“Kashmir’s conflict is not a mystery to be solved. It is a system that can be understood. And a system that can be changed.” __Meer Yassir Ahmed

This essay proceeds in six stages. It first examines Mullik’s intelligence[1] account as a primary historical source; then identifies the structural pattern running through Kashmir’s post-Partition political history; develops a theoretical framework based on legitimacy, social power and state power; applies that framework to Kashmir’s historical evolution; evaluates post-2019 developments against it; and concludes by identifying the institutional conditions under which durable peace becomes possible.

Long Form

There is a document that not many have read.

It was written in 1969, published in 1971, and has since remained on the shelves of specialist libraries—available, meticulously documented, operationally specific, and yet almost entirely absent from mainstream political and journalistic discussions of Jammu and Kashmir. Its author was the man who served as Director of India’s Intelligence Bureau for fourteen years under Jawaharlal Nehru. He was present during every major crisis in Kashmir’s post-Partition political history. He met Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah before his arrest, during the conspiracy investigation, and throughout the long years of detention that followed. He sat with Nehru through the night of 8 August 1953, relaying reports from Srinagar as Sheikh Abdullah’s dismissal and arrest unfolded. He documented what he witnessed, cross-checked his account with colleagues who had shared those events, and published what remains one of the most detailed first-person operational records of how India confronted the political and security challenges of Kashmir during the first two decades after Independence.

What Mullik’s account establishes is not what many readers might expect. It is not simply an intelligence history of Pakistan’s sustained efforts to undermine India’s position in Jammu and Kashmir, though Pakistani intelligence activity, infiltration, political subversion and conspiracy are documented throughout the narrative in remarkable operational detail. Nor is it merely an account of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s political rise, estrangement from New Delhi and eventual prosecution in the Kashmir Conspiracy Case, though his political evolution is traced with equal care and nuance. Taken as a whole, the book presents a far more complex picture in which external intervention, internal political leadership and the responses of the Indian state interact continuously in shaping Kashmir’s post-Partition trajectory.

The question that naturally follows is one that Mullik’s account raises but does not itself attempt to answer. Why did successive political arrangements, despite changing leaders, changing governments and changing security conditions, repeatedly fail to produce a durable political settlement? Understanding why those arrangements were created, why they repeatedly unravelled, and what conditions might sustain a more durable political order is the analytical task that much of the public discourse on Kashmir has deferred since 1947.

This essay attempts to address that question. It does so not as a retrospective exercise, but because many of the structural conditions that shaped Kashmir’s political history continue to shape the present, and the opportunity to understand them—and respond to them differently—may not remain open indefinitely.

Part I: The Foundational Choice

When B.N. Mullik joined the Intelligence Bureau as Deputy Director in September 1948, he inherited a situation already defined by a specific political logic. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah commanded the valley’s political loyalty in a way that no other leader from Delhi or from within Jammu and Kashmir could replicate. The National Conference was a functioning political organization with genuine popular roots. The alternative political formations were either communalist, pro-Pakistani, or organizationally marginal. India’s position in Kashmir was legally established through the Instrument of Accession but politically contingent upon Sheikh Abdullah’s sustained cooperation.

This created a structural dependency that shaped every subsequent decision. When Sheikh Abdullah demanded the withdrawal of intelligence officers who were reporting accurately on his changing political positions, the Government of India accommodated him because the alternative—a confrontation that alienated the Sheikh—risked India’s political position in the Valley. When Sardar Patel warned repeatedly that such dependence was dangerous, arguing that Sheikh Abdullah was ultimately captive to his own political ambitions and might one day place them above India’s interests, his concerns were weighed against the absence of any credible political alternative and set aside.

Patel died in December 1950. Within three years, his concerns appeared to have been borne out by subsequent events. Sheikh Abdullah, increasingly isolated within his own Cabinet, his own Constituent Assembly and significant sections of the National Conference, while facing the likely exposure of his contacts with Pakistani intelligence through Pir Maqbool Gilani, was dismissed and arrested during the night of 8–9 August 1953. Nearly sixty people died in the disturbances that followed. Mullik spent the night at Nehru’s residence, receiving reports from Srinagar as the operation unfolded. At 4:30 the following morning, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad was sworn in as Prime Minister.

