SEVEN years ago, on August 5, 2019, the Republic quietly amputated one of its own limbs. Article 370 and Article 35A were struck down while Jammu and Kashmir sat under President’s Rule, its leaders were under house arrest, its phone lines were dead and when there was no assembly left to consult. A full-fledged state, one that had joined India through its own Instrument of Accession, was dismembered and bifurcated into two Union Territories by an executive decree. The ruling party was patting its own back by calling the illegal bifurcation of the state an act of integration, as if the state was not a part of the country before they criminally abrogated Article 370. These actions were dressed in the language of reform, and were executed by an ordinance which asks no one's permission.

For the subsequent years the region lived under boots on every corner, its young men and women denied jobs on the flimsy pretext of ‘security clearance’, its journalists jailed under UAPA and the PSA, and its apple growers and daily-wage workers left to fend for themselves while Delhi was congratulating itself on achieving ‘normalcy’.

We in the CPI(M) will not pretend this disease was born in 2019. Our own government in Kerala – the first elected Communist ministry anywhere in the world – was dismissed by the Congress regime in 1959 through the naked misuse of Article 356, a wound we have pointed to for over six decades. But where Congress used a blunt instrument, this current BJP dispensation has managed to machine a sophisticated scalpel in the form of an ordinance for every inconvenient verdict, electoral or judicial, in the form of a compliant Governor or Lieutenant Governor for every state that is opposed to the BJP.

Let no one dress up the 2024 elections in the state as an act of generosity by the Union Government. The Union Government sat on Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood and its elections for five years, and moved only when the Supreme Court left it no room to stall further. When they were forced to the ballot, they threw everything they could at the outcome, including money, proxies, and an attempt to carve the electorate along communal and regional lines. But with the results, the people had answered anyway, and answered unambiguously against the BJP’s version of Kashmir, against August 5, and against being spoken over instead of spoken to.

But despite having an overwhelming mandate, the Chief Minister of the state lacks the basic powers to move his own officers without the Lieutenant Governor’s nod, is made to be routinely absent from the very committees he ought to rightfully chair, while an unelected bureaucrat answerable only to Delhi decides postings, policing, and land use in his place. Omar Abdullah basically holds an office with a title and no key to it.

It is important that we try to understand what is being assembled here, because it will not stay confined to the Pir Panjal.  Jammu and Kashmir serves as the prototype of a model for any state where the mandate of the ballot goes the wrong way. Now they know exactly what tools exist to hollow out their government without the Union ever risking a real vote in Parliament. These tools include, but are not limited to, the use of ordinances, Governors, and central agencies wherever and whenever the first two aren’t enough. Delhi itself has lived this script twice over, first in 2015 and then again in 2023. Ordinances were brought in within days that overrode and nullified the Supreme Court’s judgments to strip the elected government of Delhi of the bureaucracy it needed to function. It is not hidden from anyone that the current BJP government in Centre has developed expertise in legislating around and bypassing the judiciary and the ballot box, whenever both decide to say no to them.

Even worse is the fact that the right to protest this is also now rationed. On the one hand, this government claims to champion the electorate of Jammu and Kashmir, but on the other it won’t even grant permission to the representatives chosen by the same electorate to hold a peaceful sit-in at Jantar Mantar over the plain, constitutional demand for statehood. If the government is confident about its record, why does it feel the need to police a few placards?

The CPI(M) has not taken an inch back on this issue since the day it happened. Our former General Secretary, Com Sitaram Yechury was the first opposition leader who attempted to defy the blockade in J&K. Our Central Committee member, Com Yousuf Tarigami is among the strongest voices of the people of Kashmir and stands shoulder to shoulder in all their struggles. Our 23^rd and 24^th Party Congresses, held in 2022 and 2025 at Kannur and Madurai respectively, demanded the immediate restoration of full statehood, the immediate restoration of all constitutional rights of the people, the restoration of land and employment protections stripped from permanent residents, the release of political prisoners and journalists, and an end to the harassment of Kashmiri youth under manufactured charges. We have carried this political line consistently and we raise again and again, after every fresh transfer of an honest officer, every renewed arrest, after every breach in the peace of the state, and after every humiliation handed to a government that committed the crime of winning an election by defeating the BJP.

What is at stake goes beyond the status of any one Union Territory. Every time an elected government is gutted by decree, the distance between the states and the Centre widens a little further, and that trust, once spent, is not rebuilt cheaply. This country was built as a Union of States on the promise that Delhi would govern with them, not over them. We reiterate that statehood to Jammu and Kashmir should be restored in full. The union government cannot delay the restoration of power to the people who voted for it, and it should stop treating a constitutional right as a favour to be dispensed at its own convenience. A democracy that has to be reminded of this after eight decades has already been asked to concede too much.