The National Conference will gather at Begum Akbar Jehan’s graveside at Hazratbal on July 11 and again in Jammu on July 12. The party is remembering her on her 26th death anniversary to demand the restoration of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood and constitutional rights, ahead of a protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi later this month. It is a fitting tribute, but only if we understand who she actually was.Most history books remember Begum Akbar Jehan as the wife of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, Sher-e-Kashmir, the “better half” of Jammu and Kashmir’s tallest leader. That label does exactly what it is designed to do. It folds her into someone else’s biography and makes it impossible to read her as a political worker in her own right. It is how history writes women out.The standard story of Jammu and Kashmir in the 20th century is about constitutional disputes, war and the competing claims of India and Pakistan. It is a story of high politics, told through the actions of men who held formal office. But there is another way to read it. Historians have shown that the real engine of change was the democratising demand at the base: land reform, representative government, the breaking of a feudal agrarian order. These demands found their clearest expression in the 1944 ‘Naya Kashmir’ manifesto, which promised land reform, women’s rights, labour protections and universal education.For its time, it was one of the most advanced documents to come out of South Asia’s anti-colonial movements. A manifesto, however, does not run itself. It needs people on the ground to keep the movement alive when the ruling elite tries to break it.In 1953, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah was dismissed and imprisoned. Jammu and Kashmir’s organic party, the National Conference, did not simply lose a leader. It faced a crisis of reproduction. Could its networks, its legitimacy, its capacity to mobilise survive when New Delhi was working to scatter them? This was the moment when movements usually collapse, when the base frays and the leadership fades away.Also read: Kashmir’s Forgotten Women’s MilitiaBegum Akbar Jehan stepped into that gap with organisational work. She travelled across the state, kept contact with political workers, addressed public gatherings and held together the link between an imprisoned leadership and a public the New Delhi was trying to demobilise. This is the labour that keeps political movements alive, and it is almost always invisible. It is gendered, unwaged and unrecorded. Yet without it, no formation survives a crackdown.She did not just hold the line. She built institutions that outlasted crisis after crisis. After Partition, she presided over the Jammu and Kashmir Red Cross Society and worked on the recovery of abducted and displaced women. She chaired relief and food committees when the tourist economy collapsed. She founded the Markaz-e-Behboodi Khawateen, a welfare institute that still provides literacy and livelihood training.Her firm position was that women were entitled to equal standing with men in economic, cultural and political life, and that included equal work for equal wages – a demand that came decades before it became a global slogan.None of this carries the weight of imprisonment or dismissal in the historical record, but here, the imbalance is the point. We remember the men who were put in jail. We forget the women who kept the movement out of it.This is not unique to Jammu and Kashmir. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela sustained the anti-apartheid movement’s infrastructure through nearly three decades of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment, keeping his political standing and the movement’s momentum alive under constant surveillance. Across struggles, women have performed this reproductive function during the most exposed periods, only to be written back into history as helpers rather than as leaders.The categories we use to decide what counts as politics are themselves the problem. We privilege formal authority, the podium, the constitutional record. We undervalue the reproductive labour that makes all of it possible. Begum Akbar Jehan held consistently that legitimacy rested with the people, not with governments or individual leaders, and that political power was accountable to the base it claimed to represent.Also read: How is Collective Punishment Shaping Kashmir’s Identity?To recover her properly is not to add one more name to a list. It is to ask why the labour that sustains movements is treated as outside politics in the first place. The answer is not flattering. It tells us that our definition of politics is built to exclude women’s work by design.Nevertheless, this year, that recovery takes concrete shape. The National Conference is invoking her memory not to mourn but to demand. The conventions at her graveside and in Jammu are tied to a live political claim: the immediate restoration of statehood and constitutional guarantees. A movement that uses her name to fight for the very rights her own labour once held together is doing what really matters – continuing her work.There is no tribute more faithful to her practice than a movement that keeps demanding, in the present, the conditions she spent her life creating. History that remembers only those who stood at the podium gives an incomplete account of its own subject. The rest belongs to those whose labour ensured that a movement, and a history worth writing, still existed to be recovered at all.Irfan Gull is Member, Provincial Executive Committee, Youth National Conference.