Kashmir After 370: Elections Without Statehood, and a Settlement Still Unfinished

On 5 August 2019, the government revoked the special constitutional status Jammu and Kashmir had held under Article 370 since 1954, and simultaneously reorganised the state into two Union Territories, Jammu and Kashmir with a legislature, and Ladakh without one, through the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act. The move was executed with minimal advance warning, accompanied by a prolonged communications shutdown and the detention of a large number of political leaders across the ideological spectrum, including three former chief ministers, measures the government defended as necessary security precautions and critics condemned as a suppression of democratic dissent in a region already carrying decades of trust deficit with New Delhi.

The government's stated justification rested on several claims: that Article 370's special provisions had entrenched a separate legal and political identity that impeded full integration and investment, that Article 35A's restriction on property ownership by non-residents had frozen the region's economic development, and that removing these provisions would allow central laws, investment and development schemes to reach Jammu and Kashmir on the same terms as the rest of India. Supporters pointed to subsequent statistics on tourist arrivals, some new investment announcements, and a marked reduction in certain categories of street violence and stone-pelting incidents as vindication, while critics, including most mainstream Kashmiri political parties from the National Conference to the Peoples Democratic Party, characterised the move as a unilateral downgrading of a state's status without its own legislature's consent, made possible only because the state was under President's Rule at the time with no assembly in session to object.

What the Supreme Court actually decided

In December 2023, a five-judge Constitution bench delivered its judgment in the batch of petitions challenging the abrogation, unanimously upholding the constitutional validity of both the abrogation of Article 370's operative provisions and the broader reorganisation, holding that Article 370 was always intended as a temporary, transitional provision rather than a permanent feature of the Constitution, and that the President's power to declare it inoperative did not require the concurrence of a state constituent assembly that had, by 2019, long since dissolved itself, having completed its original task in 1957. This holding rested on a specific and legally contestable reading of Article 370's text and history, one that several constitutional scholars have argued glosses over genuine ambiguity in the provision's drafting regarding whether presidential power to modify or revoke it survived the constituent assembly's dissolution, though the Court's ruling is now the settled and final word on the question absent a future larger bench revisiting it.

Significantly, however, the same judgment went further than simply upholding the abrogation. The bench explicitly directed the Election Commission to conduct assembly elections in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir by 30 September 2024, and separately directed the Union government to restore statehood, meaning full state status with an elected government exercising the fuller range of legislative and executive powers a state enjoys compared to a Union Territory, "at the earliest" and as a matter of priority, treating the Union Territory status explicitly as a transitional arrangement rather than a permanent downgrade of the region's constitutional position.

What has and has not happened since

The elections did take place, held across three phases in September and October 2024, with strong voter turnout that surprised many observers given the region's history of election boycotts by separatist elements, and resulted in a National Conference-led government under Chief Minister Omar Abdullah taking office, a genuinely significant democratic milestone after roughly a decade without an elected assembly government in the region and six years of either governor's or President's Rule following the collapse of the earlier coalition government in 2018.

Statehood, however, has not been restored. Jammu and Kashmir continues to function as a Union Territory with a legislature, meaning the elected government's powers remain constrained in ways a full state government's would not be, most consequentially over policing and public order, which under the current arrangement remain with the Lieutenant Governor appointed by the Union government rather than with the elected Chief Minister and cabinet, a division of authority that has already produced visible friction between the elected government and the Lieutenant Governor's office on matters ranging from bureaucratic appointments to law and order decisions. This is not a minor technical gap; policing and public order are among the most consequential powers any state government exercises, and their continued location outside elected control in a region with Jammu and Kashmir's specific security history represents a genuinely significant limitation on what the newly elected government can actually deliver to the electorate that voted it into office.

The government's position and its critics

The Union government has stated repeatedly, including before the Supreme Court, that statehood will be restored, and Home Minister Amit Shah reiterated this commitment in parliamentary statements around the time of the 2024 elections, framing the sequencing, elections first and full statehood following once the security situation is judged sufficiently stable, as a deliberate and responsible approach rather than a broken promise. There is a defensible security logic to this sequencing that should not be dismissed reflexively: Jammu and Kashmir's specific history of cross-border militancy, and the genuine reduction in certain violence indicators the government attributes partly to the post-2019 security posture, gives the argument for caution some substantive weight, distinct from a purely cynical reading that the delay is indefinite by design.

But the absence of any published timeline or benchmark for when statehood will actually be restored, more than a year after the Supreme Court's direction and well over five years after the original reorganisation, has understandably eroded confidence among Kashmiri political actors, including the National Conference-led government itself, which has repeatedly and publicly pressed the Union government for a specific commitment rather than an open-ended assurance. A Supreme Court direction to restore statehood "at the earliest," without a hard deadline comparable to the specific election date it did impose, has proven considerably easier for the executive to treat as aspirational rather than binding, a pattern that raises a broader question about how enforceable such directive language in constitutional judgments actually is when the remedy depends entirely on continued executive follow-through rather than a self-executing legal mechanism.

An unfinished settlement

Whatever one's view of the abrogation's constitutional merits or its practical consequences for security and development in the region, both contested questions on which reasonable people continue to disagree, the settlement the government itself proposed, reorganisation followed eventually by restored statehood, remains incomplete by its own stated terms. An elected government exercising less than the full powers ordinarily due to a state, governing a region with a still-fragile security situation and a population whose trust in New Delhi's commitments has been tested repeatedly across decades, is a genuinely different and more precarious outcome than the fully restored statehood the government promised and the Supreme Court directed be delivered at the earliest opportunity. Until that promise is honoured with a specific, credible timeline, the settlement will remain, by design or by drift, unfinished business rather than the resolved chapter both its architects and its critics might prefer to treat it as.