Governance to peace: Challenges before the new Lt Governor of J&K

Manoj Sinha's task will be to negotiate some room for independent and imaginative political thinking rather than let himself be the blunt instrument of Delhi.

At his swearing in ceremony, Manoj Sinha, the new Lieutenant Governor of the Union Territory (UT) of J&K listed his priorities as accelerating development, rebuilding people’s faith in democracy and the return of peace. He will have to rethink whether he might not have listed them in the reverse order. 

However, the political situation has been made difficult for him even before his swearing in. Chief Secretary B V R Subrahmanyam ruffled the state’s mainstream political parties by claiming that they lacked public support. He told visiting journalists, “Jammu and Kashmir was a broken state and there was no system