I. Ahmad Wani
The July 20 protest for statehood is a legitimate democratic demand. The real test of Jammu and Kashmir’s politics is whether every tier of that democracy is restored, not only the one that draws television cameras.
On July 20, as the monsoon session of Parliament opens, the ruling Jammu and Kashmir National Conference will lead a sit-in at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to demand the restoration of full statehood. Party president Farooq Abdullah has written to 52 national and regional leaders, urging them to “rise above partisan politics,” and has called the continuing delay in restoring statehood “unconscionable.” The Bharatiya Janata Party has dismissed the exercise as an “eyewash.” Before the placards are printed and the slogans rehearsed, it is worth asking a fairer question than either side is posing: not whether Kashmiris deserve statehood, which they plainly do, but whether the political class is equally willing to restore the democracy that lives closest to the citizen.
How we got here
To judge the protest honestly, one has to follow the chronology rather than the rhetoric.
Before August 2019, the Valley was caught in a grim cycle. Militant recruitment, stone-pelting, shutdowns and the constant hum of fear shaped ordinary life. Parents worried for their children; shopkeepers watched businesses buckle under repeated *bandhs*. When local elections were held, mainstream parties frequently boycotted them and separatists called for their rejection, leaving grassroots democracy hollow.
On August 5, 2019, the Centre read down Article 370, stripped the region of its special status, and split the former state into two Union Territories. Supporters called it integration; critics called it the erasure of a promise. Both readings still animate Kashmir’s politics.
On December 11, 2023, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court settled the legal question and opened a political one. It upheld the abrogation as constitutionally valid. But it also directed, in the words of then Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, that the restoration of statehood “take place at the earliest and as soon as possible,” and ordered Assembly elections by September 2024.
Those elections came. Kashmiris voted in strength, the National Conference and its allies won a mandate, and Omar Abdullah took office as Chief Minister. Yet more than a year later, statehood remains withheld, with no public timeline from New Delhi. It is this gap, between a democratic mandate and the powers that mandate is meant to carry, that the July 20 protest is built upon.
The case the protesters are making
Strip away the theatre, and the statehood demand rests on solid ground. An elected government that must share authority with a Lieutenant Governor appointed from Delhi is a government operating with one hand tied. The Supreme Court itself flagged restoration as urgent; Parliament has repeated the assurance; and the principle at stake is federalism, not favour.
The American jurist Louis Brandeis once described a single state as a “laboratory” free to “try novel social and economic experiments” for the benefit of the whole nation. That is the constitutional logic the National Conference is invoking when it frames statehood as a defence of India’s federal structure rather than a regional grievance. On this reading, a protest through constitutional channels, peaceful, cross-party, on the doorstep of Parliament, is precisely how a democracy is supposed to press an unfulfilled promise.
The case the critics are making
The BJP’s rejoinder deserves a fair hearing too. Senior party leader and Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, Sunil Sharma, has questioned the timing and intent of the protest, calling it an attempt to divert attention from the government’s own performance, and has asked what became of the Chief Minister’s promised signature campaign for statehood. Beneath the sharper language sits a legitimate point: a government elected to deliver cannot let confrontation with the Centre become a substitute for governance.
That skepticism is not confined to one party. S. Tariq, a veteran Anantnag journalist who has covered the Valley’s politics for decades, concedes protest is a democratic right but doubts its timing. The public, he argues, now measures leaders by delivery, not by demonstrations. He captures the region’s wait-and-watch mood with a couplet from Ghalib:
> تھی خبر گرم کہ غالبؔ کے اڑیں گے پُرزے
> دیکھنے ہم بھی گئے تھے پہ تماشا نہ ہوا
*Thī khabar garam ki ‘Ghālib’ ke uṛenge purze, / Dekhne ham bhī gaye the pe tamāshā na huā* — the rumour ran hot that Ghalib would be torn to shreds; we too went along to watch, but no spectacle came of it. His point is plain: the protest may draw a crowd and still end in anticlimax. It is one man’s cynicism, and a democracy should be able to hold both his doubt and the protesters’ conviction at once.
The democracy that gets forgotten
Not every voice in the Valley shares that doubt. Firdos Baba of the Awami Ittehad Party, a leader from Kupwara, sees the protest as the last tool left to a people whose rights, he says, were snatched; parties that stay away from it, he warns, risk being branded anti-people. His instinct is to put the fight for the Assembly’s full powers ahead of local elections. It is a reasonable calculation inside a party meeting. On the ground, it sets up a false choice.
Because this is where the argument on all sides falls short, and where the ordinary Kashmiri is most short-changed. Statehood is the democracy at the top. Panchayats and urban local bodies are the democracy at the base, and that base is currently crumbling.
The candour of the ground occasionally cuts through the party line. A former District Development Council member from the ruling alliance was frank about his own plans. His party, he said, is preparing to mobilise support for the statehood protest and will take to the streets in both Delhi and Jammu and Kashmir, because it believes in democratic decentralisation, respects its hardworking MLA, and sees agitation as the only weapon it has left. Yet asked why that same energy is not turned toward the overdue panchayat elections, his answer was disarmingly direct. They could not afford to annoy their own MLA, who after the Assembly polls wants every decision routed through him and has little appetite for handing power down to the village. The fear he named was blunt: were voters in the constituency to elect panchayat members from a rival camp, the local contest would harden into a running clash. He may well be right about his MLA’s intentions. But sincerity about the larger cause does not redeem the smaller evasion. It is, in the end, an excuse for escapism, the tier of democracy closest to the citizen sacrificed to protect one representative’s grip.
The record is not the flattering one sometimes claimed. When panchayat polls were held in 2018, the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party boycotted them; turnout in the Valley was thin, and more than 60 percent of panch and sarpanch seats in Kashmir remained vacant. The 2020 District Development Council polls, the Union Territory’s first real exercise in local voting, drew people back to the ballot despite threats; a candidate was even shot at in Anantnag during the campaign. Since then, terms have lapsed, and fresh panchayat and municipal elections are overdue.
Alexis de Tocqueville, watching American democracy nearly two centuries ago, wrote that “town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science,” and warned that a nation “may establish a free government, but without municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty.” A canal that needs repair in Kulgam, a school roof in Anantnag, a land dispute in Baramulla: none of these is settled by a resolution in Delhi. They are settled by empowered local bodies. Every month that statehood is used as a reason to postpone them, the citizen loses twice.
What responsibility looks like
None of this makes the July 20 protest illegitimate. It makes the standard higher. The National Conference and its allies can march for statehood *and* accelerate development, publish transparent accounts of welfare spending, and hold the local elections they already have the power to hold. The Centre, for its part, can end the ambiguity by naming a timeline, rather than leaving an elected government to govern in constitutional half-light.
Kashmiris have earned the right to be treated as full participants in their own governance, not as spectators to a contest between Srinagar and Delhi. The farmer in Kulgam, the shopkeeper in Srinagar, the student in Anantnag and the entrepreneur in Baramulla are not waiting to be told what to feel. They are watching to see who delivers.
Abraham Lincoln’s definition of self-rule, “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” was never meant to stop at the top tier. As July 20 approaches, the measure of Jammu and Kashmir’s democracy will not be the size of the crowd at Jantar Mantar. It will be whether, at every level from the Assembly to the panchayat, the people’s chosen representatives are finally allowed to govern.
