S H Mohammed’s opinion piece, “Security, Stability or Statehood,” offers perhaps the clearest public articulation of the thinking that underpins the Centre’s position on restoring statehood to J&K. It presents a coherent, security-first case for retaining the Union Territory framework as a “stabilising national-security architecture” rather than a temporary administrative arrangement. The argument is neither without merit, nor without supporters at the decision-making levels.
There can be no disputing his premise that J&K occupies a uniquely sensitive frontier. Indeed, it was precisely for this reason that it had a special constitutional status. Nor can the decades of insurgency, cross-border terrorism and institutional weakening which created genuine vulnerabilities be wished away.
Yet the article ultimately rests on a myopic binary: security versus statehood; the former must precede any meaningful restoration of representative governance. This sequencing assumes that political aspirations can be held in abeyance while administrative control delivers order.
To treat political legitimacy as subordinate to administrative control is untenable. It is also unsustainable because effective governance ultimately requires a degree of congruence between how a society organises itself socially and how power is distributed politically. When that congruence is absent over long periods, stability becomes brittle — dependent on continuous external enforcement rather than self-reinforcing consent.
On the ground, with every passing day, the prolonged separation of political legitimacy from administrative authority is itself eroding the foundations of durable governance and, over time, of security as well. The current UT model institutionalises a hierarchy that is difficult to sustain in a democratic polity. An elected government possesses popular legitimacy through assembly elections yet remains structurally subservient to a central apparatus whose authority is derived from New Delhi.
Ironically, this asymmetry is not new. For most part of seven decades till 2003 (except for 1977) elected governments operated under heavy central influence even while the formal shell of Article 370 remained intact. After Sheikh Abdullah’s dismissal, subsequent regimes were widely perceived locally as enjoying greater legitimacy in Delhi than among significant sections of the population. The practical autonomy promised at accession was progressively diluted through constitutional orders and political engineering. That period is widely recognised as one of the deeper sources of the legitimacy crisis that later metastasised.
The present UT structure reproduces this core problem in more explicit form: an elected layer with popular mandate subordinated to a non-elected, centrally directed authority. The difference is that today the arrangement is constitutionally entrenched rather than operating while maintaining the facade of a special status. Past elected regimes also carried their own legitimacy deficits — dynastic tendencies, corruption and occasional suppression of dissent.
The consequences extend beyond “electoral sentimentality” and “emotional constitutionalism”. They manifest in a growing mismatch between social capital and political capital. As a result, Kashmiris are experiencing a fundamental disconnect in their ability to influence or hold accountable the structures of power. This is leading to governance gaps, political alienation, and often suboptimal collective outcomes. The inability of the social resources to influence the state policy and accountability is perceived as disempowerment.
The social resources exist but fail to articulate into political power or responsiveness. This creates “amoral familism” or enclave dynamics with weak links to broader institutions. Indeed, social capital in Kashmir is getting divided into ethnic, caste, clan, religious, or regional lines which reduces the possibilities of inclusive political formation, including coalitions.
Politics in Kashmir has reinforced exclusion, clientelist or identity-based patronage which doesn’t generate broad based accountability. This situation can stabilize regimes in the short-term but risks backsliding, legitimacy crises, or sudden eruptions, be it populism or unrest.
People in Kashmir increasingly experience governance not as something done for them but to them. This renders even well-designed development schemes vulnerable to suspicion. What is needed in Kashmir today is a framework in which political parties, inclusive movements, and linking institutions articulate social resources into political influence.
The column contends the elected UT government already wields “substantial powers” and points to civic issues such as urban development, garbage management, flooding, and illegal construction. This framing conflates two distinct levels of government. By focusing on “municipal administration” failures and citing Chandigarh and Delhi as examples of effective governance under UT or limited status, the author reduces the expectations of an elected UT administration to those of a municipal corporation.
In doing so, he employs a rhetorical sleight of hand: he blames the elected side for shortcomings that fall within a municipality’s limited remit, while arguing that the UT framework itself imposes no real constraint on governance. It is a deliberate oversimplification that serves the argument for delaying statehood until “stability and governance credibility” are established.
Yet the analysis underplays how centralised control has distorted the entire developmental design. The developmental policy has nothing to do with the local economy. Kashmir, despite its singular economic uniqueness – import dependent export oriented artisanal economy with a vibrant horticultural sector – is being treated like any other state, like Bihar or Orissa. Blaming local incompetence without examining the architecture that limits local ownership misses the deeper governance challenge.
Historical patterns further complicate the “security first, statehood later” sequence. Periods of relative calm in the Valley during the early 2000s and 2010s coincided with active political processes in which elected governments exercised meaningful, if imperfect, autonomy even under Article 370. To be sure, consent-based arrangements have historically proved more resilient than control-based ones.
Conversely, prolonged political vacuums and perceptions of disenfranchisement have repeatedly correlated with spikes in radicalisation and unrest. The Pahalgam attack itself, under the UT framework, demonstrated that kinetic superiority and central coordination alone do not eliminate vulnerabilities when local intelligence, community trust and rapid political signalling are weak.
Fiscal arguments in the original piece also require scrutiny. To be clear, J&K economy doesn’t depend on central transfers, the government of J&K does. The security costs are high, but this does not mean statehood would automatically sever central support. India’s federal practice has long accommodated asymmetric arrangements for strategically important regions.
Social capital itself is not uniformly cohesive; it contains strong bonding ties alongside fractures that can be exploited. More than the security threats to the integrity of the state, which cannot be discounted, Jammu’s regional aspirations, Ladakh’s separate status and the unresolved displacement of Kashmiri Pandits add further complexity. it is imperative that a realignment of political authority must incorporate robust safeguards for national security, minority protections and deradicalisation. These are non- negotiables.
An alternative reality for Jammu and Kashmir envisions statehood not as a reward for perfect stability but as an instrument to achieve it: by restoring agency to elected representatives, rebuilding trust across communities, and aligning local aspirations with national security imperatives. The choice is not between security and statehood, but between a stability engendered by control and stability deepened by consent.
Postscript:
By labelling demands for statehood restoration as “electoral sentimentality”, and emotional “constitutional politics”, the article delves a deep and devastating blow to the foundational principles of the Constitution of India. What is being suggested is that that popular will expressed through elections or constitutional claims can be overridden by expert or security-driven reasoning. This reframes the Constitution itself as something that can be operationalised selectively, based on assessments of security rather than on the principles of a federal democracy and popular sovereignty that the document enshrines. It also moves toward a managerial constitutionalism, where the Constitution is administered from above rather than continuously legitimised through political participation and consent. The Constitution must be viewed as a framework for managing diversity and political contestation through consent, and not as a tool for achieving and retaining administrative control.
The author is a Contributing Editor .