The operational execution was competent. What followed was, in Mullik’s own assessment, a decade of genuine political stability, economic development and closer constitutional integration with India under a reorganized National Conference supported by an experienced second line of leadership. Yet, viewed in the light of the decades that followed, that success proved less durable than its achievements initially suggested. The Government of India had unquestionably created a more stable and productive political order after 1953. The question, however, is whether that order had acquired sufficient institutional depth to endure beyond the leadership that sustained it. It is this question, rather than the achievements of the Bakshi period themselves, that becomes central to understanding Kashmir’s subsequent political history.

The Holy Relic crisis of 1963 exposed the issue once again. The disappearance of the Moi-e-Muqqaddas from the Hazratbal Shrine produced a mass mobilization of Kashmiri Muslims that no intelligence assessment had anticipated, because the intelligence framework was calibrated to monitor political organizations and their leadership rather than to measure the accumulated distance between the population and the institutions of governance. The Holy Relic agitation was neither organized by the Plebiscite Front nor initiated by Pakistani agents, although both subsequently attempted to exploit it. Read in retrospect, the episode suggests that the prevailing governance model had not developed sufficient civic and institutional capacity to absorb popular grievances before they acquired political momentum.

The Kamaraj Plan of 1963, which led to Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad’s resignation, brought this phase of Kashmir’s political history to a close. What followed—the gradual decline in administrative quality, the erosion of political credibility, the rigged elections of 1987 and the armed insurgency that erupted in 1989–90—forms the historical sequence that this essay seeks to explain. The argument advanced in the pages that follow is that these were not disconnected episodes but successive manifestations of a deeper structural problem whose roots lay in the relationship between political authority, institutions and society.

Part II: The Mechanics of What Followed

The armed insurgency that began in 1989 is most commonly analyzed as a security problem, and it was, among other things, a security problem of serious magnitude. But security analysis leaves unanswered the deeper structural question that Mullik’s intelligence account, read against the subsequent course of Kashmir’s political history, inevitably raises: how does a population that once possessed genuine political capital—Sheikh Abdullah’s early commitment to India, the National Conference’s grassroots organization, and the Valley’s well-documented preference for India over Pakistan during the crucial years immediately following Partition—arrive at a condition in which tens of thousands of young men chose armed resistance over civic participation?

The answer is not simply Pakistani interference, though Pakistani interference was real and continuous. It is not simply economic marginalization, though economic exclusion was a genuine grievance. It is structural: when civic participation repeatedly produces no outcomes, when votes are manipulated, when grievances pursued through official institutions receive no meaningful response, and when the formal political system comes to be experienced as a performance managed from outside rather than a mechanism responsive to those within it, populations do not become apolitical. They develop alternative mechanisms for political expression.

In the late 1980s, the alternative mechanism took the form of an armed insurrection, sustained by cross-border logistics, ideological infrastructure and a generation of young men who had become convinced that the formal political system would not respond to their participation. The connecting structures—the networks that linked individual grievance to collective political action—were built by organizations that moved faster, listened more carefully and offered more credible pathways to political agency than any official institution available in the Valley.

The security response to this armed insurrection—counterinsurgency operations and detention powers—addressed the visible expression of the problem. It did not address the connecting structure. When that connecting structure was disrupted, another emerged. In 2010, stone-pelting became the primary repertoire: low-cost, high-visibility, difficult to attribute and available to anyone with access to a street. By 2016, social media had become the principal connecting mechanism. The death of a militant commander in Tral produced mass mobilization across the Valley within hours because the connecting infrastructure had become faster and more widely distributed than in any previous form. The security challenge became more difficult precisely because the underlying structural condition had not changed; only its technological expression had.

