Redrawing Kashmir’s vote: delimitation, new voters and nominated members

A freeze lifted for Kashmir

In 2002 the elected assembly of Jammu and Kashmir amended the state’s constitution to freeze the number and boundaries of its seats until the figures of the first census taken after 2026 had been published. The last delimitation, published in April 1995 by a commission on which Justice Bilal Nazki sat, had given the Kashmir Valley 46 seats, Jammu 37 and Ladakh 4, with 24 more left vacant for the part of the state held by Pakistan. Leaders in Jammu had long claimed that their region was under-represented. Kashmiris answered that the Valley had the larger population and, by the census, a larger share of it than of the seats.

After New Delhi dissolved the state in 2019, the freeze was set aside for this one territory. The Reorganisation Act raised the number of seats, and on 6 March 2020, seven months after Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir lost its special status, the Indian government constituted a Delimitation Commission under a retired Supreme Court judge, Ranjana Prakash Desai, with the Chief Election Commissioner, Sushil Chandra, and the territory’s election commissioner as members. Two residents of Srinagar, Haji Abdul Gani Khan and Mohammad Ayub Mattoo, challenged the exercise in the Supreme Court. The Solicitor General, Tushar Mehta, replied that the last delimitation had been in 1995 and that “to wait till 2026 was legislatively found to be unwise”. The court reserved its judgment in December 2022, and on 13 February 2023 Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and A. S. Oka dismissed the petition, while saying that they were not ruling on the validity of the Reorganisation Act itself, then before a larger bench. The commission’s map stood.

The final order

The commission signed its final order on 5 May 2022. The assembly would have 90 elected seats in place of 83. Of the seven new seats, six went to the Jammu division and one to the Kashmir Valley: Jammu rose from 37 seats to 43, Kashmir from 46 to 47. For the first time nine seats were reserved for Scheduled Tribes, six in Jammu and three in Kashmir, and seven were reserved for Scheduled Castes, all in Jammu. The 24 seats for the Pakistan-held areas remained vacant.

The commission said it had weighed “geographical features, means of communication, public convenience, contiguity of areas” as well as population. It also recommended that at least two members of the Kashmiri migrant community, one of them a woman, be nominated to the assembly, and that displaced persons from the Pakistan-held areas be considered for representation.

Seats against people

By the census of 2011, the one the commission was bound to use, the Kashmir division had 6,888,475 people, 56.15 per cent of the total, and Jammu 5,378,538, or 43.84 per cent. Under the new map Kashmir has 52 per cent of the seats and Jammu 48 per cent. A seat in Jammu stands for about 125,000 people; a seat in Kashmir for about 146,000. A vote in the Valley now counts for less than a vote in Jammu.

Sajad Lone’s Peoples Conference set the order in a longer history: over six decades, it said, Kashmir’s seats had risen from 43 to 47 while Jammu’s had risen from 30 to 43. It called the report a repeat of past discrimination against Kashmir.

Where the lines were drawn

Kashmir’s one new seat, Trehgam, was added in Kupwara. Politicians quoted by Kashmir Life said that each of the six new seats in Jammu had either a clear Hindu majority or a critical edge over other communities. Padder-Nagseni was added in Kishtwar and Doda West in Doda, while the Muslim-majority seat of Gool was split between two constituencies, and, in Masood Hussain’s words, “the Muslim majority Gool seat that disappeared on one end re-emerged as the Hindu majority Mata Vaishno Devi seat in Reasi on the other end”.

The Jammu journalist Zaffar Choudhary counted the seats in the region where Muslims had an edge. In 1996, he said, “the region sent 15 of them to the assembly when the region had 37 berths only. Now when the number of seats is 43, I see only eight berths where Muslims have an edge.” “The legislative map is completely changed,” he said.

In the Chenab valley, a member of the district council, Asim Hashmi, said that six of the seven seats of Kishtwar, Ramban and Doda had been Muslim-majority before the order; after it, five of eight were.

The parliamentary map was redrawn as well. One constituency was carved out of the Anantnag region of the Valley together with Rajouri and Poonch in Jammu, on the other side of the Pir Panjal range, so that each of the territory’s five parliamentary seats would contain eighteen assembly segments.

Kashmiri parties object

The Kashmiri parties rejected the order. “No amount of gerrymandering will change the ground reality which is that whenever elections are held the voter will punish the BJP & its proxies,” the National Conference said. Mehbooba Mufti called it part of the BJP’s “agenda to curb the rights and dis-empower the people”. Altaf Bukhari of the Apni Party called it “unfair, and disempowering” and “yet another tragedy”, saying it divided people on regional and communal lines. Only the BJP welcomed it, as “all-inclusive political empowerment”.

