NEW DELHI: Seven years after Jammu and Kashmir was stripped of its special status under Article 370 and carved into two Union Territories, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has said the government he heads is being penalised for a security situation it has no say over, that the promise of statehood is effectively hostage to conditions nobody in Delhi will state openly.
Speaking to Karan Thapar for The Wire around the seventh anniversary of the August 5, 2019, abrogation, Abdullah concluded, "There is no worse form of government than a Union Territory with assembly," he said. "It's an abomination, and the sooner we do away with it, the better.”
“By all means, have Union Territories. But don't give them assemblies. If they're not worthy of being a state, keep them as Union Territories. Govern them however you like," he added.
Three issues ran through the hour-long conversation: the stalled restoration of statehood, the future of Article 370, and the day-to-day hollowing-out of an elected government that, by Abdullah's own account, cannot choose the officers who serve in it.
‘They Move the Finishing Line’
Abdullah told Thapar that the pattern of continual deferral on the promise of statehood, without an outright refusal, is itself the problem. Delhi, he said, "hasn't exactly said they're not going to do it," but shelters behind a promise to restore statehood "at the appropriate time" without ever defining the term.
"It's like running a marathon race," he said, "and instead of completing it in 42 kilometres, every time you reach near the finishing line, they keep shifting the finishing line." The Union government, he said, should set a measurable standard. "If we reach it, well and good. If we don't, then it's our fault." Without one, he said, he has no "finite goal" to work toward.
He was equally pointed about what is at stake for Delhi itself. The Union government's credibility in Jammu and Kashmir, he argued, now rests on delivering a pledge Prime Minister Narendra Modi made in person during a visit to the region. It is, he said, not "any other promise" but a "Modi ka wada," a personal Modi promise that ought to be "held to a higher standard than regular promises."
Beyond the politics, he argued that splitting power between an elected government and an unelected administration is simply bad design: "A dual power centre in any area - much less an area that has the history that Jammu and Kashmir has - doesn't work well for governance."
‘Is decision outsourced to Islamabad?’
Much of the public reasoning offered for the delay has centred on security, and Abdullah pushed back on it on three counts.
First, he said, Delhi never made that argument before the Supreme Court; it told the court statehood would follow a defined three-stage process - delimitation, elections, restoration - with no security precondition attached. Second, he argued it punishes a government that has no role in the security apparatus it is implicitly being held responsible for.
"I am not included in any security-related meetings. I don't have any briefings by any wing of the security establishment," he said. "If incidents of terror are taking place, they're not taking place because of me. They're taking place inspite of us."
Third, and most pointedly, he noted that Delhi has long maintained that militancy in Kashmir is sponsored from across the border rather than homegrown, which, in his telling, has an awkward implication. "You have effectively translated the decision of restoration of statehood in Jammu and Kashmir from our capital to the capital of Pakistan," he said. On that reading, every time restoration draws near, "Pakistan will turn on the tap" an attack, in Kashmir or elsewhere, that resets the clock to the beginning.
Pressed on why the region's own response of strongly coming out against terror attacks to the April 2025 Pahalgam attack, in which gunmen killed 26 people, had done nothing to shift the government's position, Abdullah said he had no answer. He noted that even as other parts of the country saw eruptions of youth-led street protest that year, Kashmir stayed conspicuously calm. "None of it seems to count for anything," he said.
'Why have we been singled out?'
Abdullah said the sense of loss over statehood in Jammu and Kashmir remains "very keen." Unlike the rest of the country, which he said has largely accepted the abrogation of Article 370 as final, Kashmir has not. People continue to hope, he said, that some future government in Delhi will engage differently.
Two things particularly rankle, he said. One is that bifurcation into Union Territories was never part of the BJP's declared political programme the way scrapping Articles 370 and 35A was. The other is that Jammu and Kashmir is the only Indian state ever downgraded to Union Territory status, even as every Union Territory that existed before it has, over time, moved the opposite way and become a state.
“Is restoration being withheld until the party can install its own chief minister in Srinagar? Or, could it be connected to the fact that Jammu and Kashmir was India's only Muslim-majority state?” he said, noting that Punjab, large stretches of Maoist-affected India, and Assam's long-running ULFA insurgency never resulted in the state concerned losing its statehood.
