Opinion | One Wound, One Kashmir How the Rajiv–Farooq Accord and the 1987 Election Broke a Shared Faith in Democracy

For every Kashmiri family—Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, or of any other faith—whose night of suffering has yet to see dawn.

There is a kind of grief that does not belong to one community. It settles over an entire land—over every home that lost a son, every family that lost a homeland, and every child who grew up knowing conflict before normalcy. Kashmir carries that kind of grief.

For too long, the story of 1986–87 has been told as a Muslim story, a Hindu story, or a story belonging only to one political camp. It is none of these things alone. It is a Kashmiri story—shared by Pandits forced from their ancestral homes, Muslim families who buried sons in unmarked graves, Sikh households that watched their neighbourhoods empty, and ordinary voters who queued patiently at polling stations in 1987, believing that a ballot paper might be more powerful than a gun.

This is an appeal to remember that shared wound honestly and to ask, diplomatically but without flinching, what happened to the faith of a people who once believed that democracy could answer them.

A Political Arrangement, a Public Wound

The understanding reached between Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress and National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah, which enabled Abdullah to return to the chief minister’s office in November 1986, was presented to the country as ordinary politics: two major parties finding common ground.

Political arrangements, however, are never judged solely by what leaders agree to in private rooms. They are ultimately judged by how ordinary citizens receive them—in the street, in the mosque, in the temple, in the gurdwara, and at the kitchen table.

For many people in the Valley, the National Conference had long claimed to represent a distinct regional identity and Kashmir’s own aspirations. Congress, by contrast, was widely viewed as the voice of the Centre. When the two parties joined hands, a perception took root that the region’s principal political vehicle had chosen accommodation with Delhi at a time when many Kashmiris, across communities, were demanding a more credible outlet for their grievances.

Whether that perception was entirely fair remains a legitimate question for historians. But one thing is clear: political legitimacy rests not only on what political leaders negotiate among themselves, but also on whether ordinary citizens believe they have been heard.

By that measure, the Rajiv–Farooq understanding became, for many Kashmiris, a symbol of decisions made above their heads rather than on their behalf. That perception would soon collide, disastrously, with the ballot box.

The Ballot Before the Bullet

This part of the story is often forgotten. It deserves to be remembered first because it complicates every simple narrative about how Kashmir’s tragedy began.

Before the gun became the dominant language of political anger in the Valley, many Kashmiris chose the ballot. The Muslim United Front emerged as an alternative political platform. It fielded candidates, held rallies, and campaigned among the people.

Kashmiris carried their grievances to polling stations rather than to the mountains. They did so not only as members of a particular community, but also as citizens testing whether the democratic promise was genuine.

That choice deserves to be honoured, not erased. The 1987 election was not simply a contest between political parties; it was a test of whether the Indian democratic system could absorb dissent without destroying the faith of those who expressed it peacefully.

Had that test been passed cleanly—had people voted, watched their votes counted honestly, and accepted an outcome they trusted even when they disliked it—the story of the following decades might have looked entirely different.

The forced displacement of Kashmiri Pandits might not have occurred in the winter of 1990. Sikh families might not have been left to bury the memory of neighbours who disappeared overnight. Muslim mothers might not have learned to stop asking their sons where they had gone in the evening.

Instead, the test was widely perceived to have failed, and an entire generation, across every community, inherited the consequences.

1987: When the Count Was No Longer Trusted

The precise scale of electoral malpractice in the 1987 Assembly election remains a matter of historical debate. No responsible writer should claim that every constituency was manipulated in the same manner or to the same extent.

Nevertheless, allegations of rigging, arrests on polling day, intimidation of counting agents, and the alteration of results became permanently embedded in Kashmir’s political memory.

The Amirakadal constituency became the most enduring symbol of these allegations. Mohammad Yousuf Shah, the Muslim United Front candidate there, would later become one of the central figures in this story.

Years later, former National Conference parliamentarian Abdul Rashid Kabuli alleged that Shah had actually won the seat and that the result had been manipulated against him.

These are serious claims. They should neither be dismissed casually nor accepted as settled fact without evidence. They deserve what they have never adequately received: a careful examination of the records, the collection of testimony, and an impartial historical and judicial reckoning.

If a democratic election was genuinely stolen from the people who trusted it, the loss cannot be measured only in seats. It must also be measured by the number of citizens—Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and others—who stopped believing that peaceful participation could bring about change.

From the Polling Booth to the Gun

Mohammad Yousuf Shah would later be known to the world as Syed Salahuddin. Yasin Malik, who was associated with the same political campaign, would later become one of the most prominent figures in the armed movement that followed.

Their later paths do not prove that a single election caused the insurgency. Such a claim would reduce a complex history to a slogan. The roots of Kashmir’s armed conflict were political, historical, social, regional, and international all at once.

