Seven Years On, Has Security Become an Alibi for Withholding Statehood?

Security Bought Stability. It Did Not Buy Statehood Back.

Seven years is long enough to test whether a promise was ever meant to be kept. In August 2019, Parliament abrogated Article 370 and reduced Jammu and Kashmir from a state to two Union Territories, one of them without even a legislature.

The justification offered was security and integration: end the psychological hold of "conditional integration," dismantle a discriminatory permanent-resident regime under Article 35A and give security forces a freer hand against militancy.

On several of these fronts, the record genuinely supports the government's case. The Hurriyat exists largely on paper now. The cycle of hartals and street shutdowns that once defined life in the Valley has significantly abated.

And critically, the 2024 Assembly election, the first in a decade, was allowed to run its course and the Centre accepted a result it did not win, which is not a small thing for a democracy to demonstrate in a region it once governed by emergency footing.

But none of that answers the actual question now on the table, which is not whether 2019's security logic worked, it is whether that logic still justifies withholding statehood in 2026. The Supreme Court's December 2023 judgment upheld the abrogation, but it also directed the Union to restore statehood "at the earliest." Nearly three years have passed since that direction and under the 2024 Transaction of Business Rules, the elected government in J&K still does not control its own police force, public order machinery or key administrative appointments - those sit with the Lieutenant Governor, an appointee accountable to Delhi, not to J&K's voters.

This is where the security argument quietly stops doing the work it is being asked to do. A functioning election with peaceful power transfer is itself strong evidence that the operational security case for indefinite direct rule has weakened.

If the Centre's own conduct in 2024 demonstrates confidence that Kashmir's electorate can be trusted with a ballot, it becomes difficult to explain, on security grounds alone, why that same electorate's government cannot be trusted with its own police department.

What began as an emergency measure calibrated to a specific security situation risks becoming, seven years and one peaceful election later, a permanent administrative default that no longer needs to justify itself. TAN's position is that the constitutional promise made to J&K's Assembly and its voters, restoration of statehood at the earliest, has now gone unmet long enough that the burden of proof has shifted.

It is no longer on those demanding statehood to prove the security situation permits it; it is on the Centre to explain, specifically and publicly, what remaining condition statehood restoration is actually waiting on. Continuing to withhold it without answering that question converts a security achievement into a standing excuse.