You have followed the recent debates in the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Legislative Assembly, where the question of a possible liquor ban came up again, with arguments in favour such as revenue generation, and objections from the clergy. How do you see it in the current context, and also in historical perspective?

This has been an unending debate. If you go through Kashmiri Sufi poetry, you will find references to mas, mas pyale—the measures Kashmiris had for liquor. It was sold even during the Sultanate period, and some Sufis even permitted it. But post-Independence, the debate has never really gone away. Liquor has kept flowing, and opposition has persisted. It was never formally banned, except briefly after the militancy of 1990, not through legislation but through a social sanction against it.

The earliest legislative reference I recall was when Sheikh Abdullah returned to power in 1975. After the 1977 election, in which the National Conference swept the polls, there were very few opposition Members in the Assembly. Among those who breached that wave was Syed Ali Shah Geelani, elected from Sopore. He introduced a private member’s bill on the issue, and no less a person than Sheikh Abdullah himself opposed it. The argument was the same then as now: beyond morality or religious sanction, it came down to revenue and Kashmir’s value as a tourism product.

Let me take you back to your own government. I remember Haseeb Drabu, who was the Finance Minister at the time, made a similar argument that it is partly a matter of individual choice, much as non-vegetarians cannot impose their preferences on vegetarians. He also linked the sale of liquor to J&K’s economy and tourism. But there is a strong clergy in Kashmir too.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq recently condemned the sale of liquor, and the clergy’s argument is essentially: if states like Gujarat, Bihar, or Nagaland can enforce prohibition and still attract tourists, why should tourism be presented as the decisive argument in a region where a substantial Muslim majority does not give social sanction to liquor?

Those are fair points on both sides. People have been drinking, and the debate has been robust. There have been ironies too—the strongest opponents of the National Conference were mocked when anyone in their ranks was seen holding a glass, and voters were mobilised on that basis. So liquor has always been a political as well as a social flashpoint. That said, consumption has always been highly restricted in Kashmiri society. Whatever the official figures, the revenue from liquor is minuscule compared to overall revenue in Kashmir, though in the Jammu division, consumption is considerably higher.

Some figures put the revenue at around Rs. 2,000 crore.

In Kashmiri society, liquor remains deeply socially abhorred. As for the tourism argument, Gujarat and Nagaland attract tourists despite the prohibition. Kashmir’s tourism revival has happened even without many bars—tourists clearly do not come primarily to drink here. When drinking does occur in public, it becomes news.

You saw Srinagar in the 1970s and 1980s, and you once held an official position that included oversight of the liquor trade. People have compared Polo View in Srinagar to London’s Piccadilly. Cinema halls were screening Hollywood films—more screens, some say, than Delhi had at the time. What was the liquor scene like in those years?

Post-colonial India saw Srinagar emerge as something of a fashion leader. The society as such was conservative, but Srinagar city was quite liberal. Residency Road and Polo View were lined with bars. There was even a discotheque. It was a very free, open society—not permissive in a vulgar sense, but genuinely liberal. People would go out for entertainment in the evenings. We had seven or eight movie theatres. I was in charge of the Excise Department, and we managed two categories of liquor. Country liquor was brewed and bottled by the government itself and then contracted out through vans. The last vans before the militancy were contracted out in 1989, when I was heading the department.

Around that time, a figure emerged from militant ranks who called himself Air Marshal Nur Khan. He went around vandalising liquor shops. Most of those shops were owned by non-Muslim families. He barged in, vandalised them, and the owners fled along with the immigration that took place at the time.

Cover of Lion of the Desert. | Photo Credit: Wikipedia

This was around 1989–90?

Yes, that winter. The cinema halls were equally vibrant. Srinagar had matinee shows, often Hollywood films with uniquely translated Urdu titles on the posters. There were late-night shows as well, ending around 1 am.

Within a radius of three to four kilometres you had Neelam, Naaz, Palladium ...

