Domicile and land: the 2020 orders that opened Kashmir to outsiders

A protection older than India

Until 2019 the land of Jammu and Kashmir could be owned only by its own people. State subject laws made under the Dogra ruler in 1927 defined who belonged to the state, and after 1947 Article 35A of the Indian constitution let the state reserve for its permanent residents the right to own land, to settle, to hold government jobs and to receive state scholarships. In 1950 the Big Landed Estates Abolition Act gave land to those who tilled it. These laws were the legal shield of a small Muslim-majority people inside a country of more than a billion.

On 5 August 2019 Article 35A was removed together with the state’s autonomy, and on 31 October 2019 the state was dissolved into union territories governed from New Delhi. Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir then had no elected assembly. Every rule on residency and land that followed was made by order, by the Indian home ministry or by the administration that New Delhi appointed.

An order at midnight

On 31 March 2020, during India’s national lockdown against the coronavirus, the home ministry issued the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation (Adaptation of State Laws) Order, in force from midnight. In place of the permanent resident it created a new category: the domicile. A domicile is anyone who has lived in the territory for fifteen years, or has studied there for seven years and sat the class ten or class twelve examination there, or is registered as a migrant. The children of central government officials and of employees of public sector and statutory bodies who have served ten years in the territory also qualify.

As first issued, the order reserved only lower-level government jobs for domiciles and left the higher posts open to all of India. The outcry was immediate. Even Altaf Bukhari of the Apni Party called it “cosmetic” and an attempt to “hoodwink the people”; Omar Abdullah called it an insult with suspect timing; and a local BJP leader, speaking anonymously, admitted: “We are facing a backlash from our workers, leave aside the general public.” On 3 April the home ministry amended the order to reserve all posts for domiciles. Bukhari thanked the home minister, Amit Shah, and the national security adviser, Ajit Doval. Sajad Lone’s Peoples Conference called the episode a “monkey dance”.

Fifteen days or a fine

The procedure followed on 18 May 2020. A tehsildar, the local revenue officer, must issue a domicile certificate within fifteen days, and an appeal must be decided within seven. An officer who fails can be fined 50,000 rupees from his salary. The writer Maknoon Wani observed in Himal Southasian that fining an official for not issuing a document was unheard of in India. Permanent residents needed the new certificate too, for jobs; Ajay Sadhotra, a National Conference leader in Jammu, said they were “feeling harassed” and were being “forced to grease the palms”.

Among the first to receive a certificate was Navin Kumar Choudhary, a senior officer of the Indian Administrative Service from Darbhanga in Bihar. By early July 2020, according to Kashmir Life, about 33,000 applications had been received and more than 25,000 certificates issued, almost all in the Jammu region: Doda alone had issued 8,500 and Rajouri 6,220. In the whole Kashmir Valley 435 had been issued, against 720 applications.

The Peoples Democratic Party warned that “demographic change and disenfranchisement will further complicate the J&K issue which has claimed thousands of lives so far. This will be resisted through all democratic, peaceful means.” Farooq Abdullah said the law was “not acceptable to the people”. G. N. Monga, a vice-president of the Congress in Jammu and Kashmir, called the issue of certificates to non-locals “morally and ethically wrong” and asked that it stop until the Supreme Court had ruled on the changes of 2019.

Counting the certificates

By 21 September 2020 the administration had issued 1,852,355 domicile certificates, 497,238 of them in the Kashmir division and 1,335,643 in Jammu. Most went to permanent residents. But by the administration’s own count 59,993 went to people who had never been state subjects, among them 17,978 West Pakistani refugees, 1,825 members of the Valmiki community and 755 Gorkhas; the rest were outside those three groups. Earlier that month, when about 1.25 million certificates had been issued, the administration had said that 99 per cent went to permanent residents. The former Congress minister Saifuddin Soz asked who the remaining one per cent were, accused the administration of issuing certificates “in hot haste” and demanded a white paper naming them.

The count kept rising. In April 2025, in a written reply to a question from the PDP legislator Waheed Parra in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly, the government said that 3,512,184 domicile certificates had been issued over the previous two years, 83,742 of them to people who were not state subjects. The reply, as reported, did not say who they were. “The government is silently redrawing the social fabric of this region,” Parra said. Kashmir Life later described the figure as more than 83,000 certificates to non-state subjects since 2020. Omar Abdullah, by then chief minister, asked for the same rule as in Ladakh, where outsiders become eligible for domicile only after 2034; the Apni Party proposed raising the residence requirement to fifty years.

Some of those who gained had a real grievance. West Pakistani refugees, Valmikis and Gorkhas had lived in Jammu for decades without the rights of permanent residents, and the state’s own legislature could have settled their claims. The order went much further, opening residency to officials’ families, long-term workers and students from elsewhere. “Definitely thrust will be on Jammu,” Sadhotra predicted. “Jammu will suffer in the long run.”

