The delayed timing of J&K Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha's admission has more to do with deflecting the thrust of the Opposition attack on the prime minister and Union home minister during the monsoon session of Parliament, points out Mohammad Sayeed Malik, the distinguished commentator on Kashmir affairs.
It was an ominous coincidence; probably more by accident than by design.
Jammu and Kashmir Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha took three long months to acknowledge and own up responsibility for the 'security and administrative failure' resulting in the April 22 Pahalgam carnage.
It came in the thick of an unseemly public display of hand-to-hand fighting between Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and his ministerial colleagues on one side and security personnel in uniform at the Shaheed Mazar (Martyrs' graveyard) located in the heart of downtown Srinagar.
The delayed timing of Sinha's admission apparently has more to do with deflecting the thrust of the Opposition attack on the prime minister and Union home minister during the monsoon session of Parliament.
Home Minister Amit Shah is in direct control of law and order in the Union Territory.
There is no other plausible reason, considering that the immediate circumstance of the April 22 Baisaran attack, resulting in the merciless killing of 25 tourists and a local person, left hardly anything to doubt about the gross security failure.
There was no sign of any security cover in or around the bustling tourist spot, even though preparations were underway for securing the annual Amarnath Yatra with its base camp right there in Pahalgam, a couple of kilometres from Baisaran.
Sinha's 5-year tenure ends on August 6. Until Pahalgam happened, his track record was, by and large, unblemished. Though, lately, he allowed himself to be seen playing 'partisan politics' vis a vis Omar Abdullah.
The gravity of this solitary failure on the lieutenant governor's part is such that his entire track record gets badly tarnished, considering that what he routinely holds out as a 'security and intelligence failure' brought India and Pakistan to the brink of yet another war over Kashmir.
Indeed, the country is yet to be told about the exact dimensions of the conflict.
Kashmir, in that way, has yet again proved to be a notorious graveyard of reputations.
Suddenly, the dead 'Kashmir issue' seems to have come alive viciously, if only to go by US President Donald Trump's incessant public statements.
Post the 1972 Simla Accord, India had succeeded in, by and large, convincing the world public opinion that 'Kashmir' was a bilateral issues between the two neighbouring countries.
Suddenly, that position looks to be in jeopardy, thanks to Trump's verbal diarrhoea.
At the other end, there is no trace of the killers who sneaked into a supposedly secure base camp for the Amarnath Yatra, killed innocent tourists mercilessly and vanished into thin air.
The suspicion is that a group or small groups of well armed and tactically well equipped Pakistani intruders have been having a free run all along the Pir Panchal mountain range from Poonch-Rajouri to Kishtwar, Pahalgam and Kargil over the past year or two.
That kind of a troubling security backdrop simply does not brook politicking by the head of the administration, Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha in this case.
And yet that was what was on public display earlier this month when Omar Abdullah was seen in physical combat with security personnel at the martyrs memorial in downtown Srinagar.
It seems that Sinha is following the copybook of his Delhi counterpart whose non-stop run-inn with Arvind Kejriwal, blessed by the central government, did not stop until the AAP government was downed.
According to Omar Abdullah, even such a routine matter as setting the rules of business for administrative functioning under the existing anomalous arrangement have not been cleared by Sinha.
The result is that the elected component of the government has remained paralysed since it took office more than seven months ago.
As if to rub salt into the Abdullah government's wound, Sinha's office recently announced over a dozen administrative transfers of state cadre officers who are technically supposed to be under the chief minister's jurisdiction, just as IAS and IPS officers come under the lieutenant governor's administrative jurisdiction.
Perhaps Omar Abdullah had foreseen it all when he publicly declared that he would not contest assembly elections until full statehood was restored to Jammu and Kashmir.
His father Farooq Abdullah prevailed upon him and he contested from two constituencies in last year's assembly election.
After coming to power, he allowed himself to be seen singing paeans to whosoever visited the state, from Prime Minister Modi down to Kiren Rijiju.
But after his forgettable experience on July 14, Omar seems to be probing some respectable alternative course. To what end, god only knows.
Now that his tormentor Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha has belatedly accepted gross security failure under his watch public attention is shifting to what next.
As it is, there are a couple of possibilities: 1. Sinha is allowed to continue indefinitely beyond the end of his 5-year term on August 6 until a successor is chosen and formally installed; 2. He gets an extension of his tenure beyond August 6.
Sinha is said to be the prime minister's choice for BJP president. In that case he might be moving out of the state, though apparently not that soon either.
Whatever the eventual case, the relationship between the lieutenant governor and the chief minister is vitiated by the bad blood created by recent events.
That does not augur well for a sensitive border state like J&K.
The April 22 Pahalgam carnage and its cascading effect holds a lesson that could be ignored only at the unaffordable cost of national security.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff