Opinion | The valley that stopped waiting for the next shutdown

For thirty years, the gun wrote Kashmir’s calendar, and silence wrote its mornings. Seven years on, the calendar belongs to the classroom again and the mornings, finally, are just mornings.

An apple farmer in Shopian loads his crates before dawn. He no longer worries that a strike call will strand his harvest at a checkpoint. A street vendor in Srinagar sets up his cart. He no longer checks the lane for a shutdown notice. A student in the university library underlines a passage for an exam. That exam will happen on the date printed on the calendar, not on a date a separatist diktat happens to allow. None of them are making a political point. They are just getting on with their lives. In Kashmir, for three decades, that alone would have counted as an act of defiance.

Lal Chowk wakes early too, and it wakes upward — shutters rising, not rattling down. A newspaper seller unrolls the morning’s papers on the pavement. Across the Jhelum, schoolchildren cross the bridge toward an exam sat on the date the calendar fixed, not the date a shutdown call allowed. Picture that scene in 1996; it does not exist. Picture it in 2016; it barely does. For thirty years, an unremarkable morning like this one was itself an act of defiance in Kashmir, staged against a war fought not only at a distance, in the border villages and along a frontier the state could never fully seal, but also within our daily lives, our evenings and mornings, and within our own bodies. Seven years after the revocation of Article 370, that is where this piece chooses to begin: not with the familiar argument, but with a morning that no longer needs defending.

That argument will go on. People will keep disagreeing about what Kashmir lost in 2019 and what it gained. That is fair. It should not stop. It is itself a sign of how far things have shifted that a politician can still criticise the policy, lead a protest, or sit in dharna among his own people, and can do so today because the situation has improved enough to allow it. But underneath the argument sits a harder test: a policy is judged by what it produces. And what the Indian state has produced here over seven years, in security, in daily life, in the basic machinery of government, is now solid enough to stand on its own record.

On this, opinions in Kashmir divide sharply, and they always will. Some see 5 August 2019 as a wound. Others call it a correction that was long overdue. I write this as a Kashmiri who lived through the cross-border proxy war. I do not think that argument has to be settled before we look honestly at what has changed since. Let the disagreement stay alive. A democratic republic does not need everyone to agree with each other. An authoritarian system does. The right to disagree loudly, and still remain one country, is part of the way of life this piece is trying to describe.

What we agree on

It is worth stating plainly what is, in fact, common ground. Civil society groups, ordinary Kashmiris, and the mainstream political parties who contest elections here do not agree on much. But they agree on this: violence is never a legitimate way to make a political point, whatever the grievance behind it. Kashmiris argue, often sharply, about how much security is needed and how the state should deliver it. They do not argue about whether security and public order matter in the first place. Almost everyone, from a party worker in Jammu to a shopkeeper in Baramulla, believes in the idea of India. Our ways of getting there differ. Our destination does not. That shared premise is the right place for the state to build from.

No part of India is watched as closely by its own security establishment as Jammu and Kashmir, and for good reason. Since partition, the neighbour across the border has treated infiltration, the sponsorship of terror groups, and, more recently, drugs and disinformation, as tools of state policy, not accidents of it. Kashmir is not one region among many for New Delhi. It is the frontier around which a large share of India’s security and foreign policy has had to be built for seven decades.

What the state has actually delivered on security

Start with recruitment. Local enlistment into militancy has fallen to its lowest level in three decades. South Kashmir, once the heartland of new recruits, now reports almost none. This has not happened by accident. Sustained operations against the network of local support, the logistical backbone of the old militancy, have gone hand in hand with asset seizures and frozen funds aimed at separatist and militant groups. An armed movement stripped of money, recruits, and supply lines all at once is not the threat it once was. Infiltration attempts across the Line of Control still happen. But they now meet a tighter, faster, better-coordinated response than existed before 2019.

Taking apart that network on the ground taught Pakistan’s security establishment a second, quieter lesson. As handlers and local support networks were rolled up, Pakistan leaned harder on tools that need no man to cross the Line of Control: false narratives spread through cross-border social media, and campaigns built to stir anger and despair without a single weapon changing hands. That, too, has met a response, in units that counter false narratives, faster takedowns of coordinated propaganda, and community outreach that gets ahead of a rumour before it spreads. It is the same lesson taught twice, in two different forms of war. A proxy war fought with guns has a cost Pakistan cannot sustain. Increasingly, neither does one fought with lies.

