Who Really Runs Jammu?
Peerzada Masarat Shah
When the Jammu Development Authority’s bulldozers rolled into Transport Nagar and flattened the house of a working journalist, they did more than reduce brick and concrete to rubble. They exposed, in one brutal afternoon, the fragile fiction that Jammu and Kashmir is being governed by an elected government answerable to its people.
The facts are no longer in dispute: a journalist’s home was demolished in an anti-encroachment drive. No prior notice worth the name was served. No alternative accommodation was offered. Neighbouring structures—many equally “illegal” by the JDA’s own yardstick—stood untouched. The operation was clinical, swift, and unmistakably selective.
And then came the most damning revelation of all.
Omar Abdullah, the serving Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, publicly admitted that his government was not consulted. “Officers are carrying out demolition drives without seeking consent from the elected government,” he said—a sentence that should chill every citizen who still believes in the idea of representative democracy.
Let that sink in. The Chief Minister of a Union Territory says he has no control over a bulldozer brigade operating in his own capital. If the head of the elected government is reduced to a spectator, who exactly is holding the joystick?
The Congress party’s question is therefore not rhetorical but existential: Is there a parallel power structure running parallel to—and often above—the elected one? The PDP went a step further and called the demolition “targeted vengeance” against a journalist. When a state uses heavy machinery to silence a pen, it is no longer enforcing the rule of law; it is enforcing rule by fear.
The BJP’s response has been characteristically schizophrenic. Some local leaders distanced themselves from the decision and pointed towards “the administration.” Others insisted the elected government was fully in the loop. Both versions cannot be true, but both can be convenient.
What we are witnessing is the quiet institutionalisation of unaccountable power in Jammu and Kashmir. Ever since the erstwhile state was stripped of statehood and brought under direct central rule in 2019, bureaucratic empires have grown in the shadow of the Lieutenant Governor’s office. The JDA, the revenue department, the police—agencies that were once answerable to elected ministers—now report to officers who owe their positions and promotions to Raj Bhawan, not to the people of Jammu.
In theory, the return of an elected government in 2024 was supposed to reverse this slide. In practice, the bulldozers of Transport Nagar prove that the old order has not yielded an inch. The elected dispensation issues statements; the permanent bureaucracy wields the actual hammer.
This is not merely a Jammu problem. It is a national warning. When a journalist’s house can be razed without the Chief Minister’s knowledge or consent, no citizen’s property—or dignity—is safe. Today it is a reporter who dared to write uncomfortable truths. Tomorrow it could be any one of us.
Anti-encroachment drives are necessary. Illegal constructions must go. But law enforced without transparency, without due process, and without political accountability is no longer law—it is licensed vendetta.
The silence from the Lieutenant Governor’s office has been deafening. No clarification, no regret, no assurance that such high-handedness will not be repeated. That silence itself is a message: we do not answer to the people or their elected representatives; we answer only upwards.
Until the constitutional chain of command is restored—until every bulldozer needs the explicit nod of the elected government, until every demolition notice is published and contestable, until no officer can play god with people’s homes while hiding behind “orders from above”—the question will haunt us:
Who really runs Jammu?
The answer, for now, lies not in the Assembly or the Secretariat, but in the dust and debris of a journalist’s demolished dreams. And that is the most damning indictment of the system we have allowed to grow in the heart of our democracy.