On J&K’s poor economic performance and higher unemployment, Abdullah placed it squarely on Delhi, which he noted has administered the region directly since 2018, well before his government took office: "You can't correct eight years of trouble in a year and a half," he said, adding that his administration was doing what it could "with one or one-and-a-half hands behind our backs."
‘Statehood has to come before Article 370’
Asked whether he was pursuing the restoration of Article 370 itself with equal urgency, Abdullah said the fight would continue but conceded plainly that it would not succeed "from this government."
More important, he argued, is a constitutional sequencing problem that he believes is widely misunderstood. Article 370's special status was built on a division of legislative subjects between the Union and the state. Without statehood, there is no state to hold a State List, so 370 cannot logically be revived before statehood is.
"Those who say forget statehood, the game is all about 370, either don't understand the constitution or are playing with the sentiments of people," he said.
In a post on X marking the anniversary on August 5, Abdullah had written that he and his party "haven't forgotten and haven't reconciled, far less accepted," the current situation, and remained committed to "reversing all that was done to J&K that took away our rights and threatens our identity."
He told Thapar he had underestimated how hard that fight would prove. He had believed statehood would "flow to us automatically" and kept the size of his ministry deliberately small in the expectation that it was "a matter of months" away, not years. Going forward, he said, his government would keep "talking about it," "agitating over it," and taking the demand to the streets of Delhi.
'I wouldn't recognise him in a line-up of five'
On the daily working of his government, he said, it does not choose the officers who staff it and does not decide who holds which post. It inherits a bureaucratic team handed down from above. Entire departments that should logically report to the elected government, he said, have been kept outside its purview altogether, despite Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha's public position that his own role is confined to security and law and order.
Abdullah offered four specific examples. He is the minister for power, he said, but the chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Power Development Corporation is the lieutenant governor, not him. A cabinet colleague holds the health portfolio, but the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS), the region's premier medical institution, is headed by the lieutenant governor, with its files routed to Raj Bhavan rather than to the health ministry. Abdullah himself holds this portfolio, yet the Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages, reconstituted as a society with a governing body chaired by the lieutenant governor, answers to the LG, not to him.
Most strikingly, Abdullah said Jammu and Kashmir has had no Advocate General for close to two years, because the elected government has not been permitted to appoint one. The territory's cases are instead argued by an "additional advocate general" whom he, as the law minister, did not appoint and who takes no instructions from him.
"I would not be able to pick him out in a line-up of five people," Abdullah said, "and I'm the law minister."
The deeper problem, in his account, is that an elected government's real leverage over the bureaucracy comes down to two levers - the power to transfer officers, and the power to write their annual performance appraisals. "When neither of those powers are with you," he said, "there's a limit to what you can do."
‘Accountable, but without authority’
Asked whether his government could be meaningfully accountable to Kashmiris without the powers of statehood, Abdullah said, "I will be held to account, and I'll be held to a higher standard. I accept that."
He added that he would "pay the price for sins that are not mine." He noted that he had taken the job "by choice, not by force." His government was doing "a lot," he said, but "obviously not" as much as it wanted to, due to structural reasons.
‘Is a BJP win in Srinagar the real precondition?’
On scholar Radha Kumar's assessment that Kashmir could be waiting "hundreds of years" if the BJP believes statehood would be restored only after its own chief minister is installed, Abdullah said, "Let's not say never, because politics has produced strange results."
He threw a challenge to the BJP: “If the party were to say plainly that statehood would follow only after a BJP chief minister, I would quite happily sit out for at least a term" in exchange for statehood's return. He added that he had heard senior government figures privately suggest it took seventy years to remove Article 370 and might take seventy more to restore statehood; and that if that was genuinely the thinking in Delhi, it should be said openly rather than leaving Jammu and Kashmir "hanging."
Asked, whether Kashmiris feel let down by a government that made statehood's restoration a personal promise, Abdullah said he could not speak for everyone but that the disappointment was real, and that it extended well beyond anger directed at the BJP.
"It translates to all of us in the mainstream," he said, "and most more so me, because I'm at the top of that pyramid." He said he had spent roughly eighteen to twenty months of his own political capital on a bet that a cooperative relationship with the Union government would deliver what had been promised and acknowledged he had burned through a substantial share of his own credibility in the process. "It's a price I was willing to pay," he said, "but I do understand that I've paid it. So, the anger, the disappointment, is not just about the Modi government……I'm facing it as well."
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