Land for any Indian

On 26 October 2020 the home ministry notified the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation (Adaptation of Central Laws) Third Order. It took effect at once and removed the requirement of permanent residence, or even of domicile, for buying land: any Indian citizen could now buy non-agricultural land in the territory. Twelve state laws were repealed outright, among them the Alienation of Land Act, the Big Landed Estates Abolition Act, the Common Lands (Regulation) Act of 1956 and the Consolidation of Holdings Act of 1962.

The lieutenant governor, Manoj Sinha, said: “Agricultural land will be protected, however, we also want that like other parts of India, industries should be set in Jammu and Kashmir as well.” Omar Abdullah called the amendments “unacceptable” and warned: “J&K is now up for sale & the poorer small land holding owners will suffer.” Sajad Lone, speaking for the People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration, the coalition of Kashmiri parties seeking the return of the special status, called the order a “huge betrayal” and a “massive assault”. In December 2020 Sinha challenged the critics: “Give me a single example of any outsider having bought land here.”

Who has bought

The answer came from his own government. In March 2022 the junior home minister, Nityanand Rai, told the Lok Sabha that 34 people from outside had bought property in the territory since 2019, in Jammu, Reasi, Udhampur and Ganderbal. In April 2023 he told the Rajya Sabha that 185 people from outside had bought land in the territory in three years: one in 2020, 57 in 2021 and 127 in 2022. In the same reply he said 1,559 Indian companies, including multinationals, had invested in the territory.

In November 2024 the territory’s deputy chief minister, Surinder Choudhary, said: “Our land and jobs are being taken by outsiders.” He cited a young woman from outside who had become an officer of the Kashmir Administrative Service, and a recently retired police officer who, he said, had bought land cheaply at two tourist places. “Our land is also very little and it should be our right.”

Strategic areas for the army

In July 2020 the administration approved a special arrangement for “strategic areas” needed by the armed forces for operations and training. At the request of an army officer of the rank of corps commander or above, the government may notify such an area, and inside it the forces themselves are responsible for seeing that construction follows the master plan and environmental rules. Kashmiri parties protested that land was being handed to the army in what is already one of the most militarised places in the world. The administration replied that the decision had “nothing to do with the transfer of any land to the Armed Forces” and accused its critics of “deliberately misleading people as if the land is being transferred to Armed Forces and entire J&K is being turned into a military establishment”.

Bulldozers in 2023

In January 2023 the administration began an eviction drive. On 9 January the revenue department ordered officials to retrieve all encroached state land and kahcharai, the village grazing land, by 31 January, with daily progress reports. Bulldozers followed. One newspaper claimed 15 lakh kanals had been recovered, another 3.89 lakh. On 9 October 2020 the administration had already scrapped the Roshni scheme of 2001, under which 172,244 kanals of state land had been regularised in the names of those who held it.

“Due process has to be followed. Without issuing a single notice, they are directly sending bulldozers,” Omar Abdullah said. “Even people who have papers from Maharaja’s time are not being considered,” said Mehbooba Mufti. Sajad Lone asked: “Do they want to retrieve land or humiliate people?” Even Altaf Bukhari said: “There are no land sharks in Jammu and Kashmir.” A doctor from a village in south Kashmir found land his family had held for at least a century listed as encroached. In Surankot in Poonch a man was reported to have died of a heart attack a day after receiving an eviction notice. Residents of Sunjwan and Bathindi, mostly Muslim localities of Jammu, said they were being singled out because of who lives there.

What the UN experts said

On 18 February 2021 two United Nations special rapporteurs, Fernand de Varennes on minority issues and Ahmed Shaheed on freedom of religion or belief, said that the loss of autonomy and direct rule from New Delhi meant that the people of Jammu and Kashmir “no longer have their own government and have lost power to legislate or amend laws in the region to ensure the protection of their rights as minorities”. They warned that “the number of successful applicants for domicile certificates that appear to be from outside Jammu and Kashmir raises concerns that demographic change on a linguistic, religious and ethnic basis is already underway.”

India’s foreign ministry replied that Jammu and Kashmir is an “integral and inalienable part of India”, called it “deplorable” that the rapporteurs had not waited for India’s response to their questions, and dismissed their concerns as “inaccurate assumptions”. It said nothing about who the non-state recipients of domicile certificates were.

What the orders add up to

New Delhi removed the protection that Kashmiris had held since 1927 by executive order, in the middle of a pandemic lockdown, at a time when they had no assembly to debate it and some of their leaders were still in detention; Mehbooba Mufti was released only on 13 October 2020, two weeks before the land order. In Ladakh, by contrast, outsiders become eligible for domicile only after 2034. No such delay was given to Kashmir.

The elected government that took office in October 2024 has asked for longer residence requirements and protection for local land and jobs. When this article was reviewed the domicile and land orders of 2020 remained in force. Kashmiri parties across the spectrum, including those that have always worked within Indian rule, have warned that the orders give New Delhi the legal means to change the population of Indian-occupied Kashmir over time. Kashmiris remember that the population of Jammu was changed by force in 1947.