By: Zahid Sultan ( Independent Researcher Based in Srinagar, India)
The significance of a legislature is not exhausted by the fact of its election. An elected Assembly acquires democratic legitimacy through the ballot, but it acquires institutional credibility through what it subsequently does with that legitimacy. The real test of representative government begins after the election: whether political representation is converted into accountable administration, whether public grievances are translated into policy, whether executive power is subjected to sustained scrutiny, and whether the institutions of the state become more responsive to the citizens in whose name they operate.
This distinction is particularly consequential in Jammu and Kashmir. The restoration of an elected Legislative Assembly in 2024 followed a prolonged period of political and institutional disruption. The election therefore carried a significance beyond the ordinary alternation of political parties. It was widely understood as a moment of democratic re-entry: an opportunity for representative politics to reclaim a substantive role in governance after years in which administration had acquired an unusually dominant position. The expectations attached to that transition were consequently immense.
The electorate did not merely vote for a Council of Ministers. It voted for the possibility that politics might once again matter in the everyday functioning of the state. That expectation now requires a harder assessment.
The forthcoming Autumn Session of the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly, scheduled from September 21 to September 30, will have seven working sittings because of three non-sitting days. The Speaker, Abdul Rahim Rather, has defended the arrangement by arguing that the length of a session should correspond to the legislative business before the House. He has also pointed to Jammu and Kashmir’s reported average of 28 Assembly sittings, compared with a national average of 24. The Opposition, led by Leader of Opposition Sunil Sharma, has demanded a considerably longer session to provide greater space for public issues and legislative scrutiny.
The immediate dispute, however, is less important than the question it inadvertently exposes. The issue is not simply whether seven working days constitute an adequate legislative calendar. The more fundamental question is what this Assembly has accomplished since the 2024 election and whether the political system has translated the enormous democratic expectation surrounding that election into a corresponding record of governance. This is where the discussion becomes uncomfortable.
The government cannot reasonably be accused of doing nothing. It has presented budgets, introduced legislation and initiated programmes in employment, entrepreneurship, welfare, agriculture, healthcare and administration. Mission YUVA, for instance, represents a serious attempt to diversify employment opportunities beyond the traditional dependence on government jobs. According to the government’s 2026–27 Budget Speech, 16,500 enterprises
had been sanctioned through banks under the programme, with nearly ₹800 crore disbursed; the government also reported that 7,650 candidates had entered government service during 2025 and proposed fast-track recruitment to another 23,800 posts.
These initiatives deserve acknowledgement. A serious assessment of the government cannot begin by pretending that every policy is either cosmetic or unsuccessful. Mission YUVA, in particular, addresses a structural problem: the inability of a predominantly educated youth population to depend indefinitely upon a public sector that cannot absorb everyone. Its emphasis on entrepreneurship, credit, capacity-building and market linkages is conceptually more ambitious than simply expanding government recruitment. But the existence of a policy is not proof of its success.
The distance between an announced scheme and an achieved outcome is where governance begins to reveal its real quality. Sixteen thousand five hundred enterprises sanctioned is an administrative achievement; the more important questions concern how many become sustainable enterprises, how many generate durable employment, how many survive beyond subsidised credit, and whether the programme creates an ecosystem capable of reducing dependence on government employment. Likewise, recruitment figures matter, but they cannot resolve the deeper employment problem unless they are accompanied by expansion of private-sector employment, productive investment, industrial diversification and a stronger connection between education and the labour market.
This distinction between administrative activity and political achievement is central to evaluating the present government. A government can announce. A government can allocate. A government can legislate. A government can inaugurate. But governance is ultimately judged by whether institutions work differently because those things happened. The Assembly should be the principal institution through which that difference is examined.
Yet the legislative record presents a picture that is more complicated than either the government or Opposition rhetoric suggests. During the 2026 Budget Session, the Assembly held 22 sittings and recorded 110 hours and six minutes of proceedings. Eight government Bills were introduced and passed. At the same time, 1,528 questions were received, of which 1,379 were listed but only 151 were taken up. The House also received 128 resolutions; 101 were admitted, but only four were taken up and none was adopted. There were 110 calling-attention notices and 2,231 cut motions.
These numbers do not establish legislative failure by themselves. Parliamentary procedure necessarily filters questions and motions, and the passage of government legislation is an important legislative function. But the figures reveal a significant institutional asymmetry. There is considerable demand among legislators to raise questions, scrutinise policy and bring public grievances into the House, yet only a relatively small proportion of that demand receives substantive parliamentary attention. That should concern both the government and the Opposition.
It also complicates the Speaker’s argument that legislative time should simply correspond to the amount of government business. The premise sounds pragmatic, but it risks defining legislative business too narrowly. The business of a legislature is not identical to the business of the executive. This distinction is fundamental.