However, 1987 occupies an outsized place in that history because, for many Kashmiris, it became living proof that the constitutional path could not be trusted.

Once that belief takes hold, the space for more dangerous alternatives does not shrink; it expands. Its consequences are felt by everyone living in its shadow, regardless of faith.

Within only a few years, the Kashmiri Pandit community—custodians of a civilisational presence in the Valley stretching back millennia—was driven from its homes by threats, targeted killings, and an atmosphere of terror that made ordinary life impossible.

This displacement ranks among the most painful chapters of modern Indian history. It deserves to be named plainly rather than folded quietly into a footnote.

The Valley’s small but historic Sikh community also lived through those years under a shadow of fear, while its losses were too often omitted from the broader reckoning.

Kashmari Muslims—the Valley’s largest community—also paid an immense cumulative price: sons who disappeared into militancy or custody and never returned, civilians caught between crossfire and curfew, and decades of ordinary life postponed indefinitely.

No community’s grief cancels another’s. No hierarchy of suffering serves the truth.

What connects a Pandit family that fled Habba Kadal, a Sikh family that buried its dead quietly, and a Muslim family that never learned what happened to a missing son is not a competition over whose loss matters more.

It is a shared wound: a democratic promise that broke in 1987, followed by consequences that spared no community in the Valley.

Why Memory Must Be Shared

Collective memory is never simply a record of what happened; it is also what a community chooses to carry forward.

A memory held by only one community, while the losses of others remain unrecorded, is not collective memory. It is a partial account mistaken for the whole truth.

Kashmir’s tragedy will never be understood, let alone healed, while its Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh residents are asked to remember separate and competing versions of the same decade.

An honest reckoning does not ask any community to minimise its suffering to make room for another’s. It asks that each community’s grief be given equal dignity, documentation, and the right to be heard within a single, shared account of what happened to Kashmir and why.

That is not merely a moral aspiration. It is also the only credible foundation on which any future political settlement can be built.

The National Conference Must Answer

The National Conference has every right to defend its record, and no political party can reasonably be asked to remember only its defeats.

But no party can credibly present itself as the custodian of Kashmiri aspirations—of every Kashmiri’s aspirations, not those of one community alone—while leaving the darkest questions surrounding 1987 permanently unexamined.

The question is not whether today’s party leadership personally participated in events that took place nearly four decades ago. The question is institutional: was the democratic mandate of the people—all the people, in every constituency and from every community—honestly respected in 1987?

If the answer is yes, the evidence should be produced to demonstrate it. If the answer is no, that too should be established plainly and without evasion.

A mature political institution does not fear its own history. Only an insecure one does.

Congress, Too, Owes an Answer

Congress cannot reasonably be blamed for every consequence that unfolded during the four decades after 1987. But neither can the political choices made in 1986 be treated as though they occurred in isolation from what followed.

The right question is not, “Who caused Kashmir’s entire tragedy?” No single actor did. The narrower and more answerable question is: which political decisions weakened Kashmiris’ trust in the democratic process, and what responsibility do those who made them bear?

Any democracy secure in its institutions should be willing to answer a question posed in those terms.

A Wound That Refuses to Close

Sajad Gani Lone and the Peoples Conference have repeatedly raised allegations surrounding the 1987 election and demanded an independent investigation.

Whatever one’s view of his politics, this persistence demonstrates something larger than the interest of any one party: 1987 remains politically alive because its central questions have never been resolved.

Nearly four decades later, Kashmiris from every community are still, in effect, arguing about what happened to their votes.

That should trouble anyone who believes that democratic institutions derive their strength from public trust rather than from the mere passage of time.

Time may soften the edges of memory, but it cannot settle a disputed fact.

The People Behind the Politics

It would be a grave error to allow 1987 to become, once again, a weapon in a contest between political parties. The real stakeholders were never the parties; they were the people.

They were the voters who queued at polling stations believing that their ballots mattered. They were the young men and women who chose politics over violence and paid a price for that choice. They were the Pandit families uprooted from ancestral homes they may never see again.

They were the Sikh families who lived through the same fear in comparative silence. They were the Muslim families who lost sons to militancy, custody, crossfire, and decades of postponed ordinary life.

They were the security personnel who never returned home, the children raised on curfew rather than childhood, the mothers who waited, and the fathers who buried their dead.

The tragedy belongs to Kashmir as a whole—to a shared homeland, not to any single community’s claim upon it.

A Question Without an Expiry Date

Should the people of Kashmir, whatever their faith, be asked to trust political parties that remember only history’s convenient chapters? Or should they simply be asked to forget, as though forgetting were itself a form of resolution?

No democracy secure in its legitimacy should ask its citizens to forget when they are asking for the truth.