Yes. You also had Regal, Khayyam, Firdaus, Shiraz, Shah Cinema, and Palladium—the oldest. And Broadway.

Speaking of cinema, there was something that happened even before the militancy. The film starring Anthony Quinn—Lion of the Desert—about Italy’s colonisation of Libya became controversial, and the government of the day banned its screening.

It did not just become controversial—it became a trigger. Sheikh Abdullah was, as everyone knows, the most towering figure in Kashmir; privately, people would not dare entertain any thought against him. But post-1977, things had shifted. When Congress withdrew support, and his government fell, there were open protests against him in Srinagar—his posters were torn down in full public view, which at that time was almost sacrilegious.

He had come back to power in 1975 with a Congress alliance government, having previously called Congress leaders “worms of the gutter” and called for the social boycott of anyone affiliated with Congress. Many people whose relatives passed away went without a proper funeral because no one would dare attend in defiance of Sheikh sahab’s directive. Post-1977, his personal popularity recovered somewhat through the election of that year, which brought together a broad coalition from Madhu Dandavate to Maulana Farooq.

But people had also come to see Sheikh sahab’s broader, decades-long struggle—the 22-year fight he had waged, the resistance against the Dogra regime going back to 1931, the drive for the economic, political, and social empowerment of Kashmiri Muslims. His current position as Chief Minister had come to feel too small for that legacy. So when audiences watched Lion of the Desert, it was like a sudden eruption—people walked out and tore down every National Conference symbol they could find.

That brings me to a question about political culture. We recently saw a debate in the Assembly between a PDP legislator from Pulwama and the National Conference’s current Education Minister, which quickly descended into personal attacks. Since you have tracked political and social developments in J&K closely, how has the National Conference—from Sheikh Abdullah’s time onwards—treated its opposition? The practice of labelling anyone who disagrees as an agent of one power or another—how do you see that trajectory?

This, unfortunately, is an irrefutable truth of Kashmir politics. From Sheikh Abdullah onwards, a pro-Pakistan lobby was constructed, and those labelled thus were externalised from the political mainstream, even though they were part of Kashmir’s core political conscience. I am referring to the Muslim Conference (1931-39), the Mirwaiz family, and the deep rivalry that was fostered between the followers of the Mirwaiz and the National Conference. Farooq Abdullah, at a later stage, managed to bridge some of that divide, and militancy eventually subsumed much of it. But the tag—mukhbir, being an informant, being attached to one party or the other—Pakistani agent, Delhi agent—has never disappeared.

When Sheikh Abdullah was released in 1964, there was a student agitation led by figures like Abdur Rashid Kabili through the Students and Young Men’s League. It was essentially a movement for Kashmiri rights, at a time when there were not even genuine elections. Sheikh Sahab, perhaps seeing them as a growing threat, promptly labelled them IB-sponsored. Later, most of them were absorbed into the NC, and then the NC itself became a replacement for earlier Congress regime.

Is it true that people affiliated with the Congress were even socially ostracised—that their funerals were not attended?

The most prominent case was Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad’s mother, who had to be buried at night. People would not attend the weddings or funerals of Congress-affiliated families. Such was the hold Sheikh sahab had—it was not considered political dissent; it was treated as a kind of sin.

You were also the government spokesperson for the PDP-BJP coalition government (2015-18). A great deal happened during those years—in 2016, many young people were blinded by pellets, and the newspaper Kashmir Reader was banned by a government order under your watch. Today, much of the PDP leadership speaks of media freedom and civil liberties. How do you look back at your tenure in that coalition, given the human rights violations and the suppression of the press?

I do not deny any of it, and for those things we are sorry. But you have to see it in the context of the times. The PDP-BJP alliance was formed as perhaps the last credible political and democratic arrangement to resolve the Kashmir issue. I said as much in an interview with The Indian Express in 2017. But unfortunately—perhaps because of our failure to communicate, or because of the depth of mistrust built up over decades— people did not accept it. And then the architect of that alliance, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, passed away in January 2016 after barely 10 months in office. He might have been better placed to navigate those turbulent waters.