The repertoire shift between 1989 and 2016 is one of the most important developments in Kashmir’s recent political history, yet it receives relatively little attention in mainstream analysis. The armed insurgency required organization, cross-border support, weapons and sustained political infrastructure. It could therefore be weakened by disrupting those requirements. The 2016 pattern required only a smartphone and a grievance—neither of which can be disrupted without costs that exceed any likely security benefit. The velocity of political mobilization increased while its organizational threshold decreased. Each successive cycle of contention thus became more difficult to manage through security measures alone, making governance-based responses progressively more important. Security measures could suppress successive repertoires of contention. They could not, by themselves, alter the political conditions that repeatedly generated them.

Part III: The Legitimacy Problem

There is a specific mechanism through which the state sustains its authority over people who might otherwise resist it, and it is not primarily coercive, even when coercion is available.

Coercion can compel compliance. It cannot produce the legitimacy that arises only when people come to regard the political system as genuinely their own—responsive, equitable and worthy of their trust. That legitimacy finds expression in the population’s active and sustained investment in the political system, making political authority durable. The difference between coercive compliance and such investment is not merely philosophical; it is operationally decisive. A population that complies because it fears coercion will act differently the moment it perceives a shift in the balance of coercive capacity. A population that experiences the political system as responsive, equitable and genuinely its own will defend its continuation even under pressure because it has something precious to lose from instability.

Kashmir’s governance history across seven decades reflects a persistent tendency to conflate coercive compliance with durable political legitimacy. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s dismissal and arrest in 1953 marked a profound rupture in the legitimacy of the political order. The decade that followed under Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad was nevertheless real, productive and substantially better than what came before and after it. As the subsequent course of Kashmir’s political history suggests, however, that relative stability proved more dependent upon Bakshi’s political authority, his genuine popularity among the Valley’s working class and the cohesion of the leadership surrounding him than upon institutions capable of sustaining the population’s enduring investment beyond that leadership. Bakshi thus generated a substantial measure of personal political legitimacy, but it remained tied primarily to his own leadership rather than becoming institutional legitimacy capable of sustaining public investment in the political system beyond him.

The same distinction also helps explain the later phases of Kashmir’s political history. The periods of surface stability following the gradual containment of the insurgency that began in 1989 and, later, the disruption of the Hurriyat’s organizational structures after the revocation of Article 370 in 2019 were achieved primarily through coercive compliance rather than renewed political investment. They addressed the visible manifestations of instability but did not rebuild the institutional legitimacy through which people come to regard the political system as genuinely their own. Consequently, each period of stability proved contingent upon the continued effectiveness of coercive capacity rather than upon a durable relationship between the political order and the population.

When Bakshi resigned in 1963, the political cohesion that had characterized the previous decade began gradually to weaken. The institutions developed during that period proved less resilient than the leadership that had sustained them. This is the signature of governance that depends primarily upon personal legitimacy rather than institutional legitimacy: its durability rarely extends beyond the authority of those who created it.

What legitimacy-based governance produces is different: institutions that function independently of the individuals who happen to occupy them; processes that deliver consistent outcomes across successive administrations; and civic infrastructure—accessible courts, responsive local government, transparent development spending and functional grievance mechanisms—that makes the cost of political disruption real to the people who would bear it.

India has, since 2019, invested in several of these components. The revival of Panchayati institutions is the most significant. District Development Councils, when they function effectively, represent precisely the kind of local accountability mechanism that earlier governance models did not successfully institutionalize. Greater transparency in district-level development spending, the expansion of infrastructure connecting previously isolated communities and the economic integration reflected in the revival of tourism all represent investments capable of strengthening political legitimacy, even if they are rarely described in those terms.

The critical variable, however, is whether these investments function with sufficient credibility to alter the political calculus of the population that encounters them. A Panchayat that exists only on paper—one that cannot resolve a land dispute, deliver development funds or hold a contractor accountable—produces not legitimacy but its opposite. It demonstrates that the formal political system is merely performative and that nothing fundamental has changed. A Panchayat that genuinely works—one that produces a repaired road, resolves a dispute and delivers a predictable administrative outcome—creates exactly the kind of civic investment upon which durable peace depends.

The test is not ceremonial. It is operational.

