Politics is just legacy software that refuses to patch.

In the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly, the source code is particularly buggy. This week, the system crashed again. We didn’t get a debate on infrastructure or a deep dive into the region’s agonizingly slow broadband speeds. Instead, we got a shouting match over the metaphorical use of footwear.

The "shoe-beating" remark. That’s the headline. It sounds like a bad translation of a 1950s diplomatic row, but in the high-stakes theater of Srinagar, it’s the latest reason for the BJP to stall the engine and demand a public apology from Chief Minister Omar Abdullah.

Here’s the breakdown. During a session that was supposed to be about, you know, governing, the rhetoric shifted from policy to the kind of schoolyard threats that usually get filtered out by a basic AI moderator. When the phrase "beating with shoes" (or the more evocative "jootey marna") entered the transcript, the BJP benches didn’t just object. They rebooted into full outrage mode.

They want Omar to say sorry. Not because he said it—the remark reportedly flew from the opposition or a rogue corner of the floor—but because he’s the admin of this particular chat room. In the world of modern Indian politics, the "leader of the house" is held responsible for every stray bit of data that passes through the pipes. It’s the ultimate liability trap.

It’s exhausting to watch.

We’ve waited six years for this Assembly to go live. Six years of "President’s Rule" and bureaucratic bloatware. You’d think there’d be a backlog of actual issues to process. The unemployment rate in J&K isn’t exactly a secret. The power grid is held together by hope and high-voltage prayer. But instead of tackling the hardware issues, the Assembly is obsessed with the UI of "dignity" and "insults."

The BJP’s demand for an apology is a classic DDoS attack on legislative time. By focusing on a verbal slight, they effectively take the server offline. No bills get passed. No resolutions on the restoration of statehood get the floor time they deserve. It’s a tactical distraction, and it works every single time because the National Conference is happy to take the bait.

Omar Abdullah finds himself in a familiar glitch. He’s trying to play the statesman, the sophisticated tech-savvy leader who can bridge the gap between New Delhi’s cloud servers and the local hardware on the ground. But his opponents aren’t interested in his "new era" branding. They want to drag him back into the mud, or in this case, the shoe closet.

The cost of this friction isn’t just measured in wasted hours. It’s measured in the taxpayer-funded salaries of MLAs who spent their afternoon testing the decibel limits of the chamber’s microphones. Each minute of an assembly session costs lakhs of rupees. That’s a hell of a price tag for a conversation that could have been handled by a moderately competent HR department or a mute button.

The "shoe" remark isn't the problem. It’s a symptom of a deeper compatibility issue. You have a central government that’s rewritten the region’s operating system and a local assembly trying to run the old drivers. The two don't talk to each other. They just throw errors.

The BJP knows that in the current political climate, "insulting the house" is a high-engagement keyword. It plays well on social media. It generates the kind of clips that feed the 24-hour news cycle. It doesn’t matter if the apology ever happens; the point is the friction. The point is to show that the new Assembly is just as chaotic as the one they dissolved years ago.

And Omar? He’s stuck in a loop. If he apologizes, he looks weak to his base. If he doesn’t, he’s the "arrogant" leader blocking the wheels of democracy. It’s a lose-lose scenario coded into the very structure of the session.

While the politicians argue over who gets to feel more offended, the actual users—the people of J&K—are left with a 404 error. They were promised a functional government that would address the "ground reality," a phrase politicians love until they actually have to stand on it. Instead, they’re getting a rerun of a show that’s been cancelled three times already.

It makes you wonder why we even bother with the hardware of an assembly if the software is this fundamentally broken. If the pinnacle of legislative discourse is a fight over a shoe, maybe we’ve hit the limit of what this particular version of democracy can handle.

How many more sessions will we lose to these scripted outbursts before someone realizes the public has moved on to a different platform?