Six weeks ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government took two major decisions related to Jammu and Kashmir.
It removed Article 370 of the Constitution of India, which gave the region substantial administrative autonomy. It also split the area into two union (largely federally run) territories—Jammu-Kashmir and Ladakh. These decisions were both rooted in the past, as well as a bet on the future; politics is as much the foreword to history as its epilogue.
The story begins in the 1840s, a period of remaking nations and redrawing maps across the world. In 1845, for instance, the United States annexed the Republic of Texas, much to the anguish of Mexicans who claimed that “disputed territory.” A year later, as the Sikh Empire collapsed in the northwestern frontier of the Indian subcontinent, a commander of the Sikh army, Gulab Singh, made a deal with the rising power, the British.
In return, he got himself a kingdom—Jammu and Kashmir.
The kingdom was a jigsaw puzzle. It had several subregions: mountainous, largely Muslim Kashmir; Hindu Jammu, which shared greater affinity to the foothills of Punjab; Buddhist-dominated Ladakh, ethnically and religiously different; and the so-called “Northern Areas” comprising Gilgit, Baltistan, and adjacent territories. It was an adjunct to Ladakh but with a still different ethnicity and a collective memory that was more Central Asian than South Asian.
In August 1947, India and Pakistan became free nations following the partition of British India. About 550 princely states, thus far quasi-independent, were offered the choice to join either nation. Among them were Jammu and Kashmir. In October 1947, this menagerie of ethnicities formally joined India. Singh’s descendant and the reigning king signed the Instrument of Accession, but wasn’t quite master of his kingdom. Pakistani troops had already occupied parts of Kashmir that they retain to this day.
Gilgit-Baltistan, meanwhile, was a British imperial frontier in the Great Game with the Soviet Union and soon-to-be communist China. A British officer facilitated Pakistani takeover.
The Accession was quickly followed by a war between India and Pakistan. India made the legal case; Pakistan the religious one, since Jammu and Kashmir had an overall Muslim majority. When hostilities ceased, the 85,000 square miles of the former kingdom was split down the middle. Today, India governs about 39,000 square miles, while just over 46,000 square miles is controlled by Pakistan and China.
The Valley
Administered by India, the Kashmir Valley (or simply “the Valley”) covers 5,800 square miles. While it has more people that either Jammu or Ladakh—the other subregions under India’s jurisdiction—it’s only 15 percent of the territory with India, and just 7 percent of the former princely state. Yet, it has near-monopolized the world’s attention. This is largely due to a local disaffection that has, over the years, evolved into a security challenge—insurgency, terrorism linked with networks in Pakistan, and a ballooning Islamism.The unrest of 2016, for instance, was partly the product of ISIS-inspired internet radicalism.
If Jammu and Kashmir had been a “normal” state of the Union of India, it probably would have been broken into smaller, more manageable components long ago. As early as the 1950s, a States Reorganization Commission redrew India’s internal map. Many mega-provinces and former princely states were disbanded using subregional, religious-sectarian, ethnic, and linguistic parameters.
In the case of Jammu and Kashmir, India waited for a final resolution. This could have meant reincorporating the entire former kingdom into India (unlikely), or acknowledgment of the tentative frontier between Indian and Pakistani administered subparts of Kashmir into a formal international border (which has often been discussed).
Different Tracks Rejoined
The testy relationship between the Kashmir Valley and the Indian state has been mediated by a patronage-based political elite that today carries little credibility at home or in the rest of India.The insulation provided by Article 370 meant many Indian constitutional provisions and laws didn’t apply to the state. As a result, Jammu and Kashmir and the rest of India traveled on different tracks—not only politically, but also in economic transformation and social modernization. In turn, this led to resentment in Ladakh and Jammu. They felt the status quo was gamed to benefit the Valley, and the disproportionate attention to Kashmir was crowding out other subregions.
Union territory status for Jammu-Kashmir and for Ladakh gives New Delhi much greater say in governance, and in security and internal policing. In Kashmir, this is critical, given growing threats of Islamist terror and the potential repercussions of the Taliban’s return in Afghanistan. Ladakh is crucial because of its proximity to Gilgit-Baltistan and Chinese Central Asia. To paraphrase Churchill, India fights by itself alone, but not for itself alone.
Nevertheless, the new paradigm in Kashmir is not just the product of a security mindset. That is a key factor, but not the only one. There is also an attempt to trigger a more regular process of politics and political mobilization in the Valley. This previously hasn’t been fostered, and has been hindered by the traditional political leadership. That leadership benefited by presenting itself as a shifting bridge between secessionists and the Indian state.
The removal of Article 370 makes virtually all laws of the Union of India applicable in Jammu-Kashmir. Facilities provided in the rest of the country to disadvantaged communities and groups—from women to religious minorities to historically underprivileged castes—will now become available. The removal of Article 35A, for instance, will make it possible for a permanent resident to marry an outsider and yet pass on inherited property to their children. So far, this was a right denied to women permanent residents who married non-natives.
Partition-era Punjabi (largely Sikh) refugees from areas now in Pakistan settled in Jammu in 1947, as they did in other states of India. In Jammu and Kashmir, this community, now more than 100,000 strong, wasn’t granted permanent resident status and had no domicile rights. Its members voted in national but not provincial elections. They couldn’t buy property or access higher education carve-outs.
In contrast, Muslim refugees from Xinjiang and Tibet, who arrived in the 1950s after the annexation of their homelands by communist China, were completely integrated into Kashmiri society.
Such discrepancies can be addressed within the new architecture. Already the government in New Delhi is proposing to route developmental funding and welfare benefits through representatives in local villages, to check embezzlement by intermediary structures. There is some hope that a new cadre of political leaders could emerge from among panchayat (local council) representatives. This may be a fool’s errand—or gradually all of it could lead to new avenues of politics and new anchor issues around which lobbies and interest groups are formed.
Ashok Malik is an Indian affairs analyst and distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, one of the leading public policy think tanks in India. He recently served as the press secretary to the president of India.