Jammu, Sept. 13 -- With barely a week to go before the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly's Autumn session convenes, the Omar Abdullah-led National Conference government still has no answer to a question that refuses to go away: who will occupy the Deputy Speaker's chair?
The delay is no longer just administrative - it is now tangled in coalition politics. Sources say the NC had been weighing an offer to coalition partner Congress: the Deputy Speaker's post, sweetened with a ministerial berth. But that plan appears to be unravelling fast, undone by an unlikely flashpoint - a bitter public spat between the two allies over whether to sing the full version of Vande Mataram.
The optics could hardly be worse for a government already under ...