Part IV: Social Power, State Power and Political Order

Albert Jay Nock, the American political essayist whose work forms part of the intellectual foundations of twentieth-century libertarian thought, first distinguished between social power and state power in Our Enemy, the State (1935). He conceived social power as the productive capacity generated through voluntary cooperation, exchange, association and shared social organization, while state power denoted the coercive authority exercised through political institutions to regulate, direct and extract. Nock argued that the two were generally inversely related, with the expansion of state power tending to occur at the expense of social power. Later libertarian thinkers, most notably Murray Rothbard, retained this distinction and portrayed political history as a continuing contest between these two forms of power.

Subsequent political and institutional scholarship retained the analytical distinction between society’s autonomous capacities and the institutional authority of the state while substantially refining their relationship. Max Weber shifted the focus to the legitimacy of political authority; Hannah Arendt distinguished power grounded in collective action and consent from coercion and violence; Charles Tilly demonstrated that states not only extract resources but also create the institutional conditions for markets, security and collective action; Peter Evans argued that effective states derive strength from their embeddedness within society; and Francis Fukuyama emphasized that durable political order depends upon balancing state capacity with the rule of law and democratic accountability. Contemporary political thought therefore no longer treats social power and state power as inherently antagonistic or necessarily zero-sum, but as analytically distinct and potentially complementary forms of collective capacity whose relationship depends upon legitimacy, institutional quality, state capacity and civic participation.

The advent of constitutional democracy fundamentally altered the normative conception of the state. Rather than being viewed primarily as an external coercive authority, the state came to be understood as an institution deriving its legitimacy from the people, exercising authority through constitutional and legal constraints, and remaining accountable to the citizenry through representative and judicial institutions. The analytical distinction between state and society nevertheless remains significant, since each performs distinct but complementary functions in sustaining political order.

Borrowing Nock’s terminology while employing it in this broader institutional sense, this essay understands social power as the capacity of society to organize itself through networks of trust, civic associations, voluntary cooperation, markets and shared norms to pursue collective goals. State power refers to the legitimate institutional capacity of public authority to formulate and enforce rules, provide security, mobilize resources and coordinate collective action in accordance with constitutional and legal authority. The framework does not transfer wholesale to Kashmir; no theoretical framework does. Rather, it provides a conceptual lens through which the evolving relationship between society, institutions and political authority may be examined. Within this framework, durable political order emerges not from the predominance of either social power or state power, but from institutional arrangements through which each reinforces the legitimacy, effectiveness and resilience of the other.

Viewed through this conceptual framework, Kashmir provides an unusually revealing case because it demonstrates both the resilience of social power and the consequences of repeatedly failing to institutionalize it.

Kashmir’s social power has been extraordinary. Kashmiriyat—the composite cultural identity that sustained itself through centuries of external political pressure—is not merely a rhetorical construct invoked in political discourse. It is the documented expression of a civilizational tradition that produced Sufi shrines and Sanskrit manuscripts within the same cultural landscape, sustained interfaith craft communities across centuries of political change, and endured a decade of armed conflict without the complete communal fracture that external sponsors of violence repeatedly sought to engineer. The Valley’s craft economy—carpet weaving, shawl production, willow work and papier-mâché—represents forms of social organization and productive capacity that predate the modern state and have survived every major political disruption.

The revival of tourism during the past four years is not solely a product of government policy, although public investment in security and infrastructure has helped create enabling conditions. Its durability ultimately depends upon the capacity of society itself to respond through entrepreneurship, investment and cooperation. Local entrepreneurs rebuilding houseboat operations, families converting properties into homestays, pony operators, handicraft traders and shikara wallahs restoring economic networks disrupted by decades of conflict together exemplify the operation of social power. The 21 million visitors to Jammu and Kashmir in 2023 represent a collective economic judgement by hundreds of thousands of ordinary people that stability is durable, investment is worthwhile and the social fabric can sustain expanding commercial activity.

That collective judgement is perhaps the most powerful observable indicator of social investment. It is more politically significant than any election result because it reflects a population making real, irreversible economic decisions based on its assessment of the prevailing political environment. People who rebuild houseboats, refurbish hotels or establish tourism-related enterprises acquire a direct material stake in preserving the conditions that make those investments viable. Such investments constitute an infrastructure of peace—not the visible infrastructure measured through security indicators, but the social and economic infrastructure through which peace becomes self-sustaining.

