The removal of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status in 2019 and what has followed: new residency rules, changes to land law, redrawn constituencies and the fear of becoming a minority at home.
In October and November 1947 the troops of the Dogra maharaja, Hari Singh, together with armed bands of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Akali Sikhs and refugees from Punjab, massacred Muslims across the eastern districts of Jammu and drove most of the survivors into Pakistan. Estimates of the dead run from 20,000 to more than 200,000. No FIR was lodged, no inquiry was held and no one was tried, and the Muslim population of Jammu district fell to about a third of what it had been.
On 5 August 2019 the Indian government abolished the constitutional autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, removed the law that reserved land and jobs for its permanent residents and split the state into two territories ruled from New Delhi. It did so with no elected Kashmiri body in place, under a military lockdown, with phones and internet cut and thousands detained, among them children and three former chief ministers. India’s Supreme Court upheld the decision in 2023, no official has been held to account for the detentions, and statehood had not been restored when this article was reviewed.
In 2020, by orders issued from New Delhi while Jammu and Kashmir had no legislature, the Indian government replaced the permanent resident with a new domicile open to people from outside, let any Indian citizen buy non-agricultural land in the territory and repealed the state’s land reform laws. In April 2025 the government told the assembly that 83,742 of the domicile certificates issued in the previous two years had gone to people who were not state subjects. Kashmiris were never consulted, and India dismissed the warning of United Nations experts that demographic change appeared to be under way.
Between 2020 and 2023, while Jammu and Kashmir had no legislature, New Delhi appointed a commission that gave six of seven new assembly seats to the less populous Jammu division, opened the voters’ list to Indians ordinarily living in the territory and gave its own appointee, the lieutenant governor, the power to nominate five members of the assembly. Of the parties in Jammu and Kashmir only the BJP welcomed the new map; Kashmiri parties condemned it as unfair, and their leaders called it gerrymandering. None of the changes was put to the people they govern, and the 2024 election was fought on the map the commission drew.
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