify political families before learning district boundaries. That is not merely politics. That is inheritance entering public psychology.
Somewhere over the decades, governance in J&K stopped feeling like an open democratic field and slowly started resembling an old neighborhood shop, everyone already knows who the owners are, who will inherit it next, and who will sit at the counter after renovation.The board changes. The business remains familiar.
This is not entirely the fault of the dynast political families. They survive only when societies emotionally invest in familiarity. Dynasties are never built by politicians alone; they are co-authored by public habit.And habit is a fascinating thing.
Philosophers from Aristotle to Pierre Bourdieu repeatedly warned that repeated social behavior eventually starts appearing natural, even when it may no longer be rational. Human beings do not always choose what is best; they often choose what feels psychologically settled.J&K’s politics increasingly feels trapped inside that psychological settlement, Aal-baen and Qalam-Dawat.
People complain about familiar surnames all year, criticize them in tea shops, blame them in weddings, mock them on social media, and then quietly return to them during elections like tired customers returning to a restaurant they claim ruined their appetite twenty times before.There is humor in this. But also tragedy.Because repetition, after a point, stops being stability and starts becoming intellectual laziness.
That sentence may sound harsh, but societies too can become mentally comfortable. They can inherit political reflexes the way families inherit old furniture, nobody particularly likes it anymore, nobody remembers why it was bought, but somehow it still occupies the center of the room.This is precisely where J&K stands today.
The region is facing twenty-first century crises with twentieth century political habits.Its youth carry degrees but not certainty. Its economy survives more on resilience than structure. Its environment is visibly fatigued. Its institutions often appear emotionally older than the people they govern. Yet politically, public imagination continues to circle around a handful of surnames as though history outsourced leadership permanently.
One almost feels tempted to ask, Is J&K a democracy, or a long-running family franchise with seasonal elections?Again, humorous, but only partly.Because the deeper issue is not dynasty alone. Dynasties exist everywhere. The deeper issue is intellectual dependency on dynasty. That is more dangerous.A democracy weakens not when powerful families exist, but when society loses confidence in producing alternatives.And somewhere, perhaps unconsciously, J&K has begun doing exactly that.
Observe the language around politics here. Whenever a new face emerges, the immediate question often is not, What ideas does this person bring? but rather, Can he defeat saheb?or Can she challenge meem-saheb?.Notice the irony.Even alternatives are measured through the gravitational pull of the same familiar centers. New politics does not arrive independently; it arrives as reaction. That means the old political structure still controls the imagination of the new.This is why the problem is philosophical before it is electoral.
The issue is not simply who governs J&K. The issue is whether the region still believes leadership can emerge from outside inherited pathways.Because when a society unconsciously accepts that only a few surnames are naturally political,democracy quietly shrinks. Not legally. Psychologically.And psychological limits are often stronger than legal ones.
“Democracies evolve when ordinary people weary of political repetition rather than through politicians themselves. In Jammu & Kashmir, public discourse is shifting from predicting election winners to questioning a predictable political script and the inevitability of traditional dynastic rule (“Saheb” for the Abdullahs and “Meem-Saheb” for the Muftis). True democratic renewal and the future of J&K begin when society moves beyond these familiar surnames.”
The strange thing about inherited politics is that it creates emotional contradiction among voters. People simultaneously resent and rely on it. They criticize dynasties passionately, yet panic at the idea of moving beyond them.It is similar to those old Kashmiri households where a broken samovar leaks every winter, everybody complains about it endlessly, but nobody dares replace it because “yi chu purkhoon hund”, meaning, it belongs to the ancestors.Eventually, heritage begins occupying the space where functionality should have stood.This is what familiar surname politics risks doing to J&K.It converts memory into qualification.
Now memory has value. Historical figures like Sheikh Abdullah or Mufti Mohammad Sayeed undeniably shaped the political trajectory of the region. Their place in history is secure.But history is not supposed to become hereditary governance software.Every generation must justify itself independently. Democracy demands renewal, not genetic continuity.
Unfortunately, J&K often behaves as though political capability flows biologically through bloodlines, almost like hereditary immunity.It does not.Administrative intelligence is not inherited like eye color.Vision does not pass automatically from father to son. Governance is not transferred through surname chromosomes.And yet, political culture here frequently behaves otherwise.
This becomes particularly dangerous in a region undergoing rapid social transformation. Today’s Kashmir is not emotionally, economically, or technologically the same society it was thirty years ago. The anxieties have changed. The aspirations have changed. Even the vocabulary of ordinary people has changed.But politics still often arrives wrapped in old emotional packaging.The result is disconnect.
Young people increasingly consume a globalized world through their phones while remaining politically confined to recycled local binaries. They can discuss artificial intelligence, climate change, and international geopolitics online, yet during elections, public debate often collapses back into familiar surnames and inherited rivalries.A society cannot evolve intellectually if its politics keeps walking backward into emotional comfort.
And this is not an argument for reckless political experimentation either. J&K does not need chaos marketed as change. It needs expansion of political imagination.It needs teachers entering politics without feeling irrelevant beside dynastic charisma. It needs researchers, entrepreneurs, social reformers, environmental thinkers, and administrators entering public life without being treated like temporary guests in a permanently reserved political hall.Most importantly, it needs voters willing to psychologically detach leadership from inheritance.That is the real revolution, not electoral, but mental. Because ultimately, democracies are not transformed by politicians first. They are transformed when ordinary people become intellectually tired of repetition. Perhaps J&K is slowly reaching that exhaustion.
One can sense it in conversations now. People no longer merely ask who will win. Increasingly, they ask whether the political script itself has become too predictable to inspire confidence anymore. That is an important shift. Because the day a society begins questioning the inevitability of familiar surnames, democracy quietly begins breathing again.And perhaps that is where the future of J&K truly begins, not against saheb or meem-saheb, but beyond them.Saheb is for Abdullah’s and meem-saheb is for Mufti’s.
(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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