Justice delayed does not vanish, but delay can diminish its meaning and credibility. Silence, however, should never stand in for history’s final verdict—not for Pandits still displaced from their homeland, not for Sikh families whose losses rarely appear in history books, and not for Muslim families still waiting to learn what happened to those who never returned.

What an Honest Reckoning Would Require

Kashmir does not need another partisan retelling of 1987. It needs an honest and inclusive examination—one credible enough to be trusted by every community that lived through the consequences of that decade.

A genuinely independent, judicially supervised inquiry should examine the 1987 election on its merits. It should draw on surviving electoral records, complaints from polling and counting days, arrest records, official correspondence, and witness testimony.

With equal seriousness, the same process should document the displacement of the Kashmiri Pandit community, the largely unrecorded losses suffered by Kashmir’s Sikh residents, and the decades-long toll borne by Kashmiri Muslim families.

These should not be treated as three separate inquiries competing for attention. They should be understood as interconnected chapters of a single, shared history that has never been fully documented.

The purpose is not retribution. It is truth, held in common and offered to every community with equal seriousness.

If particular allegations turn out to be exaggerated, an impartial inquiry should say so plainly. If they are substantially correct, the affected communities deserve an honest and public acknowledgment.

Where responsibility can be established, it should be recorded. Where it cannot, that too should be recorded openly.

That is how mature democracies should confront painful history—not by choosing which community’s pain deserves recognition, but by acknowledging all of it with equal seriousness.

The Ballot Must Not Betray the Voter Again

The lesson of 1987 should never be that Kashmiris must abandon democracy. It should be the opposite: democracy must become transparent and accountable enough that no citizen, of any faith, ever again feels compelled to abandon it.

A vote belongs to the voter—not to a party, a government, an alliance, or whoever happens to win a particular round of history.

Kashmiris of every community have the right to ask what happened to their votes and those of their neighbours without being called separatist for asking, labelled anti-national, or dismissed as pursuing a communal grievance when what they are pursuing is a shared truth.

The Responsibility of Today’s Leadership

Today’s political leadership—in Srinagar and in Delhi alike—has an opportunity that earlier generations did not fully seize.

It can continue defending every past decision as though defending it were the same as understanding it. Or it can acknowledge, without political calculation, that the suffering of 1986–87 and its aftermath crossed community lines, and that institutions, like the people who run them, can fail—with consequences that outlast those responsible.

The purpose of confronting 1987 honestly is not to reopen old wounds for political advantage. It is to ensure that they are never reopened by force again.

The truest tribute to everyone Kashmir lost across those decades—Pandit, Sikh, and Muslim alike—is not another speech marking another anniversary. It is a democratic system that finally proves itself worthy of what they endured.

A Debt to Every Community’s Children

The children of Kashmir—whatever faith they are born into—should not have to inherit their parents’ distrust as a birthright. They deserve institutions worthy of their trust.

They should be able to vote without fearing that the outcome has already been predetermined. They should be able to lose an election without suspecting that the count was stolen. They should be able to criticise a government without being treated as enemies of the state.

They should also be able to demand accountability for what happened to their grandparents’ generation without that demand being automatically reduced to one community’s grievance rather than recognised as a shared Kashmiri concern.

That is what a functioning democracy is supposed to offer. It is the debt this generation owes to the next—every next generation, in every Kashmiri home, of every faith.

The Final Question

History cannot be written only by those who happened to win an election. It must also remember those who believed they had won and were told instead that they had lost.

It must remember the young Kashmiris who entered politics trusting the ballot to change their future—and those who, when that trust broke, picked up a gun instead. It must remember those who were killed and those who simply disappeared.

It must remember the Kashmiri Pandits uprooted from a homeland their families had inhabited for generations. It must remember the Sikh families whose losses were never given their proper place in the record. It must remember the Muslim families who buried sons whose loss they never fully understood.

It must remember the security personnel and civilians who became casualties of a conflict none of them started.

That is why 1987 is more than an old election dispute. It is a warning to every democracy that watches how a state treats the trust of its citizens.

When people lose faith in the ballot, a nation does not merely lose an election. It risks losing a generation—and, in Kashmir’s case, it risked and lost parts of every community that called the Valley home.

Their loved ones cannot be returned. Their lost years cannot be given back. Their memories cannot be erased, and they should not be.

But their questions can still be answered honestly. Their history—the whole of it, belonging to no single community—can still be acknowledged.

Justice, even after nearly four decades, can still begin with one simple principle owed equally to a Pandit family in exile, a Sikh family that grieved quietly, and a Muslim family still waiting for an answer:

No vote was insignificant.

No community’s suffering was disposable.

No democratic betrayal against any Kashmiri, of any faith, should remain beyond honest examination.