The executive asks: What do we need to legislate? The legislature must also ask: What does the public need to know? Those are not the same questions. Jammu and Kashmir certainly does not suffer from a shortage of issues requiring legislative scrutiny. It suffers from an abundance of unresolved governance questions.
Employment remains one of them. The government’s recruitment initiatives are important, but public employment cannot be the only answer to an employment crisis affecting a highly educated population. The Assembly should be asking what is happening to vacancies across departments, how recruitment timelines are being enforced, how private employment is being generated, whether industrial policy is attracting investment, what happens to graduates after university, and whether entrepreneurship schemes are producing sustainable enterprises rather than merely processing applications.
The government has a legitimate argument that it is attempting to move the economy towards entrepreneurship and self-employment. But precisely because the claim is ambitious, the Assembly should subject it to rigorous evaluation. How many enterprises have actually begun operations? How many remain viable after one or two years? How many jobs have been created? What is the geographical distribution of beneficiaries? Which sectors are receiving investment? What proportion of applicants are women and young people from rural areas? What are the rates of loan repayment and enterprise survival?
These are the questions that transform a political slogan into public policy. Infrastructure presents an analogous problem. Jammu and Kashmir has witnessed substantial investment in roads, connectivity and public infrastructure. The Union government approved 3,566 crore in PMGSY-IV projects for Jammu and Kashmir in April 2026, reflecting continuing investment in rural connectivity. Such investment is undeniably important. But the relevant measure of infrastructure policy is not merely the sanctioned amount. It is the quality, timeliness and utility of the completed infrastructure.
How many projects remain delayed? How many have exceeded their original costs? How effectively are completed assets maintained? Does a new road merely shorten a journey, or does it connect farmers to markets, students to institutions and communities to healthcare? Infrastructure should not be understood as concrete expenditure alone. It is the physical architecture of economic opportunity.
The Assembly should therefore be examining implementation rather than merely applauding allocation. The same applies to urban governance. The forthcoming session includes proposed legislation relating to municipal governance and other reforms. But the crisis of urban governance in Jammu and Kashmir cannot be solved simply by altering statutory provisions. Srinagar and Jammu confront persistent problems of congestion, waste
management, drainage, public transport, land-use regulation and unplanned expansion. Municipal institutions require finances, professional capacity, planning authority and accountability. Legislation may create the framework, but institutions must make the framework work.
Here again, the Assembly’s task should be to ask what happens after the Bill becomes law. This is the larger weakness in the current political discourse: too much attention is paid to the production of governmental activity and too little to the evaluation of governmental outcomes. The problem is not unique to the present government, nor should it be presented as though Jammu and Kashmir’s governance difficulties began in 2024. Many of the problems confronting the Union Territory are structural and predate the current administration. Administrative centralisation, institutional weaknesses, unemployment, infrastructure deficits, dependence on government employment and weaknesses in local governance cannot reasonably be attributed to one government alone.
But historical inheritance cannot become an indefinite excuse for present underperformance. Every government eventually becomes responsible for what it does with the problems it inherits. This is where the political promise of 2024 becomes important. The election was surrounded by an expectation that the elected government would restore not merely representation but responsiveness. Citizens expected the return of politics to mean a stronger capacity to communicate grievances upward and receive institutional responses downward. The danger is that democratic restoration may become reduced to electoral symbolism.
Elections are indispensable to democracy, but democracy does not end when the votes are counted. A government that repeatedly invokes its mandate without demonstrating how that mandate has altered public administration risks converting electoral legitimacy into a permanent retrospective justification. The mandate is not a certificate of immunity from scrutiny. It is a demand for performance.
This is why the Opposition’s demand for a longer Assembly session cannot simply be dismissed as political theatre. If legislators require more time to scrutinise recruitment, infrastructure, education, healthcare, agriculture, municipal governance and public expenditure, the government should be prepared to provide that space. But the Opposition itself must rise to a higher standard.
A longer session is not automatically a better session. A month of slogans, adjournments and partisan confrontation would not constitute parliamentary revival. If the Opposition wants additional legislative time, it should demonstrate precisely how that time will be used: department-wise scrutiny, project audits, questions on recruitment, evaluation of budget implementation, examination of public-sector performance, scrutiny of Bills and concrete alternative policy proposals.
The purpose of opposition is not to make government impossible. It is to make the government answerable. That distinction is often lost in contemporary parliamentary politics. The government, meanwhile, should avoid an equally tempting fallacy: that efficiency is
measured by the brevity of legislative proceedings. A short session can certainly be efficient. But brevity can also become a form of institutional minimalism if it limits the opportunity for scrutiny.
The Speaker’s comparative argument- that other legislatures have held shorter sessions- is relevant but not decisive. The fact that some other assemblies sit for fewer days does not establish that Jammu and Kashmir has sufficient legislative time. Institutional adequacy should be determined by function, not by competitive comparison.