It was terrible to witness those events. But there was some satisfaction in what we could remedy—we withdrew FIRs against 12,000 young people who had been accused of stone-pelting or participating in protests, whose careers would otherwise have been finished. They would have been denied passports and employment. We also managed to get Prime Minister Modi to appoint an interlocutor, Dineshwar Sharma. And an all-party parliamentary delegation led by Arun Jaitley came to Kashmir with a genuine purpose. For the first time in the history of Jammu and Kashmir, a Chief Minister wrote personal letters to Hurriyat leaders—Geelani, Yasin Malik, and others—urging them to engage in dialogue. But they shut their doors.

Revisiting 2016, Akhtar admits the government’s failures but portrays Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s short tenure as a missed opportunity—one that might have contained the crisis before it spiralled into repression and alienation. | Photo Credit: AP

The New York Times ran a headline during that period: “Epidemic of the Eye”—referring to the pellet injuries. And I recall interviewing Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in Jammu when your government took power, and he described the partnership as a “paradigm shift”.

Later, after the coalition collapsed, his son Tassaduq Mufti told The Indian Express that it had been a “partnership in crime”. Looking back—at the media suppression, the human rights abuses, the alliance failing to deliver what you had envisioned—where do you stand today? And how does PDP rebuild from losing ground from 28 seats to 3, and now winning the Budgam by-election?

What you have described is factually correct. But the one immutable fact is that as long as our government was in place, it could not touch Article 370 or the special status of Jammu and Kashmir. They had to remove us first—to do it through the back door, through a governor and whatever followed.

The National Conference argues that PDP actually paved the way for the BJP to do what it eventually did.

That is normal electoral squabbling. Kashmir is above that. This is about the rights of the people. Looking around the world and at our own region, the strategic reality is clear: however small a population may be, you have to reach out to them, own them, give them a sense of partnership. Otherwise, it will keep erupting—it is not something you can decide unilaterally. It has to be a contract, a covenant. Until 2019, such a covenant existed between the people of Jammu and Kashmir and the rest of the country. We may have been called unionists, but we were partners. That contract has to be revived. It cannot be one-sided.

Two final questions. First, on geopolitics: there is an apparent churn underway in West Asia, including in Iran. If Iran were to emerge stronger from its current pressures, what indirect impact might that have on South Asian politics and on Kashmir specifically?

I think South Asia still belongs to South Asians. Unfortunately, this BJP government has abandoned that idea. The weaponisation of the electoral process—first through delimitation in Kashmir and Assam, and second through the weaponisation of the electoral roll—has made Muslim citizenship suspect. Muslims are part of this country. If you declare them second-class citizens, at least give them that constitutional position. But by throwing them out of the electoral process, you are removing even that. Our national leadership across all parties needs to consider the implications.

One stated objective of the current BJP government was the diplomatic isolation of Pakistan. Yet right now, American, Iranian, and GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] representatives have been in Islamabad working to resolve the current crisis. Has that objective been achieved?

It pains me to say it, but a country of India’s size and potential has unfortunately been reduced to a bystander. When India was economically weak and politically marginal on the world stage, its voice was still heard with attention. As Obama once observed about Manmohan Singh, when the Prime Minister speaks, the world listens. We do not even speak now. India could still reclaim its position if the BJP government could rise above its anti-Muslim agenda—because leading South Asia requires carrying Muslims along.

South Asia has a Muslim population as the second-largest demographic in nearly every country of the region. Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan—the leadership of South Asia belongs to India. It is a question of when a Prime Minister in New Delhi picks up the phone, calls Dhaka, calls Islamabad, calls Kabul, and tries to make a fresh start.

We began with liquor, so let us end there. As someone who has followed the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly closely, do you believe liquor could actually be banned in Jammu and Kashmir, or will this debate continue indefinitely?

The debate will continue.