The policy implication follows directly from this analysis. The most productive deployment of governance capacity in Kashmir is not merely to manage political threats but to strengthen the institutional conditions within which social power can continue to expand. This requires predictable and enforceable property rights; contracts that inspire confidence because they are honoured and adjudicated efficiently; infrastructure that broadens the geographic reach of economic opportunity beyond the Valley’s principal urban centres; educational investment that equips people with the skills demanded by a changing economy; and, above all, civic institutions through which citizens experience the political system as responsive, accountable and worthy of their continued participation. In the long run, political stability is most securely sustained not by the continuous exercise of state power alone, but by the growth of social power that legitimate and effective institutions make possible.

Part V: The Historical Lesson and the Present Moment

What B.N. Mullik’s intelligence account establishes, reading it against the subsequent six decades of Kashmir’s political history, is a lesson about the relationship between governance quality and political stability that is simultaneously obvious in retrospect and consistently difficult to act on in real time.

The Sheikh Abdullah crisis was not caused by Pakistani interference, though Pakistani interference existed. It was caused by a governance model that had made India’s position in Kashmir contingent on one man’s continued political judgment and that had no institutional resilience when that judgment changed. The lesson was not drawn. The model was replicated with Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad. The Holy Relic crisis of 1963 exposed the model’s limitations again. The lesson was not drawn. The 1987 elections compressed forty years of accumulated governance failure into a single catastrophic moment of credibility loss. The armed insurgency followed.

The 2019 constitutional changes created a new institutional reality in Jammu and Kashmir – one whose implications are still developing. The reinvigoration of local governance structures, the expansion of infrastructure investment, the opening of economic opportunity at scales not previously attempted these represent exactly the kind of institutional investment that the pre-1989 governance model conspicuously lacked.

But institutional investment takes time to produce the specific commodity it is designed to generate: the population’s experience of the system as genuinely theirs. That experience cannot be declared; it must be accumulated, one resolved dispute, one functional grievance mechanism, one visible connection between civic participation and real outcome at a time.

The historical record is specific about the timelines involved. Mullik’s account documents that even the most stable period in Kashmir’s post-Partition history the decade from 1953 to 1963 was insufficient to build the institutional depth that would have survived the Holy Relic crisis without political crisis. A decade of surface stability, built on personal political relationships and economic development without civic infrastructure, did not produce durable legitimacy. It produced the appearance of legitimacy that dissolved when tested.

The present moment offers something the 1953-1963 period did not: a clearer understanding of what actually produces durable governance legitimacy, a more sophisticated institutional toolkit for building it, and in the Panchayat system, the tourism economy, and the youth population’s demonstrated appetite for economic participation—a set of social assets around which legitimacy-building investment can be organised.

What it also offers, if the historical record is read honestly, is an understanding of the cost of delay. Every year in which the formal institutions of governance fail to build the credibility they require is a year in which alternative connecting structures—the mechanisms through which grievance becomes collective political action—develop further and become more difficult to interrupt. The 1947-1953 model failed in three years. The 1953-1963 model produced a decade before failing. The current moment is not exempt from this logic. The investments required are understood. The tools are available. The window in which the accumulated social capital of post-2019 stability can be converted into genuine institutional legitimacy is real but not unlimited.

Part VI: The Ledger Since 2019

When Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah stated on 12 March 1981 that Article 370 was “not sacrosanct” and could be abrogated, he acknowledged that the provision was not beyond constitutional alteration. Nearly four decades later, the Modi government acted upon that constitutional possibility. On 5 August 2019, it revoked Article 370, reorganized Jammu and Kashmir, and initiated an institutional restructuring that has altered the Valley’s political, economic and security landscape in ways not attempted by previous governments.

The argument developed across the preceding five parts is open to empirical verification, and that is precisely what gives it analytical value. If institutional investment, rather than personal patronage, is what converts obedience into legitimacy, then the years since August 2019 should be assessed as a concrete institutional ledger: elections restored, development accelerated, infrastructure expanded, institutions strengthened, and sustained efforts made to dismantle the separatist, terror-finance and narco-terror ecosystem. That ledger is neither perfect nor complete. It nevertheless reflects a markedly different approach to governance—one centred upon institutional restructuring rather than the management of political personalities.