The real question is whether the Assembly has sufficient time to perform the functions expected of it. Does it scrutinise government expenditure adequately? Does it provide meaningful opportunities for legislators to question departments? Does it examine the implementation of major programmes? Does it provide adequate space to private members? Does it allow the Opposition to put alternative policies before the public? Does it compel ministers to answer questions rather than merely provide written replies? Does it follow up on those answers?
These are the standards against which parliamentary performance should be measured. This is where the concept of dogmatism becomes useful. Dogmatism does not necessarily appear as ideological rigidity. It can appear as an unquestioned institutional assumption. The government risks dogmatism when it assumes that the amount of legislative business is determined exclusively by what the government wishes to introduce.
The Opposition risks dogmatism when it assumes that the longer the session, the stronger the democracy. Both are incomplete. Pragmatism requires something more difficult: a willingness to adjust institutional practice according to the actual requirements of public accountability. If seven working days are sufficient for the scheduled business but insufficient for meaningful scrutiny of urgent public issues, the calendar should be reconsidered. If seven days are genuinely sufficient because the Assembly has adequate mechanisms throughout the year for scrutiny, then duration alone should not become a political fetish.
The problem, therefore, is not the number seven. The problem is whether parliamentary time is being treated as a constitutional resource or merely as an administrative commodity. Jammu and Kashmir requires a legislature that moves beyond the politics of episodic confrontation. It needs stronger committees, more systematic departmental scrutiny, greater follow-up on questions, serious examination of audit findings, meaningful discussion of implementation reports and greater attention to private members’ initiatives. Most importantly, the Assembly needs a culture of policy evaluation.
The government should periodically be required to place before the House a record of its major commitments: what was promised, what was budgeted, what was implemented, what remains pending and what explains the gap.
Imagine, for instance, if every major employment promise were accompanied by measurable indicators. The debate would then move beyond whether the government “cares” about
employment. Legislators could examine recruitment timelines, vacancies, enterprise survival, job creation and private-sector absorption. The same could be done for infrastructure, healthcare, education, horticulture and urban governance.
This would transform the Assembly from a chamber of political assertion into an institution of empirical accountability. That transformation is more important than whether the Autumn Session lasts seven days or seventeen. The government deserves credit for initiating programmes and for placing employment, entrepreneurship and welfare prominently within its policy agenda. But it also deserves criticism where implementation remains inadequate, outcomes remain uncertain or promises exceed institutional capacity. Such criticism is not hostility towards the government; it is precisely what representative government is supposed to accommodate.
Likewise, the Opposition deserves space to scrutinise the government, but it must demonstrate that it possesses more than the capacity to oppose. It must show that it can investigate, formulate and propose. The Speaker, too, has an important institutional responsibility. His role is not simply to defend the calendar. It is to defend the credibility of the House. That means ensuring that the government has sufficient time to legislate but also ensuring that the Opposition has sufficient time to scrutinise. The neutrality of the chair is ultimately measured not by the absence of criticism but by the confidence of competing sides that parliamentary procedures are available to them.
The deeper lesson from the present dispute is therefore not that the Assembly is necessarily too short or that the government is necessarily unwilling to face scrutiny. The evidence is more complicated than either claim suggests. The more serious issue is whether the extraordinary democratic expectation generated in 2024 is being converted into an equally extraordinary culture of institutional performance.
So far, the answer is mixed. There is policy activity, but implementation requires deeper evaluation. There is legislative work, but scrutiny remains uneven. There is political representation, but representation has yet to become fully consequential in the domain of governance. There are ambitious programmes, but their long-term outcomes remain to be demonstrated.
That is not an indictment of one government alone. It is a challenge to the entire political class. Jammu and Kashmir has already achieved the first requirement of representative democracy: it has restored an elected legislature. The harder task is to make that legislature matter every day. The 2024 election restored the ballot as an important source of political legitimacy. The next stage must restore the citizen as the central object of governmental accountability.
The Assembly should therefore not be judged primarily by how many days it sits, how many Bills it passes, or how loudly its members disagree. It should be judged by whether it can make the government explain itself. Whether it can turn grievances into policy. Whether it
can turn policy into implementation. And whether implementation can finally be measured in improvements in the lives of ordinary citizens.
The real question facing Jammu and Kashmir is consequently not dogmatism versus pragmatism in the narrow dispute over the Autumn Session. It is whether pragmatism itself can be made answerable to democratic purpose. A government should govern efficiently, but it must also govern visibly and accountably. An Opposition should oppose forcefully, but it must also propose seriously. A legislature should sit neither for spectacle nor for statistical comparison, but for the amount of democratic work that the public condition requires.
The election of 2024 created the possibility of a new political beginning. The Assembly’s unfinished task is to prove that it has become more than the institutional consequence of that election. It must become the institution through which the promise of that election is made tangible.
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