On Oct. 8, India’s election commission announced the results of elections in the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. A regional party, the National Conference, in alliance with the Indian National Congress, a national center-left party, and a handful of independents, will form the next government. This is perhaps unsurprising: A leader from one of these two parties has headed the state government for the bulk of Jammu Kashmir’s post-1947 history.
Instead, the surprise was the announcement that National Conference leader Omar Abdullah will be sworn in this week as next chief minister. Abdullah has been vocally opposed to the last five years of the Indian government’s policies toward Jammu and Kashmir. As recently as this year, he had refused to serve in its new legislature, let alone lead it.
Abdullah is a 54-year-old heir to Jammu and Kashmir’s preeminent political family. His grandfather, Sheikh Abdullah, was the territory’s first post-1947 leader. The elder Abdullah dominated Kashmiri politics until his death in 1982. Omar’s father, Farooq Abdullah, played a pivotal role in Kashmiri politics during the emergence and peak of the anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir during the late 1980s and 1990s. Omar himself previously served as chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, from 2009 to 2015.
Why this is a big surprise
Understanding what just happened, and Omar Abdullah’s return atop Kashmiri politics, requires some explanation.
India and Pakistan had fought over Jammu and Kashmir in 1947, when both countries were gaining their independence from Great Britain. The new Muslim-majority country of Pakistan demanded that the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir should become part of Pakistan. India asserted that Jammu and Kashmir could and should be part of a secular, independent India.
After facing an invasion of Pakistan-backed militia groups in 1947, the government of Jammu and Kashmir appealed for India’s military help and was willing to join India to secure that aid. Part of New Delhi’s contemporaneous bargain with the Jammu and Kashmir government was that it would have special status if it joined India rather than Pakistan.
A change in 2019
That special status endured until 2019, when India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s national government ended it.
Modi’s government also downgraded Jammu and Kashmir’s status by splitting the state into two “union territories”: a new rump Jammu and Kashmir and a separate territory of Ladakh. Union territories in India have less autonomy than a state government and consequently are subject to more national-level intervention in local politics.
Anticipating that these combined moves would be deeply unpopular, the government in New Delhi put Jammu and Kashmir on lockdown when it announced the moves. The Indian government placed many senior Kashmiri politicians under house arrest, restricted access to the internet, and moved in tens of thousands of additional military and paramilitary forces.
Restrictions on political and civil liberties have been gradually relaxed in the last five years, though the people of Jammu and Kashmir continue to face severe restrictions on their freedoms of speech, association, and peaceful assembly, according to international human rights groups. Indeed, the incoming chief minister publicly agreed with this assessment. “Democracy stops where the boundaries of Jammu and Kashmir begin,” Abdullah told the Associated Press last year.
Five years without an elected legislature
From November 2018 until these recent elections, Jammu and Kashmir did not have an elected legislature. All Indian state governments have such legislatures, but union territories have a variety of elected representation. Beginning in 2018, New Delhi oversaw governance in Kashmir (first via a “governor’s rule” through an appointed official in Jammu and Kashmir, and then through a “president’s rule” from 2019 onward).
What changed? In December 2023, the Indian Supreme Court weighed in on the 2019 changes to Kashmir’s status within the Indian constitutional system. The court upheld the federal government’s decision to remove Kashmir’s special constitutional status. But the court also declared that Jammu and Kashmir was entitled to an elected representative government. These recent elections are a direct result of the Supreme Court ruling.
Will Abdullah push to restore Kashmir’s independent status?
The Abdullah family has a prior political relationship with Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). When I first met Omar Abdullah in 2002, he was serving as a junior cabinet minister in the BJP-led national government. Yet until quite recently Abdullah was adamant that he would not serve as chief minister.
Abdullah fared poorly in national parliamentary elections earlier this year, losing the seat he contested, even though his National Conference party performed well. In the immediate aftermath of that loss, Abdullah told the media that he would focus on restoring Kashmir’s status under the Indian constitution:
I will fight for our statehood to be restored to us. I will fight for a full state of J&K [Jammu and Kashmir] with no dilution. Then, if possible, I will seek an opportunity to enter the [state] assembly and play my part there. But, I will not humiliate myself by entering a UT [Union Territory assembly].
Yet in the intervening months Abdullah apparently decided that it was better to have some circumscribed authority rather than remain out of power entirely. He contested elections in not one but two constituencies (thus increasing the certainty that he would win in at least one). When filing his papers, he appealed to the people of Kashmir to elect him. “My honor is in your hands,” he told onlookers.
What’s next for Jammu and Kashmir?
On Oct. 13, the central government revoked the “president’s rule,” preparing the ground for the new Abdullah-led union territory government to form. Some BJP-friendly media houses are now reporting a conciliatory tone on Abdullah’s part toward Modi and the BJP, despite the troubled recent past. If so, the Modi government may feel like an Abdullah chief ministership is the best they can hope for in the BJP’s long-term effort to integrate Jammu and Kashmir into India and wash away any separatist aspirations there.
While suffering a string of embarrassing high-profile militant and terrorist attacks last summer, New Delhi can point to larger trends. Overall fatalities in such violence are lower than they have been for a decade.
Will a new elected government in Jammu and Kashmir, under Abdullah’s leadership, help alleviate Kashmiri grievances? The new government’s moves in the coming months may play some role in figuring out whether violence in the region will remain low – or if it is instead “like a soda bottle waiting to burst,” as one Kashmiri told Human Rights Watch earlier this year.