The first and most visible change has been political participation. In October and November 2020, Jammu and Kashmir held its first direct District Development Council elections, creating a genuine third tier of grassroots democracy in a territory where local governance had too often been mediated through appointment rather than election. Four years later, in 2024, the region held its first Assembly election since the reorganization, and voter turnout exceeded that recorded in the Lok Sabha election held earlier the same year. Omar Abdullah’s return as Chief Minister through a full electoral process, rather than through negotiated political accommodation, marked not a restoration of the earlier governance model but the functioning of a revised institutional framework within which electoral politics could once again operate. The significance of this development lies in providing citizens with a more direct stake in governance, development and public accountability.

The economic changes have been equally significant. Domestic tourist arrivals increased from about 2.3 million in 2020 to 23.5 million in 2024, while foreign arrivals rose from about 1,650 to more than 65,000 during the same period. The Economic Survey 2024–25 recorded nearly seventy-five million cumulative visits over four years, suggesting a substantial strengthening of public confidence in the region. Gross State Domestic Product reached approximately ₹2.62 trillion in 2024–25, with a compound annual growth rate of 8.55 per cent since 2018–19. Such growth reflects the combined effects of a more stable administrative environment, improvements in the security situation, greater physical connectivity and a policy framework that has enabled tourism and private enterprise to operate on a larger and more predictable scale. The G20 Tourism Working Group meeting held in Srinagar in 2023 similarly carried significance beyond diplomacy, signalling an effort to project Kashmir nationally and internationally as a region increasingly associated with economic opportunity rather than recurring disruption.

The transformation of physical infrastructure has been equally substantial. The Udhampur–Srinagar–Baramulla Rail Link, first conceived in 1898 and delayed for generations, became fully operational in June 2025. The project includes thirty-six tunnels, 943 bridges, the Chenab Bridge—the world’s highest railway arch bridge—and the Anji Khad Bridge, India’s first cable-stayed railway bridge. The introduction of Vande Bharat services designed specifically for Himalayan conditions has reduced the Jammu–Srinagar journey to less than five hours. In practical terms, these developments facilitate the movement of people, agricultural produce, medicines, tourists and commercial goods while deepening Kashmir’s economic integration with the rest of India. The establishment of a dedicated Jammu Railway Division further reflects the institutional consolidation accompanying this expanded transport network.

The gains in health and education have been similarly significant. AIIMS Jammu became operational in 2024, while a second AIIMS is under construction at Awantipora. Medical colleges in the Union Territory have increased from four to twelve over the past decade, MBBS seats have more than doubled, and postgraduate medical seats have expanded from none before 2014 to about 650. IIT Jammu now functions from its permanent campus, IIM Jammu has broadened its academic programmes, and the region’s higher educational infrastructure has expanded considerably. These developments have implications beyond statistics: they reduce the need for young Kashmiris to leave the region for advanced education and specialized healthcare while contributing to the growth of a locally rooted professional middle class with an increasing stake in long-term stability.

One of the most consequential changes has occurred in the security domain. For decades, separatist organizations functioned as a parallel political authority, providing ideological support to militancy while sustaining an environment in which violence, intimidation and political mobilization reinforced one another. Since 2019, this ecosystem has been subjected to a more systematic institutional response. Hurriyat offices ceased to function, Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu Kashmir and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front were proscribed, and National Investigation Agency actions led to the attachment of properties linked to terror-financing networks, including those associated with Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali. At the same time, financial investigations, property attachments and specialized anti-terror mechanisms sought to weaken the institutional foundations that had sustained separatist activity over many years.

The narco-terror nexus has likewise received greater institutional attention. The Nasha Mukt Jammu Kashmir Abhiyaan, launched in 2026, resulted in the arrest of more than one thousand peddlers during its first fifty days and the seizure of narcotics and drug-linked assets worth several crores of rupees. Earlier NIA investigations had already documented links between heroin trafficking routes originating in Pakistan and militant financing networks operating in Kashmir. These developments are significant because narcotics function not merely as a criminal issue but also as an instrument of social degradation, recruitment, corruption and terrorist financing.