The clearest example of this deliberate approach is the fight against drug money. Narcotics have become a main way terrorism is now funded. The state’s response has been visible, not quiet. Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha led a hundred-day ‘Nasha Mukt Jammu & Kashmir’ campaign through 2026, walking anti-drug marches through all twenty districts to bring communities into the fight directly, rather than leaving it to the police alone. By its close, the drive had led to over 1,130 arrests under more than 1,000 police cases, dozens of repeat offenders held under preventive-detention laws, and over a hundred properties linked to drug money seized or demolished. That cuts into a funding line that has doubled as a tool of proxy war.

One quieter achievement deserves more credit than it gets. For three decades, families who lost someone to militancy had no organised voice in Kashmir’s politics. The administration under the Lieutenant Governor has changed that, with a formal policy to identify, register, compensate, and support victims of terrorism, including government jobs, in eligible cases, for their next of kin. This is not simply welfare. It is a correction to a story, pushed for years from across the border, that counted the cost on only one side of this conflict.

Governance: the harder, less glamorous work

Security gains have been matched by a governance push that gets far less attention than it deserves. The state has pushed grassroots democracy further down than before, with elections to district development councils and an expanded village council system giving villages a voice they never had. A back-to-village programme sends officials directly into rural areas to hear complaints in person. Government hiring has moved toward open exams rather than favours. The independent rankings back this up: Jammu and Kashmir was named a front runner on India’s Sustainable Development Goals index, ranked fifth nationally on ease of doing business, and now spends a higher share of its economy on research. Its hydropower potential, close to 18,000 megawatts, is being paired with a fast-growing rooftop solar push. A newer index on investment readiness still ranks it well down the table, a useful check against overstatement. But taken as a whole, this is a government being measured, and largely succeeding, on the same yardsticks as the rest of the country.

The clearest change of all is the hardest to put a number on. For three decades, separatist groups issued shutdown calendars, sometimes running for months, closing schools, shops, and transport on command. Disruption was not the exception in Kashmir. It was the routine, and it worked as a cheap, visible way of proving the state’s writ stopped at the edge of a strike call. That routine has broken. Schools now largely run on fixed academic calendars. Businesses report steady operating days. The long communication blackouts that once interrupted public life through the 2010s have not returned in recent years. This is a security achievement in its own right: the state taking back ground that separatism had long treated as its own.

A quieter shift, too

The hardest change to measure is the one taking place in people’s heads. For years, a soft, unspoken sympathy for separatism could be voiced at little cost, and that grey area was itself something an adversary could use. That space has visibly narrowed. Not because dissent has disappeared, but because fewer people, especially the young, want to romanticise a movement that gave their parents’ generation grief and little else. Every young man who does not pick up a gun is one less recruit for Pakistan’s security establishment, which has relied on exactly that supply since partition. Every rupee of terror financing the state freezes is one less brick in a proxy war built on cross-border money. None of this is a small, local policing story. It is central to how India defends its most contested frontier.

Back to that morning

None of this means the state’s job is done, or that every criticism aimed at it is wrong. Institutions built in a hurry, under emergency conditions, still have to prove themselves against ordinary standards of fair, accountable government, and that test is never yet finished in democracy. What can be said plainly is this: the basic conditions for passing it, a working sense of security and a working floor of public order, are now more present than absent. And that did not happen on its own. Which brings us back to the bridge over the Jhelum, and to the apple farmer in Shopian, the street vendor in Srinagar, the student in the library. None of them proves anything by themselves. A single morning never does. But they are the smallest, most human place where the security data, the governance record, and the national rankings finally mean something. A policy of this scale is not proved by an index. It is proved in the accumulation of mornings like that one, repeated for seven years, until they stop being an argument between analysts and simply become somebody’s ordinary life. That, more than any report, is the standard against which the state’s work in Jammu and Kashmir should be judged.

Irshad Ahmad Bhat is a Research Scholar in Politics and Governance and serves as Coordinator and In-charge of the Research Wing at Save Youth Save Future. He can be reached at Bhatirshad81@gmail.com.