Farooq Abdullah
By TEHELKA WEB DESK
National Conference president Farooq Abdullah has asked the party’s increasingly alienated Lok Sabha member Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi to resign from Parliament and seek a fresh mandate, prompting the MP to say he will respond to the veteran leader’s demand in the coming days.
Ruhullah did not accept or reject the challenge when asked about it on Tuesday, but indicated that he was taking Abdullah’s request seriously.
“It is not possible that Dr Sahab asks me for something and I don’t give it to him. It is not possible that I send him back empty-handed,” Ruhullah said. “He has asked for something at this age. I respect him. I don’t want him to ask me for something and I return it to him empty-handed. I will give an answer in a few days.”
Abdullah had issued the challenge a day earlier, questioning Ruhullah’s claim to an independent political mandate following his victory in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.
“If you think people voted for you, resign and go back to them. We will see how many votes you get,” Abdullah said.
The public exchange has brought into the open the widening differences between the NC president and Ruhullah, who has increasingly taken positions that have diverged from the party leadership on Jammu and Kashmir’s political future.
At the centre of the differences is the question of how aggressively the NC should pursue the restoration of Article 370, statehood and other constitutional rights that Jammu and Kashmir lost after the Centre’s August 2019 decisions.
Ruhullah has repeatedly argued that the political struggle over J&K’s constitutional rights remains unfinished. He has also criticised the political leadership for failing to regain powers that, he says, the region has progressively lost.
Abdullah, while maintaining that Ruhullah is free to raise Article 370 in Parliament, has questioned the manner in which the issue is being pursued.
“If he thinks Article 370 can be restored, he should take up the issue in the Parliament,” Abdullah said.
The NC president has also stressed the importance of the party organisation and its workers, arguing that candidates who contest elections on an NC ticket benefit from the support of the party machinery.
The differences have been building for some time, with Ruhullah emerging as a more outspoken voice on constitutional issues than the party leadership. He has also indicated that he could consider resigning from Parliament after taking his campaign for constitutional rights and protections to a certain stage.
Abdullah’s challenge now puts that possibility directly before him.
If Ruhullah resigns, he would have to seek a fresh mandate from voters, turning the dispute into an electoral test of whether his support is primarily personal or rests on the organisational strength of the National Conference.
For the NC, meanwhile, the episode raises a larger political question over the direction of the party’s opposition politics in J&K and the extent to which it can accommodate a leader whose public positions have increasingly diverged from its established line.
Ruhullah backs justice for Kashmiri Pandits, not revenge
Ruhullah was also asked about the reopening of cases relating to Kashmiri Pandits. He backed justice for the community but cautioned against turning the process into an exercise in revenge.
“Everyone should be aware of Kashmiri Pandits. Justice should be delivered. There should be no revenge in the name of justice,” he said.
His remarks came amid renewed attention to cases involving Kashmiri Pandits, with Ruhullah drawing a distinction between accountability for wrongdoing and retribution.
For now, the immediate political question is whether Ruhullah will accept Abdullah’s challenge and resign from the Lok Sabha.
His answer, he said, will come “in a few days.”
