Jammu, Sept. 22 -- For nearly twenty-five minutes on Tuesday, the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly stopped functioning as a legislature and became something closer to a battlefield of memory - one where the past itself was on trial, and both sides refused to yield.
The spark was a demand. National Conference legislator Abdul Majeed Larmi rose and asked for December 5 - the birth anniversary of NC founder Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah - to be restored as an official holiday, and for September 8, the Sheikh's death anniversary, to be added as a new one. Then came the line that lit the fuse: if both dates for Sheikh Abdullah wouldn't be honoured, Larmi argued, then the holiday for Maharaja Hari Singh's birth anniversary should be scrapped to...