The security outcomes are reflected in available indicators. Terror incidents have declined substantially since 2019, local recruitment into militancy has fallen to its lowest level since the insurgency began, and large-scale shutdown politics has receded considerably. These developments do not imply that the challenge has ended. Cross-border infiltration continues, and attacks such as Pahalgam in 2025 remain a reminder that Pakistan-sponsored terrorism continues to pose a serious security threat. Nevertheless, the post-2019 institutional framework appears to have altered the balance by increasingly constraining the organizational networks through which separatism and militancy previously operated.

Taken together, these developments suggest that the post-2019 period is better understood not merely as a constitutional change but as an attempt at institutional correction. The revocation of Article 370 created the legal and administrative framework within which successive measures relating to elections, infrastructure, investment, law enforcement and institutional accountability became possible. It also established a governance framework in which Jammu and Kashmir has increasingly been administered as an integrated part of the Indian Union rather than as an exceptional political arrangement.

That institutional shift has measurable consequences. Kashmir today possesses more extensive transport connectivity, stronger educational and healthcare infrastructure, greater tourist inflows, more sustained scrutiny of terror-financing networks, broader local democratic institutions and a more regular electoral process than existed before 2019. Whether these measurable gains prove politically durable depends not simply upon their continuation but upon whether they generate the sustained civic investment discussed in the preceding sections. Equally significant, the earlier governance model, centred largely upon managing political personalities while operating within a political environment in which separatist structures retained significant influence, has increasingly given way to one that places greater emphasis upon institutional capacity and governance.

In that sense, the post-2019 period is best understood as an ongoing transition from managed fragility towards institutional consolidation. Kashmir’s future will undoubtedly continue to be contested, but the institutional terms within which that contest unfolds have changed substantially. The constitutional changes of 2019 did more than amend the legal framework; they substantially expanded the institutional capacity of the state to govern, secure, invest and integrate. Whether these institutional gains ultimately translate into durable political legitimacy will depend, as argued throughout this essay, on the extent to which they deepen civic participation, strengthen institutional credibility, and enable social power and state power to reinforce one another over time.

Final Reflections: The Architecture

What makes a society’s peace durable is not the strength of its security apparatus, though security matters. It is not the goodwill of its political leaders, though leadership matters. It is the depth and quality of the institutional architecture through which ordinary people experience the political system as genuinely responsive to their participation.

In Kashmir, that architecture has remained incomplete throughout much of its modern political history—present in some forms, absent in others, and in every period more dependent upon personalities than upon institutions for its continuity. The fruit trader in Sopore who is tired—not angry, simply tired—represents exactly the political moment that this institutional architecture must convert into civic investment before exhaustion hardens into something else.

The intelligence record documents the historical pattern. The literature on collective action and social movements explains the mechanisms through which unaddressed political exhaustion becomes organized contention. Political theory explains why coercive compliance, however effective in the short term, cannot substitute for the legitimacy and institutional trust that only responsive governance can generate.

Taken together, these bodies of knowledge point towards a common conclusion. In the long run, political stability is sustained not by the continuous exercise of state power alone, but by legitimate institutions that enable social power and state power to reinforce one another. It is through that mutually reinforcing relationship that political authority acquires legitimacy, society acquires a durable stake in the political order, and peace becomes progressively self-sustaining.

The architecture of durable peace is not built in moments of crisis. It is built during the long, often undramatic intervals between them. Kashmir appears to be passing through one such interval today. The question—as it has been in every comparable interval across the past seven decades—is whether the governance system will use it to build something that lasts.

(Meer Yassir Ahmed is a Srinagar-based senior journalist who has written on Kashmir, national and internal security, and South Asian geopolitics for over two decades. His works examine these issues through a systemic and institutional lens, with particular attention to the historical and political dynamics of the Kashmir question.)

[1] Mullik, B. N. (1971). My Years with Nehru: Kashmir. Allied Publishers.