Srinagar's winter session started as most of its sessions have begun since the area became part of the Union of India six years ago with the sadness, the grievance, and the gridlock. Monday's proceedings were solemn and obituary references were made to three former ministers of the erstwhile state. In no time at all, the Bharatiya Janata Party's members of Parliament were on their feet, and when the time for the Question Hour was due, they were still in the well of the House, unwilling to move.

This was a very ordinary grievance, in high politics terms, but very ordinary in the eyes of common consumers – a new electricity rate hike. BJP member Sunil Kumar Sharma, who is the opposition leader of the ruling Congress, took BJP members to the well holding placards and shouting slogans in the form of "a government that cannot deliver power and water is a failed government". The disruption was to be disregarded and continued with the legislative calendar, said Speaker Abdul Rahim Rather, which ministers were taking questions over. It did not work. The BJP benches stayed put.

The day's actual political theater took place next. As opposed to letting the protest pass, ruling alliance legislators used it as an occasion to poke fun at the party at Delhi. CPI(M) MLA Kulgam, a veteran, rose to ask BJP members why they could not be raising another slogan to demand a different statehood one that was enjoyed by Jammu and Kashmir before 2019, but hasn't been restored yet to the residents.

The game was picked up by National Conference's Ali Mohammad Sagar, who led members from his party from the treasury-bench in counter-sloganeering this time, straight at the BJP. Congress MLAs Irfan Hafiz Lone and Iftikhar Ahmad were restraining the scrum in the well along with Shopian's Shabir Kulley and Langate's Sheikh Khursheed, who attempted to physically join the scrum but were repelled by marshals. The Speaker was told by NC campus chief Nazir Gurezi that the BJP must protest in Delhi and not Srinagar as it was Parliament and not Assembly which has control of the statehood file. Later Deputy Chief Minister Surinder Choudhary branded the entire walkout "mere drama", saying the BJP was not interested in having any issues debated.

Remove the rhetoric, and there's a real economic issue to be resolved. The Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh Electricity Regulatory Commission has granted an average 6.83 per cent hike in tariff for the financial year 2022-23, after five years of declining. The simple math is that the two distribution companies, JPDCL and KPDCL, had set their own revenue needs at about ₹10,275.72 crore per year, as compared to the revenue requirement of about ₹7,352.87 crore per year, which was projected at the previous rate structure, which was in excess of ₹2,900 crore per year.

The regulator estimated the tariff would have had to have risen nearer to 40 percent to close that gap, and deemed it politically and socially unacceptable. Instead, the government promised to bear the burden of subsidy to the tune of about ₹2,420.78 crore, while consumers will have to bear a comparatively smaller single-digit hike. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has come out with a forceful public defence of the decision, arguing that the previous governments had implemented 14 and 15 percent increases and that the current adjustment is "structural" and not a broken promise, but that his government's commitment of 200 solar-powered units to the poorest homes is not affected.

Former minister and BJP functionary Priya Sethi replied pointedly that this is a good question to ask by consumers going to the market this winter “where is the free power that was campaigned on.” BJP's state unit, headed by Sat Sharma, was also in the world of street dramas outside the Assembly, burning an effigy of the ruling alliance and accusing it of carrying out the "anti-national" agenda to please separatist sentiments a charge that is being rejected by the staying NC and Congress as a red rag in the face of their governance failures.

The ongoing debate on the statehood itself has now gone through several election cycles, and four different verbal formulations from the Union Home Minister. Amit Shah announced in 2019 that the statehood will be restored once security is normalised. This year he tied it to delimitation and elections (2021). The Supreme Court by 2024, when delimitation and elections are expected to be over, had instructed the restoration to be done “as soon as possible” without specifying any time frame and the Centre told the bench it could not fix any exact timeframe.

In 2025, Shah had again pledged restoration "as promised" without specifying a date, and as recently as August this year, said it would follow the delimitation and voting, both of which have already taken place. Jammu and Kashmir Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president Tariq Hameed Karra has slammed the BJP for exploiting Question Hour disruptions with the sole agenda of not having a 'floor debate' on that unfulfilled timeline.

The aspect of this perpetual stand-off that is more than a regional curiosity is the pattern it fits into: a directly elected government that has very limited constitutional authority and still requires budgetary transfers from Delhi and policy latitude, while being held politically accountable for decisions on tariffs, employment backlogs and service delivery on the ground. Similar incidents have occurred in other parts of the country since then, ranging from the decades-old conflicts between the Puducherry administration and its Lieutenant Governor to the service dispute in Delhi, indicating that it is not just a Kashmir issue, but a systemic problem in governance of partially empowered territories in India.