Voters from outside

Until 2019 the rolls for the state assembly were governed by the state’s own law. With the special status gone, India’s Representation of the People Act applied, under which anyone ordinarily resident may register. On 17 August 2022 the territory’s chief electoral officer, Hirdesh Kumar, announced the first revision of the rolls since the change and said that some 2.5 million voters could be added to a roll of about 7.6 million. “An employee, a student, a labourer or anyone from outside who is living ordinarily in Jammu and Kashmir, can enlist his or her name in the voting list,” he said. No domicile certificate was needed, and soldiers from other states posted at peace stations in the territory could register too.

Omar Abdullah asked whether the BJP was “so insecure about support from genuine voters of Jammu and Kashmir that it needs to import temporary voters to win seats”. Mehbooba Mufti said that letting non-locals vote “is obviously to influence election results” and called the move “the last nail in the coffin of democracy”. On 22 August an all-party meeting called by the Gupkar alliance, with the Congress, the CPI(M), the Akali Dal and others, rejected it; Farooq Abdullah called it “totally unacceptable”. Sajad Lone threatened a hunger strike.

The administration then said the figure had been misread: the roll had grown from about 6.6 million in 2011 to 7.6 million mainly through young people reaching voting age, and anyone registering from elsewhere had to give up a vote in their home constituency. The final roll, published on 25 November 2022, listed 8,359,771 electors, a net increase of 772,872. The published figures did not separate voters from outside the territory. By January 2024 the roll was expected to reach about 8.7 million. The rule that an Indian from anywhere who is ordinarily resident may vote for Kashmir’s assembly remains.

Five members chosen by New Delhi

The Reorganisation Act of 2019 already let the lieutenant governor nominate two women to the assembly if he judged women under-represented. In 2023 the Indian parliament amended the Act to let him nominate three more: two members of the Kashmiri migrant community, one of whom must be a woman, and one person displaced from the Pakistan-held part of the state. As Kashmir Life noted, “these five nominated members will have the same powers and voting rights as other MLAs.” In a house of 95 a majority is 48, so five members chosen by New Delhi’s appointee can decide who governs.

Before the 2024 result, the National Conference, the Congress and the PDP warned against any nominations ahead of the formation of a government. “If they do it, we will go to the Supreme Court,” Farooq Abdullah said. On 14 October 2024 the Supreme Court declined to hear a petition against the provision and sent the petitioner, the Congress spokesman Ravinder Kumar Sharma, to the High Court, where he argued that the lieutenant governor must act on the advice of the elected council of ministers. The High Court admitted the challenge but declined to halt the nominations. In August 2025 Mehbooba Mufti called the provision “a blatant subversion of democratic principles”. “Representation must be earned through the people’s vote, not granted by central decree,” she said. The challenge was pending in the High Court at that time.

The vote of 2024

The assembly election was held on the new map in three phases between 18 September and 1 October 2024. Kashmiris used it, in the words of Kashmir Life’s editor Masood Hussain, as “a tool to register their anger and hate against the arbitrary decision-making on August 5, 2019”. “What happened in 2019 is more than a memory,” a voter in Sopore said. “It is something that will determine events in Jammu and Kashmir for a very long time.” The National Conference won 42 seats, the Congress 6 and the PDP 3; the BJP won 29, and independents 7. In the Kashmir division the National Conference and its allies took 41 of 47 seats.

In Jammu the new map did its work. The BJP won 29 of the region’s 43 seats, against 25 of 37 in 2014, and five of the six new Jammu seats: Doda West, Padder-Nagseni, Ramgarh, Jasrota and Ramnagar. Its gains, Masood Hussain wrote, “are being seen as the direct benefit of the delimitation, which gave Jammu six seats and Kashmir one.” The BJP had the largest share of the vote across the territory, 25.63 per cent against the National Conference’s 23.43. The former finance minister Haseeb Drabu warned in The Indian Express that the mandate was “virtually along communal lines, which cannot augur well for either the state or the country.”

Who counts and who decides

The Kashmiri parties won, but the changes stand. The seats, the voters’ list and the nominated members were all settled by New Delhi between 2020 and 2023, while Jammu and Kashmir had no assembly of its own. The assembly they produced governs a union territory in which police and public order are placed before the lieutenant governor, not the elected government. When the chief minister, Omar Abdullah, moved a resolution for the immediate restoration of statehood on 28 September 2026, the BJP members walked out.

Taken together with the domicile rules and the land laws, the new electoral arrangements are what Kashmiris mean when they speak of demographic change. Their concern is not only who may come to live in Indian-occupied Kashmir but who will be counted, and whose votes will decide, in what was India’s only Muslim-majority state. The plebiscite promised in 1948 was never held. The electoral map of 2022 was drawn without asking the people it governs.