Omar Abdullah is the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time. Don’t count on him to suddenly personify the change that the Kashmiris voted for in the last elections. That seems to be the unfortunate if unavoidable inference from the events of the past couple of months. From here on, it will take nothing short of a miracle to restore public faith in the state government. The history of the troubled valley suggests that the more likely scenario will be a relentless state of misrule on part of the state government and mistrust on part of the people punctuated by spells of sheer chaos. Until, that is, the inevitable change of actors takes place all over again. And so the tragedy of Kashmir, betrayal of public faith and abdication of responsibility by a succession of sons of the soil, continues to play out in excruciating slow motion.

With just a little more will to govern on part of the incumbent chief minister, it could all have been otherwise. Here is a young ambitious politician who had assumed power by elbowing out his father from the job and was hailed as a beacon of hope not only because he was fresh and unsullied but also because unlike the senior Abdullah he was seen as serious-minded. He had made just the right noises and political moves too, by dissociating himself from the Bharatiya Janata Party which had earlier made him a minister at the centre and by seizing his opportunity to become a trusted ally of the ascendant Congress party.

As the past few months have proved, though, histrionics in parliament and handling a state as challenging as Jammu & Kashmir are completely different things. What is most disappointing is that as chief minister the junior Abdullah seems to have cultivated a penchant for doing the most ill-advised things at the most inopportune moments. So you have a leader who is said to have gone picnicking to Pahalgam amid the raging fire in parts of the valley. You have a chief minister who can neither do without the central security forces nor come clean on his need for a calibrated armed response to the unrest on the ground. Worst of all, perhaps, you have a duly-elected representative of the people who is seldom seen among his people, a ruler who is unable to connect with those he seeks to lead. No chief minister in Kashmir can do worse than to be seen running to New Delhi seeking a bail-out. That, too, after having painted his people as perpetrators of violence that cannot be contained without giving the security forces a free run.

Don’t be fooled by the demand for a political package from New Delhi either. It is simply an admission of failure of governance on part of the chief minister, who has ended up doing so early in his regime what his predecessors routinely did when they finally ran out of excuses: blame their own inefficiencies on the centre. Political resolution of the Kashmir issue between India and Pakistan notwithstanding there is sufficient room for good governance in the state. Entrenched interests, including the bureaucracy and the separatists, doubtless favour status quo to keep receiving special central funds but with the implosion in Pakistan there has emerged a real opportunity to govern Kashmir back to normalcy. Unlike in the past, there is no real urge among the Kashmiris to join Pakistan, even as they remain distrustful of India.

What the situation in Kashmir does not call for is to link every single outburst against the security forces to Pakistan. But what it does require on part of the chief minister is to be seen as a representative of the people who are losing their lives without ever really encouraging his people to resort to violence. The junior Abdullah has failed to achieve this delicate balance. In Kashmir, he is seen as somebody who has failed to empathise with the masses. In the rest of India, he is seen as somebody who can stand up to the separatists but who is too incompetent to govern. He has only himself to blame for these impressions. It is unrealistic to expect him to suddenly transform into a man of the masses.

But his belated attempt to console those injured in clashes with the security forces may have just given him the opening that he needs to hang on to fight another day. With the prime minister’s intervention predictably switching the public focus yet again to New Delhi’s inability to get to grips with the complexity of the issue, the onset of Ramzan amid the tragedy in Leh may just give the beleaguered chief minister the lease of life that he so badly needs.