Umme Haniya
For Kashmiris, the story of the past six years has been one of promises made and promises broken. When Article 370 was revoked in 2019, the Indian government assured the world that statehood would be restored once “conditions normalised.” Many in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) held on to that pledge, hoping that elections and local governance would at least bring some measure of dignity back to their politics.
But the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation (Amendment) Bill, 2025 tells a different tale-one not of restoration but of betrayal. The amendment empowers the Lieutenant Governor, an unelected appointee of Delhi, to dismiss the Chief Minister and ministers after just 30 days of detention. Without trial, without conviction, without judicial oversight. In essence, a Kashmiri leader’s fate can now be sealed by an administrative order, not a court of law.
This is not how democracies function. In democracies, leaders are unseated by voters or by due legal process, not by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. But in Kashmir, the elected assembly has already been reduced to the stature of a municipal committee, and now even the Chief Minister can be removed through a clause better suited to authoritarian rule than constitutional governance.
Can we close our eyes to the political subtext? The BJP government in Delhi has struggled with domestic crises with slowing growth, corruption scandals, and increasing international scrutiny over its human rights record making headlines. When cornered, it reaches for a familiar tool by tightening control over Kashmir to project toughness, and stoke nationalist sentiment. In this script, Kashmiri leaders become expendable, their detention a convenient show of strength to mask failures elsewhere.
For ordinary Kashmiris, the lesson is stark. If their leaders can be dismissed without trial, then what value remains in participating in elections? Why believe in a system where the rules change whenever Delhi feels threatened? Alienation deepens, and with it, the risk that more Kashmiris will disengage from the ballot entirely, seeing it as meaningless under central dominance.
Perhaps most alarming is that opposition figures in India see Kashmir as the testing ground. What begins in Srinagar today could be extended to Lucknow or Kolkata tomorrow. If this becomes the new normal, India edges not toward federal democracy but toward a centralised police state where dissent is neutralised, not debated.
For Pakistan, the amendment is confirmation of what it has long argued: that New Delhi’s talk of peace and statehood is a façade. The world, too, must take note. Kashmir is not just a regional dispute but a mirror reflecting the erosion of democracy inside India itself.
The tragedy of Kashmir is that its people were promised empowerment but delivered control. The new amendment is not the restoration of statehood-it is the burial of it.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
