Kashmir Is a Question of People

Perhaps no other issue in South Asia has been discussed as much as the Kashmir question. There have been resolutions, wars, negotiations, agreements, delegations, diplomatic formulas, and repeated claims that a solution is finally within reach. Yet, after more than seven decades, the people of Jammu and Kashmir, on both sides of the Line of Control, are denied the right to determine their collective political future.

This is not merely a border dispute. It is not only a question of geography. Nor is it simply a bilateral conflict between India and Pakistan. At its core, Kashmir is a question of democratic representation, human rights, and the right of all regions and all communities of the former State of Jammu and Kashmir - as it existed in 1947 - to participate equally in deciding their future.

The fundamental problem is that most proposed solutions to the Kashmir dispute have been imagined from above. Delhi and Islamabad have drawn maps in line with their own interests. Global powers have viewed the region through strategic lenses. United Nations resolutions have been interpreted selectively. Kashmiri people have often been invoked as a slogan or diplomatic category but rarely treated as active political agents.

The people of the Kashmir Valley, Jammu, Ladakh, ‘Azad Jammu and Kashmir’ (Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir), and Gilgit-Baltistan, whose future is being discussed, have never been brought together on an equal democratic basis and asked what they themselves want.

That is the real democratic crisis at the heart of the Kashmir question.

One State, Many Regions, Shared Exclusion

The State of Jammu and Kashmir has historically existed as a political unit. It contains multiple languages, cultures, religions, regional histories and political experiences. The experience of the Kashmir Valley is not the same as that of Jammu. Jammu is not Ladakh. Ladakh is not Gilgit-Baltistan. PaJK has its own political and administrative realities. Gilgit-Baltistan has its own history of deprivation and exclusion.

But diversity does not cancel the common political question. Which state in the world does not contain different languages, cultures, regions and political interests? Diversity is not the opposite of unity. The real problem begins when one region, one state, one power or one ideology attempts to impose itself on all others.

India often argues that Kashmir is not only the Valley, and that the politics of the Valley cannot represent the entire diversity of the former state. There is a factual truth in this, but it has consistently been used not to expand political agency across all regions, but to deny it everywhere. Pakistan formally supports Kashmiri political agency, but in practice tends to support only those political trends that remain within the framework of alignment with Pakistan. The space for other voices, including genuine autonomy movements within Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, has been constrained rather than supported.

These two state positions appear different, even opposed. Yet they share one important assumption: both treat the people of Jammu and Kashmir primarily as a problem to be managed, not as the legitimate authors of any solution. Both have used the Kashmir question as an instrument of domestic politics and regional rivalry. And both have sustained, through very different means, a politics of control over the people they claim to represent or champion.

This is precisely where a people-centred democratic politics must intervene.

The Crisis of Representation

The biggest problem in the Kashmir dispute today is the crisis of representation.

The assembly in Srinagar does not represent the entire former state. The assembly in Muzaffarabad does not represent the entire former state. The assembly in Gilgit-Baltistan does not represent the entire former state. Nor can the institutions of Jammu or Ladakh claim to speak for all the people of the state.

Every institution is confined within its own controlled territory, constitutional limitations and political restrictions.

On the Indian side, in Jammu and Kashmir, the years since 2019 have seen a dramatic contraction of political and civil space. The revocation of the region's constitutional arrangements was carried out without any democratic consultation with those most affected. It was followed by prolonged communications blackouts, the detention of political leaders across the spectrum, the administrative bifurcation of the state, and ongoing restrictions on press and assembly. This was not a gesture toward greater democratic participation. It was its opposite.

In Pakistan-administered territories, the institutions formally exist, but power remains substantially constrained by Islamabad's strategic priorities. Gilgit-Baltistan remains in a state of constitutional ambiguity — its people integrated into Pakistan's administrative structure without the full rights that come with that integration. Movements for genuine local autonomy have found little room to breathe.

The message to ordinary people, on both sides, has been the same: your role is to affirm, not to decide.

The question, then, is unavoidable: if there is no common democratic institution representing the collective will of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, who has the authority to decide the future of the state?

India? Pakistan? The United Nations? Global powers? Or the people whose land, history, identity and lives are directly tied to this dispute?

The answer must be clear: the people must decide. But the people cannot mean only one region. It must mean the people of all regions of the former State of Jammu and Kashmir - with equal agency, equal voice, and equal standing in any process that claims democratic legitimacy.

Democratic Agency from Below

To resolve the Kashmir question, we need to move away from top-down political settlements and towards democratic agency from below.

This means, first, that a free political environment must be created in all parts of the former state. People must have the right to speak, write, organise, campaign, assemble and freely debate different political options, without preconditions. All diverse political voices and formations must be allowed to operate openly and equally, including those whose preferred outcome differs from that of the governments currently administering them.

Political prisoners must be released. Human rights violations must end. Freedom of media, freedom of assembly, freedom of organisation must be guaranteed across all territories of the former state.

Demilitarisation is also essential. If people live under constant military pressure, fear, surveillance and coercion, how can they form and express a free political opinion? A climate free from fear is a basic condition for any just process.

