In the years following August 5, 2019, Kashmiris were repeatedly told that Article 370 was an obstacle to democracy, development, and integration. Constitutional protections over land, jobs, and residency were portrayed as outdated relics that stood in the way of modernity and national progress. The promise was that once these barriers disappeared, Jammu and Kashmir would finally become “normal.”
Less than seven years later, however, the Indian state finds itself negotiating constitutional safeguards for Ladakh centered around precisely the same issues: protection of land, employment, identity, ecology, and demographic balance.
The contradiction is too stark to ignore.
Reports indicate that New Delhi is considering Article 371-type protections for Ladakh after sustained pressure from local political and civil society groups concerned about demographic change, outside control over land and resources, and the erosion of indigenous identity. These concerns are not being dismissed as anti-national or separatist. On the contrary, they are being treated as legitimate democratic anxieties deserving constitutional accommodation.
But were these not the very same concerns that Kashmiris articulated for decades?
When Kashmiris defended Article 370 and Article 35A, they argued that constitutional protections were necessary to preserve the region’s fragile demographic character and distinct political identity. Yet after 2019, the national discourse shifted dramatically. Asymmetrical constitutional arrangements were suddenly portrayed as incompatible with national unity. Safeguards over land and residency were demonized as instruments of exclusion and separatism.
And yet India’s constitutional framework still contains multiple asymmetrical provisions across several regions. States in the Northeast continue to enjoy protections over land and identity, while Ladakh itself is now seeking similar guarantees.
This exposes an uncomfortable reality.
The issue was never really about constitutional principle. It was about political power and selective application.
The unfolding Ladakh debate reveals the intellectual inconsistency at the heart of the post-2019 narrative. If constitutional protections are acceptable instruments for preserving identity and addressing demographic anxieties in one region, then their demonization in Kashmir cannot be justified as constitutional morality. It becomes selective politics presented as a national principle.
The developments in Ladakh also sharpen the crisis facing Kashmir’s traditional mainstream parties.
For decades, parties such as the National Conference and the People's Democratic Party built their political legitimacy around defending Jammu and Kashmir’s constitutional autonomy within the Indian Union. Article 370 was projected as a historic constitutional compact and a bridge between Kashmir and India that could neither be diluted nor revoked unilaterally.
But when the defining political moment arrived in August 2019, that entire framework collapsed with astonishing speed.
Leaders were detained, political rhetoric disappeared, and within a relatively short period, many mainstream actors quietly returned to electoral politics under the very post-370 constitutional order they claimed to oppose. What had once been presented as an existential political struggle gradually narrowed into symbolic speeches and carefully calibrated statements.
Today, mainstream parties continue invoking Article 370 rhetorically while simultaneously functioning within the political reality created by its abrogation.
That contradiction has not gone unnoticed among Kashmiris.
For many people, the mainstream now appears less like a force of resistance and more like an instrument of adaptation. Their participation in institutions created after the abrogation lends legitimacy to a new political order even while they verbally criticize it. The widening gap between rhetoric and action has weakened public trust to an extent perhaps unprecedented in contemporary Kashmiri politics.
Against this backdrop, Ladakh’s emerging negotiations carry immense symbolic significance.
Because what Ladakh now seeks indirectly validates the very logic Kashmir’s mainstream once defended: that geographically sensitive and culturally distinct regions may require constitutional protections against demographic and economic domination.
The irony is historic.
Kashmir was told such protections were regressive and dangerous. Ladakh is being told they may be necessary and democratic.
This contradiction also exposes another truth about the center’s approach toward different regions. Constitutional consistency has often mattered less than strategic manageability. Where political pressure becomes organized and sustained, accommodation re-emerges. Where fragmentation and political weakness prevail, protections disappear.
For Kashmiris who long argued that the issue was fundamentally about political self-determination rather than constitutional autonomy alone, the present moment carries an additional lesson. The tragedy of Kashmir’s mainstream is not simply that it failed to preserve Article 370. It is that generations of political aspirations were invested in constitutional guarantees that ultimately depended on the goodwill of the very system empowered to revoke them.
History now delivers its final irony.
As Kashmir’s mainstream parties continue demanding restoration of safeguards they could not defend, Ladakh may end up securing fresh constitutional protections through sustained negotiation and political pressure.
What Jammu and Kashmir could not preserve in seventy years, Ladakh may partially secure within seven.
That is not merely a constitutional contradiction.
It is the political obituary of Kashmir’s post-1947 mainstream politics.
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