The Line of Control must stop functioning as a permanent wall and should gradually become a line of human contact for families, traders, students, journalists, political workers and civil society. People separated for decades cannot make collective decisions about a shared future if they cannot meet, speak, or hear one another.

After these conditions begin to take shape, people in each region should elect their own representatives, not merely to manage existing governance structures, but with a clear mandate to deliberate about the political future of the state as a whole. These representatives, drawn from across all the territories of the former state, should form a common deliberative body. Whatever it is called, its function matters more than its name: to consider constitutional options, engage with India and Pakistan, and ultimately place viable political choices before the people through a genuine democratic process.

That would be real popular participation, in which decision-making rooted in democratic representation will take precedence over diplomacy conducted behind closed doors.

International and local observers should be allowed to monitor elections and consultation processes, so that no party can later claim that public will was suppressed or distorted.

Equal Agency for Every Community

Any political future worthy of the name democratic must rest on one non-negotiable foundation: no community, region, religion or language group has a prior or superior claim over any other.

The Dogras of Jammu are not guests in this political conversation. Neither are the Ladakhis, the Baltis, the Gujjars and Bakarwals, the Pahari-speaking communities of Poonch and Mirpur, the Shina-speaking people of Gilgit, or the many others whose identities do not map neatly onto either of the nation-states that claim them. Every one of these communities must enter any common process as equals - with their own voice, their own representation, their own fears and their own hopes taken seriously.

Kashmiriyat, if it is to mean anything politically useful, cannot mean the cultural dominance of one region over others. It must mean a shared political commitment to pluralism - a framework in which diversity is not a problem to be overcome but the very ground on which any lasting political arrangement must be built. Regional autonomy must be structural, not rhetorical. Power must flow from communities upward to common institutions, not downward from a centre that decides who counts and how much.

If Kashmiriyat is understood in this broad democratic sense, it can serve as a unifying political philosophy. If it is used narrowly, as a proxy for Valley politics, or for any single religious or cultural tradition, it will become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Possible Political Options

A common representative process, conducted freely and fairly across all regions, may arrive at several possible political arrangements.

One option is a united, democratic and plural political entity - the option this writer considers most just and most durable, precisely because it is the one that requires the genuine consent of all communities rather than the strategic calculations of external states.

A second option could be a federal or confederal structure, in which different regions enjoy extensive internal autonomy while sharing common institutions for limited matters such as external relations or economic cooperation.

A third option could be some form of shared or joint arrangement, negotiated between India, Pakistan and representatives of the people of Jammu and Kashmir.

A fourth possibility is that individual regions, through a clear democratic majority and in a genuinely free environment, choose different constitutional arrangements. That choice too must be taken seriously, but only if it is made freely, not under military presence, legal coercion, religious mobilisation or external pressure.

The point is not to predetermine the outcome. The point is to insist that whatever outcome emerges must come from a legitimate process - one that no state, however powerful, has the right to foreclose in advance.

A Starting Point for Re-envisioning South Asia

The Kashmir question is not only about Kashmir. It is a mirror for the whole of South Asia.

South Asia is a space of extraordinary human diversity - of language, religion, ethnicity and culture - organised into nation-states whose borders were drawn, in many cases, by colonial violence and post-colonial haste. The logic of the centralised nation-state, in which a dominant identity defines the political whole, and others are accommodated at its discretion, has produced not just the Kashmir conflict but a long series of unresolved tensions across the region.

If Kashmir were to move even partially toward a resolution grounded in the democratic agency of diverse peoples rather than the strategic interests of states, it would demonstrate something important: that communities of different faiths, languages and regional identities can negotiate a shared political future on equal terms. That would be more than a local resolution. It would be a different way of thinking about what political arrangements in South Asia can look like.

Can the region move, over time, toward more federal, more pluralistic, more people-centred frameworks where the meaning of political belonging is based not only on state borders but on consent, cultural respect and genuine autonomy? These are large questions, and Kashmir alone cannot answer them. But it can be an important starting point for the debate.

The most intractable conflicts are sometimes the ones that carry within them the possibility of the most profound political rethinking.

The Final Decision Belongs to the People

In the end, the argument returns to one basic principle: the solution to the Kashmir question does not belong to any state, army, diplomatic office, global power or single political party. It belongs to the people of the State of Jammu and Kashmir.

But these people are not a single silent, faceless mass. They are made up of different regions, languages, cultures, religions, classes and political experiences. Their collective right to choose cannot be reduced to one imposed formula. It must move through regional will and through the voices of every distinct community towards a common, democratically legitimate decision.

Kashmir is not merely a question of borders. It is a question of people. It is not simply a dispute over maps. It is a crisis of representation. It is not only a conflict between India and Pakistan. It is a question of the political existence of the people of Jammu and Kashmir - all of them, not as instruments of someone else's strategy, but as the rightful owners of their own future.

Until that question is answered by the people themselves, every solution will remain temporary. Every agreement will remain incomplete. Every peace will remain fragile. Every claim will remain contested.

The time has come to take Kashmir out of closed rooms, military posts, diplomatic files and state narratives and return it to its real owners. Those owners are the people of the State of Jammu and Kashmir.